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Edward William Godwin, was born in Bristol in 1833, & perhaps by a happy accident of fate, as it was there, in the hothouse environment of a rambling garden on the banks of the River Frome, a bustling urban architect's office, the columns of The Western Daily Press, & one of the busiest shipping hubs for the import of Oriental artefacts, that Godwin would cultivate his eclectic passions for journalism, costume design, theatrical production, architecture, interior design, & all things Japanese.
Godwin was raised in an aspirational family of social climbers. His father was a thriving leather merchant, whose upward mobility resulted in a change of residence to the suburban Earl's Mead Estate. Their new home boasted the largest gardens in the neighbourhood, complete with it's own decaying church ruins, thereby creating the perfect symbiosis of form, space & bygone mystique. Confronted with such evocative subject matter & armed with a sketchbook, the young Godwin felt compelled to translate these mesmerising medieval forms onto paper. And so the seed of inspiration was planted, & Godwin set his sights on a career as a professional architect. Godwin had already cut his teeth as a self taught draughtsman by copying illustrations from J.R.Planche's A Cyclopaedia of Costume or Dictionary of Dress, & sketching the views in his garden, a skill that would prove invaluable as he received little hands-on training under the tutelage of the Bristol Architect William Armstrong. Notwithstanding, he served his apprenticeship & by the 1850's had earned his wings with a commission of a school in Easton. This was followed by asojourn in Ireland in 1856, where he joined his brother & designed a series of labourer's cottages & a modest church at St Johnston in County Donegal. Here he indulged his passion for critical writing, which had 1st blossomed in the local Bristol papers, contributing a myriad of articles on matters of art & architecture for the Derry Journal. But 1861 marked the year of his 1st competitive success, beating his fellow candidates for the chance to design & build Northampton Town Hall. A Ruskin inspired design featuring embellished Gothic forms, mural decorations, stain glass, & stonework. With an impressive commission under his belt & a growing architectural practice, Godwin's 1st wife Sarah Yonge, passed away. And so, in the mid 1860's Godwin turned a new page, upped sticks to London & began what was to be the most prolific, dynamic, & creatively charged period of his career. TURNING JAPANESE ! Godwin's love affair with Japanese decorative arts & oriental wood construction had developed long before his move to London & his discovery of Liberty's East Indian Art Warehouse. Bristol's eponymous port provided a melting pot of Japanese inspiration due to the massive influx of import trade from the Far East & it was probably there, where Godwin got his prized copy of Hokusai's Mangwa ( a volume of Japanese prints ), along with many artefacts with which he furnished his Bristol home: he was the 1st in England to decorate his home in the Japanese style. Godwin was not merely an occasional collector but a veritable devotee of the Japanese style, enamoured with the elegant simplicity of it's line & form, & more exuberant heraldic crests & floral motifs, among many other characteristics which he would subsequently adapt & incorporate into his furniture design, textiles, ceramic tiles, & wallpaper. Bristol also played host to the 1861 Industrial Exhibition, which featured a display of Japanese art, & it is likely that Godwin attended & fed his passion further. Godwin's appetite for the Japanese style seemed to be insatiable, & it is well documented that he scoured the national press for information on Japan, as avidly reading the travel journals of the 19th century Japanese tourists. Although Godwin never set foot on Japanese soil, unlike Dr Christopher Dresser, his illustrious friendship with the Gothic Revival architect William Burgess, & the painter James McNeill Whistler bear testimony to his enduring infatuation with the style, their bond being cemented by a shared passion for Japanese arts & crafts, forming what we might loosely term as a mutual appreciation society. Indeed, Burgess is widely credited as being one of the earliest collectors of Japanese prints in the country. And so, we can easily imagine how these like minded heavyweights of the world of Art & Architecture must have nourished & sustained Godwin's vision. This vision based on a fusion of Oriental & Western elements in an innovative Aesthetic style known as 'Anglo-Japanese'. A close friend of William Burgess, Oscar Wilde & James Mc Neil Whistler a collaborator with Whistler, & he also designed furniture & Interior's for Wilde & Whistler. He lived out of wedlock with the most famous stage actress of the time Ellen Terry whom he had 2 children with something which was somewhat scandalous in those strict Victorian times. Godwin a true pioneer of his day, a revolutionary of his time the Godfather of the modern movement & a significant leader in the influence on domestic design, one of the first people to incorporate economy & hygiene into his furniture, his thinning designs using as little wood as appropriate yet making the piece as strong as possible, so even a maid could move the furniture on her own to clean behind & under & designed furniture without dust attracting area's so important in an age where disease was rife. His disbandment of clumsy or over ornate detailing his lean toward line & form in a purely Japanese style yet he never visited Japan, it is thought that he was most probably the first man in England to decorate his entire house in the Japanese style & drew part of his inspiration from 2 volumes of Hokusai's Mangwa from which he gained his knowledge of Japanese wood construction & he carefully studied original pieces on display at museums. At the same time he couldn't have failed to have been aware of the massive influx of Japanese items that were pouring in from the boats docking in Bristol from the far East in the 1850's & 60's. He was a master designer in many different styles but most famous for his Anglo-Japanese designs, a pure geneous who truly understood the art of & function with restraint. He wrote 'If we were asked to select the style of furniture from the new designs before us, we require first that the furniture be well lifted from the floor & second that it be as light as is consistent with real strength. But this is not all. It is essential for true domestic comfort in these high pressure nervous times, that the common objects of everyday life should be quiet simple & unobtrusive in their beauty,' a statement that carries William Morris's ideals some 10 years later. He also wrote 'I look upon all my work as art work. A building to me is as a picture to a painter or a poem to a poet, as Max Beerbohm wrote, 'That Godwin was that superb Architect...the greatest Aesthete of them all'. A.F.Geering 2004 |