Chair
W. Charles Tozer (fl. 1910-1960)
Category
Furniture
Date
circa 1920
Materials
Wood, paint, gilding, cane
Measurements
83.8 cm (Height) x 42 cm (Depth)
Place of origin
England
Order this imageCollection
Shaw's Corner, Hertfordshire
NT 1274795
Summary
A painted chair, bearing a retail label for W. Charles Tozer of 25 Brook Street, London, circa 1920, in early 19th century style. The chair back formed from two pierced rails joined by lattice paling, and each decorated with a polychrome-painted scene: the toprail with a figure amongst plants, the bottom rail with a circular building in a garden with a tree and boulders within a fence. The cane seat within bead-edged and shaped seat rails, and raised to the front on a pair of ring-turned and tapering front legs and outswept rear legs.
Full description
Bernard (1856-1950) and Charlotte Shaw (1857-1943) purchased several items of furniture from the prestigious dealer W. Charles Tozer of Brook St., Mayfair in the 1930s. This chair, together with a pair of open armchairs of a different design (NT 1274790.1 & .2) are copies of chairs made in England at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries; the four other pieces - an escritoire, NT 1274782; NT 1274804, a bureau bookcase; and two small gateleg tables (NT 1274797.1 and .2, not labelled by Tozer but possibly purchased from him) - were copies of English japanned furniture of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which was itself decorated in imitation of East Asian lacquer. Reproduction furniture soared in popularity in the opening decades of the 20th century in response to the revival in the market for authentic 17th and 18th century furniture, which was relatively scarce, very expensive and, as a result, a luxury beyond the means of most people. W. Charles Tozer was a leading retailer (he is known to have been supplied with stock by other cabinet-makers) of this type of revival furniture, particularly walnut-veneered furniture: it is possible that a walnut stool (NT 1274796) in the collection at Shaw's Corner was also purchased from Tozer in the 1920s or 30s. Painted chairs became fashionable at the end of the 18th century and evolved over the course of the first half of the 19th. They ultimately derived from Continental Europe, and in England were most often decorated with medallions and garlands of flowers, although some were painted with pastoral scenes. Furniture incorporating East Asian lacquer, or referencing East Asian design, was also very popular in the Regency period, and over time many chairs of this type were made incorporating details which were considered to be Chinese or Japanese. Thus, many were painted black with gilt highlights, whilst other were made with legs and rails simulating bamboo. This chair incorporates the latter feature in the stylised, ring-turned front legs, and in the lattice paling which forms its splat. The painted scenes to the back of East Asian figures and buildings in landscapes, are a nod to English japanned furniture of the early 18th century. This chair, therefore, essentially conflates an early 19th century English pastiche of East Asian forms with an early 18th century English pastiche of East Asian lacquer. The Shaws selected their furniture on philosophic, as well as aesthetic, grounds. Bernard Shaw favoured good quality furniture sold at reasonable prices, and has been described as 'fascinated by the phenomenon of the fake in furniture, which exposes the commodity fetish - the undermining of the original that is characterised by the reproduction...’ For Shaw, the falsity of the ‘connoisseur’s’ claim that he or she valued art for art’s sake alone, ‘denying a monetary concern’, was exposed by his or her tendency to dismiss well-made copies, to which – being to all intents-and-purposes exact replicas – there could be no objection on artistic grounds.[1] Shaw encountered this attitude in 1944, when James Lee-Milne (1908-1997) – assessing the contents of Shaw's Corner on behalf of the National Trust – described the bureau bookcase (NT 1274804) as a 'fake lacquer bureau', whilst praising what he considered an authentic early 18th century bureau (still in the collection, either NT 1274791 or NT 1274810) as ‘rather good’.[2] Shaw, however, was proud of his furniture, and he himself described it as fake. In 1949, protesting at the small sums fetched by his furniture at auction, he wrote 'my splendid Hepplewhites (first class fakes), fit for Windsor or Chatsworth...fetched shillings.'[3] He often chose to be photographed by the press sitting in one of his Tozer armchairs in the 1940s. 1] Alice McEwan, 'Commodities, Consumption, and Connoisseurship: Shaw's Critique of Authenticity in Modernity', in Shaw, Vol. 35, No. 1, Special Issue: Shaw and Modernity (2015), 46-85, 69-70.[2] James Lee-Milne, Diaries, 1942-54, pp. 134-5, 9 February 1944.[3] McEwan, 70.
Provenance
The Shaw Collection. The house and contents were bequeathed to the National Trust by George Bernard Shaw in 1950 (1856-1950), together with Shaw's photographic archive.
Marks and inscriptions
Ivorine label on the underside of seat rail: W. Charles Tozer, 25 Brook Street, London W1
Makers and roles
W. Charles Tozer (fl. 1910-1960), designer W. Charles Tozer (fl. 1910-1960), maker W. Charles Tozer (fl. 1910-1960), retailer