Lot 339
GEORGE WALTON
GREEN STAINED LINEN PRESS, CIRCA 1898
Auction: 10 November 2010 at 11:00 GMT
Description
The projecting cornice above twin doors, each inset with stained and leaded glass panels with copper inlay worked as foliate motifs, backed by original net hangings and enclosing four sliding shelves each with original linen covers, the base with three long graduated drawers each with brass-backed cut-out handles, the whole raised on bracket feet
Dimensions
152cm wide, 183cm high, 68.5cm deep
Footnote
Literature: Moon, Karen, 'George Walton, Designer and Architect', pub. Oxford 1993, page 115
Exhibited: 'George Walton: Designer and Architect' Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove, Glasgow 11 June - 19 September 1993 and at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery Church Street Brighton 4 November 1993 - 9 January 1994, No 2.7
Note: This fine linen press in green stained ash was designed by the architect and designer George Walton and was made, circa 1899, for a director of his company, Robert Dick. Walton opened his first showroom at 152 Wellington Street Glasgow in 1888, naming it 'George Walton & Co, Ecclesiastical and House Decorators'. In 1897 Walton followed his brother Edward to London where he set up house and studio at 16 Westbourne Park Road, Bayswater, and in 1898 a showroom was opened in York. In the following year a four-storey block of workshops was built in Buccleuch Street, Glasgow, and it was in the same year that Robert Dick became a director of the Glasgow company, rising to chairman by 1905.
In her 1993 biography of Walton Karen Moon comments " . . . in the north the company's directors were keeping them busy: when the two brothers James and Robert Dick, who had been involved in the company since 1899, both married in the early years of the new century, their houses were done out grandly in company style". This press would have stood in one of the bedrooms or upper landings of the house and it retains its original net hangings for the windows and linen covers inside for the drawer slides.