This table was designed circa 1872 by the influential architect and Aesthetic Movement designer Edward William Godwin. Although his earliest work was indebted to the Gothic Revival style and the writings of the architectural theorist John Ruskin, Godwin soon became a passionate proponent of Japonisme. Japan had been a closed country to the West, but, from 1854, Japanese art, particularly Japanese prints, had begun to make their way to Europe, where they had a profound impact on Western art and design, resulting in a new artistic style. Godwin came into contact with Japanese art at the 1862 London International Exhibition of Industry and Art. That same year he decorated his own home in Bristol in stark contrast to the fashions of the day, in which interiors were painted in strong colors, filled with grand furniture, objets, house plants, and heavily patterned carpets and curtains. Visitors to his house encountered uncluttered rooms painted in pale colors, walls sparsely hung with Japanese prints, and matting on the floors.¹ Godwin is thought to be the first person in England to furnish his house in the Japanese style.

 

Godwin became a major proponent of the style to his artistic circle: he designed his friend James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s controversial White House in Tite Street, Chelsea, and contributed to the decoration of Oscar Wilde’s home on the same street. From 1865 Godwin designed wallpaper and textiles, as well as what came to be known as Anglo-Japanesque furniture, characterized by asymmetry, rectilinear forms, and minimal ornament. This table’s step-formation shelves, fretwork stretchers, and use of solid and void are all characteristic of Japanese design. Its folding top, however, is English in inspiration and owes its heritage to historical English models as well as to Godwin’s earlier furniture designs. It was probably made by the firm of Collinson and Lock, one of the renowned English cabinetmakers of the late nineteenth century and a frequent Godwin collaborator.

 

The table was designed in the busy artistic period between 1868 and 1874, during which Godwin and the famous actress Ellen Terry lived together. In a newspaper article from this time, he laid out his belief that design could achieve a balance of health, rationality, and economy: “We require first that furniture be well lifted from the floor [thereby eliminating dust catchers]. . . . It is essential that the common objects of everyday life should be quiet, simple and unobtrusive in their beauty.”² Another example of this table was made about 1872 for Terry and was used in their home.

           

Godwin’s Japonesque designs were shown at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition amid exhibits of “art furniture” by leading British designers. Interest in this Anglo-Japanesque style was heightened by actual Japanese art, which was included for the first time in an American exhibition. As a designer, Godwin also exercised great influence in Europe. In 1904, almost twenty years after Godwin’s death, the German architect and critic Hermann Muthesius praised Godwin’s furniture for replacing ponderous historicist designs with a lightness and elegance that foreshadowed modern ideas.

 

Due to the significance of this design, Godwin’s table is often illustrated in discussions of Anglo-Japonisme and the Aesthetic period alongside a drawing for it in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Only seven, including the one in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, are extant to date, making this example exceedingly rare. Godwin produced the table in mahogany, walnut, and ebonized versions, some of which feature other decorative features, such as brass fittings or boxwood inlay. In addition to the Museum’s example, the table can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Trust, Ellen Terry Memorial Museum, Smallhythe Place, Kent; the Louvre Abu Dhabi; and two in private collections in London. —Christine Gervais