Modern Print Monday: Edward William Godwin

Ely by Edward Wm. Godwin

1873

Godwin designed woven fabrics and wallpaper inspired by

Japanese crests---the imagery and their characteristic formal and informal repeats.

Edward William Godwin

1833-1886

Architect  E.W. Godwin was one of the first British designers to adapt traditional Japanese culture, a style that became known as Japonisme, a French word for the study or influence of Japanese arts. Critic Max Beerbohm called him "the greatest aesthete of them all."

Japanese arts and crafts were exhibited for the first time in the west at the London International Exposition in the early 1860s.

Godwin Sunflower Wallpaper

1872

Godwin's Art Furniture catalog was published in 1877

Godwin's "Anglo-Japanese" furniture with it's fragile lines was quite a contrast to the era's Gothic Revival taste. It was often ebonized mahogany (brown wood painted black.)

The Art Furniture Company's furniture and textiles were shown in the United States at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia where actual Japanese arts were also shown, creating a taste for Japonisme in the U.S.

Tea on the American prairie, about 1910.

Traditional Japanese-style patchwork print

All of which led somehow to the Crazy Quilt

and this piece of American printed cotton

imitating a Crazy Quilt.

The Victoria and Albert Museum

has the most comprehensive collection of

Godwin's design. You can buy Christmas cards

with his prints.

Do a search of their collection, which includes his sketchbook:

http://www.vam.ac.uk/contentapi/search/?q=edward+william+godwin&search-submit=Go

Click here to see a small index to Godwin's textiles:

http://stokescroft.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/if-you-want-something-done-do-it-yourself-a-godwin-source-book-part-i-fabrics/