Voysey textile designs at the Cummersdale Design Collection

Peart, Tony ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6367-1387 (2013) Voysey textile designs at the Cummersdale Design Collection. The Orchard, 2 . pp. 21-27.

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Abstract

The Cummersdale Design Collection, owned by the John Lewis Partnership, is a remarkable working archive of over 25,000 textile designs, which provide a comprehensive overview of the evolving trends, fashions and design movements of the last 200 years. Until the summer of 2012 the collection was housed at the Stead McAlpin print works at Cummersdale, a small village on the outskirts of Carlisle. Although known to some textile designers and scholars, the collection’s geographic remoteness from London and the south-east meant that it was rarely visited and, as a result, its true significance as a resource had yet to be widely appreciated. Early in his career, textile designs provided a valuable source of income to the leading Arts & Crafts architect C F A Voysey as he sought to gain his first architectural commissions. This paper details and illustrates for the first time previously unknown Voysey textile designs held in the archive, documenting the development of his style from very early designs, uniquely demonstrating the influence of William Morris, to a series of works documenting the evolution of a much more individual voice as a designer of pattern, ultimately seeing him widely hailed as the leading pattern designer of his generation. The archive also contains Voysey’s earliest known pattern designs, pre-dating those previously documented by one or two years. The paper was cited by Linda Parry (former Deputy Keeper of Textiles at the V&A) in: C F A Voysey: Arts & Crafts Designer, V&A Publishing (2016) where she states: “Since beginning this chapter I have studied an important article by Tony Peart, ‘Voysey textile designs at the Cummersdale Design Collection’ in The Orchard, No. 2.

Item Type:	Article
Journal / Publication Title:	The Orchard
Publisher:	The C.F.A. Voysey Society
ISSN:	2050-2400
Departments:	Academic Departments > Institute of Arts (IOA) > Fine Arts
Depositing User:	Christian Stretton
Date Deposited:	17 Mar 2020 10:48
Last Modified:	05 Aug 2024 12:15
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/5479

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