£475
Auction: Design Since 1860
oak with leather upholstered seats
Provenance: From The Millinery Works Collection.
Note: A self-described “craftsman woodworker, boat builder and sailor, mathematician, poet, chess player, social reformer, rebel, friend and lover”, Arthur Romney Green was a man of many talents. From a very young age he developed a love for woodworking and spent much of his free time building sailing boats. He later turned his attentions to furniture and setup a workshop in Christchurch from around 1920. An admirer of William Morris, Romney Green was an advocate of Social Reforms and sought to create a sense of community amongst his workforce. During the 1930s he supervised several workshops in deprived areas; and often employed young boys who struggled during their educational years, helping them learn key skills in the trade to increase their self-esteem and improve their literacy skills. This nurturing approach and value he placed on apprenticeships was hugely successful, and many of the young boys he employed eventually established themselves as master craftsmen in their own right. Like many of his contemporaries, Romney Green’s furniture designs show a strong admiration for the work of Gimson and Barnsley, regarded as founders of the Cotswold Tradition. Yet what distinguishes Romney Green’s work from Gimson’s is the importance he places on geometry and proportion. His designs, “built from solid equations”, often feature geometric shapes in the small details and are constructed with an exact set of mathematical principles in mind.