Conference
and AGM 2008 - Liverpool
and Chester
Friday
25 to Sunday 27 July
This
year’s conference is being held in the North West to celebrate
Liverpool’s year as City of Culture and also the publication of
Susan Stuarts’s work on the highly important firm Gillows of
Lancaster and London, and Lucy Wood’s catalogue of the chairs in
Lord Leverhulme’s collection at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port
Sunlight. We will
hear from both of them during the weekend.
The conference will be based
at the Westminster Hotel, City Rd, Chester. For those considering
travelling by train, the hotel is near the railway station and
travel during the conference will be by coach on Friday and
Saturday. On Sunday it will be possible to arrange lifts to the station
at Port Sunlight at the end of the afternoon visit.
Friday will
be spent in Liverpool where the guide will be Joseph Sharples,
architectural historian at the University of Liverpool and author
of the Pevsner Architectural Guide to Liverpool, published 2004.
Visits will include the National Conservation Centre with
furniture conservator Graham Usher and textile conservator
Vivienne Chapman and the Walker Art Gallery to see the Craft and
Design Gallery with curator Robin Emmerson.
We will take a ferry across the Mersey to the Williamson
Art Gallery in Birkenhead where the curator, Colin Simpson, is
arranging to display Owen Fitzpatrick’s tool chest and John
Boram will discuss Fitzpatrick’s work in the area.
(See John Boram’s article, ‘Owen Fitzpatrick, a
Birkenhead Cabinet Maker ‘in ordinary’, Regional Furniture 1989). In
the evening Elly Macbeath, who researches Waring, and Joseph
Sharples, who recently curated an exhibition on the lost interiors
of the grand Victorian mansions of Liverpool and Wirral merchants,
will talk on these interiors and the work of S.J.Waring & Sons
and from when this company became Waring & Gillow.
On Saturday
morning we will visit Dunham Massey, built and furnished in the
first half of the 18th century by the 2nd Earl of Warrington.
It was let for much of the second half of the 19th century
during which time much of the important collection of silver, many
paintings and some items of furniture were taken to another family
home, Enville in Staffordshire.
The family returned to Dunham in 1906, when Lord and Lady
Stamford began an extensive programme of renovation and
redecoration, assisted by Lady Stamford’s cousin, the furniture
historian Percy Macquoid. At
a series of sales at Enville in the 1920s and 30s, their son, the
10th Earl of Stamford, purchased a substantial proportion of the
2nd Earl of Warrington’s silver collection and some of the
family portraits and returned them to Dunham.
He donated the whole of the estate to the National Trust on
his death in 1976, it being one of the most generous bequests the
Trust has ever received. The
Trust still follows the policy of returning objects to Dunham
whenever possible. After
lunch we will return to Chester for a tour of the historic centre.
We will then visit the Grosvernor Museum where Peter
Boughton, curator of Decorative Arts, will introduce the Cheshire
furniture in the collection.
The AGM on Sunday morning will be followed by
a Furniture Surgery when we hope to discuss some of the rich
heritage of chair making in the area.
After lunch we leave Chester for The Lady Lever Art Gallery
at Port Sunlight, at the invitation of Sandra Penketh.
Lucy Wood, who produced a catalogue of the commodes and
researched the forthcoming catalogue of chairs during her time as
curator here, will be with us and proposes to concentrate on some
of the most interesting provincial chairs in the collection and
discuss their provenance and history.
The conference will close after tea.
If anyone plans to arrive in Chester on
Thursday prior to the Conference, it may be possible to book into
the hotel for Thursday night and a visit to the Cathedral on
Thursday afternoon to see the 13th century armoire and late 14th
century choir stalls and misericords has been provisionally
arranged.
Elly Macbeath, Polly Legg.
Cost
of the Conference from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon:
Residential
£240 per person
Non-residential
£140 per person
Members only.
Both the above include all meals from Friday
dinner to Sunday afternoon tea (excluding breakfasts for those
non-residential), coach travel on Saturday, visits and lectures.
Friday
day is optional, Cost £47 per person
This includes coach travel from Chester,
morning coffee, lunch and afternoon tea, and all visits.
It will be possible to join the coach in
Liverpool on Friday morning if preferred.
Numbers for the Conference are limited so
early booking is advised.
Application Form
A
bursary towards the cost of attending the conference may be
available to full-time students on a relevant course.
Please apply to Liz Hancock, the Bursary Secretary, for
further details. Email:
E.Hancock@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk
The Regional Furniture
Society’s Annual General Meeting will be at the Westminster
Hotel, City Rd, Chester, CH1 3AF at 10am on Sunday 27 July:
admission is free
Diary Date:
Friday 17 October 2008, Chipping Campden, Glos,
with Alan Crawford. This visit was to be held on the
Thursday before
last year’s Annual Conference.
It has been re-arranged for this October
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