Features

A recent sale at Burstow & Hewitt (20% buyer’s premium) in Battle, East Sussex was led by six Danish rosewood dining chairs designed by Niels Otto Moller for JL Moller.

Archibald Knox (1864-1933) is known today as the genius behind the Cymric and Tudric ranges sold by Liberty & Co in the early 20th century.

If Knox is best known today for his work with Liberty & Co, in his own time on the Isle of Man he was better recognised as an art teacher and for his study of the local Celtic crosses and standing stones.

The few surviving pieces of furniture designed by Archibald Knox were mainly produced at the Sunnyside Workshops in Douglas, founded by Knox with his friend and patron Wilson James Ashburner in 1899.

When Anthony Bernbaum curated the exhibition Archibald Knox, Beauty and Modernity, a Designer Ahead of his Time at the Olympia International Art & Antiques Fair in 2014, he was working in investment banking.

A closer look at the post-war appreciation of the great designer including exhibitions and auction landmarks

Local tourist bodies believe that Knox can do for the Isle of Man what Mackintosh has done for Glasgow.

Dr Stephen Martin first encountered Archibald Knox in a New York bookstore in 1990.

The Art Deco design movement found a unique expression in Cotswolds School furniture - one that sought to blend clean lines with traditional English materials and craftsmanship.

Auctioneer and valuer Clive Stewart-Lockhart has written a new biography of one of British Art Deco’s foremost figures - his great aunt Mary Stewart Lockhart, better known as Betty Joel (1894-1985).

These two silver lots bear the mark of Henry George Murphy (1884-1939), whose Falcon Studio produced some of the finest English silver of the inter-war era.

Only a decade ago Carlton Ware designer Violet Elmer (1907-88) was a relative unknown compared with her contemporaries Clarice Cliff, Susie Cooper and Charlotte Rhead.

The London-based design company Isokon, which produced furniture by Wells Coates and Marcel Breuer, and Gerald Summers’ firm Makers of Simple Furniture both explored the radical possibilities of lamination.

As the Depression took hold, the clamour for luxury goods in tropical hardwoods, silver and shagreen was replaced by a demand for less expensive consumer goods that combined the modern aesthetic with new materials and industrial production.

Shelley produced the geometric Vogue and Mode shape tea and coffee wares between 1930-32 - both the designs of Eric Slater (1902-84) who had worked at the factory since the end of the First World War.

New Zealand-born architect Keith Murray (1892-1981) began to make designs for Wedgwood on a commercial basis in 1933, joining a stable of designers that included Daisy Makeig-Jones and John Skeaping.

With this year marking the 100th anninversary of the exhibition that gave Art Deco its name, we report on the British designers whose creations appear on the market

‘Tutti Frutti’ is the name given to Cartier’s range of brightly coloured jewels in the Indian style from the 1920s-30s.

A white-glove sale tells its own story about the health of a market

Carl (1883-1946) and Rosa Askonas (1891-1980), were the toast of 1920s Austrian society.