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Item Number: 122825
Title: CHARLES SPOONER (1862-1938) Arts and Crafts Architect
Author: Hamilton, Alec
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9781907730214
Description: Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2012. 26cm., hardcover, 306pp. illus., most in color. Summary: Charles Sydney Spooner was one of the four great names most closely identified with the Arts & Crafts by no less an observer than C. R. Ashbee. The others were W. R. Lethaby, Sidney Barnsley and Ernest Gimson. Yet, while these three are admired, even revered, Spooner has effectively disappeared. Who was Spooner? He taught furniture design at Central School for more than thirty years, yet practically nothing of his work is to be found there. He was a member of SPAB's committee for nearly as long, yet their records contain almost no mention of him. He was a friend of William Morris, Emery Walker, Christopher Whall, Walter Crane, Heywood Sumner - yet he figures hardly at all in their memoirs, letters or recollections. He made a rather dazzling start: elected to the Art Workers Guild in January 1887, at the age of 25, and while still a student. Then elected to the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society in 1890: he exhibited with them at every exhibition until 1928 - at least three pieces a year, often more. Yet his star has faded almost to extinction. If his reputation in furniture has dimmed, in architecture he has fared even less well. He built seven churches - a modest tally compared to the High Victorians, but, among 'Arts & Crafts architects', almost a high number. Only Leonard Stokes, John Douglas and W. D. Caröe built substantially more: Lethaby, Prior, Mackintosh, Barnsley, Ashbee built hardly any. Gimson, Voysey and Baillie Scott none at all. For churches were not so important to the men of the Arts & Crafts as houses were - or furniture. But they were important to Spooner - he was, unusually among his fellows, a religious man: "On most Sundays when he was at home, he was in his place at the 10 o'clock Mass." It comes as no surprise that he was related to two Archbishops of Canterbury - and, yes, to Warden 'Spoonerisms' Spooner of New College, Oxford, his cousin. Yet Spooner was a Modern too - his church of St Paul, East Ham, which he thought his best, looks forward with optimism. In his church furnishings his skills and ability shine - the muscular altarpiece at St Leonard, Bridgnorth; the checkerboard baptistery at St Bartholomew, Ipswich; and most powerful of all, his emotionally charged rood screen at St Anselm, Hatch End. Spooner was not interested in fame. He was reticent; did not like public speaking; eschewed the limelight. He did not regard himself, indeed had no wish to be regarded, as a major artistic figure in any conventional sense. But he took it further than most: without ego, and self-effacing to a frustrating degree. This, the first study of Spooner, considers his churches, his church furnishings, his houses, his furniture - and also his partnerships, in particular with an even more shadowy figure, his wife, the artist Minnie Dibdin 'Dina' Spooner.
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