The Sussex Chair and Morris & Co. Furniture

A country chair from Sussex

The name is literal. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Sussex chair was named after a country chair found in Sussex, whose turned frame and rush seat inspired the design.

The model had ancestors. The V&A notes that similar chairs with imitation bamboo frames and rush seats were fashionable between 1790 and 1820, so the rush-seated country chair was a familiar type long before Morris & Co. took it up.

The firm behind the chair

Morris founded his firm in 1861; it was later called Morris & Co. The V&A gives that date in its account of the firm's furniture, and the Sussex chair belongs to the firm's earliest decade of production.

The V&A divides Morris's furniture into two styles: State furniture and what was called 'workaday'. The workaday pieces looked back to the simple styles of village craftsmen, and the Sussex chair sits firmly on that side of the divide.

The V&A dates the Sussex chair itself to 1865, describing it as a wooden spindle chair with a rush seat. That makes it an early product of the firm, produced within a few years of its founding.

What the museum records show

The V&A holds a Sussex armchair under museum number O7883. Its record describes an armchair of ebonised beech with turned ornament and a rush seat. According to the V&A, this chair was probably designed by Philip Webb and made by Morris & Co., a hedged attribution worth taking carefully.

The O7883 record gives two production dates: 1870 to 1890 and ca. 1860. Both appear in the V&A's own record, and the disagreement is discussed below.

The museum also holds a Sussex high chair, museum number O166719, made in England by Morris and Co in about 1865. The V&A attributes this high chair to Philip Webb, who was a partner in the Morris & Co. firm, without the hedging used for the armchair.

No surviving quotation from Morris about the Sussex chair appears in the evidence used here, so this page makes no claim about his own words on the design.

Dating the Sussex chair: what the records disagree on

The V&A's records do not settle on a single date. The O7883 armchair record gives production dates of 1870 to 1890 and ca. 1860, while the O166719 high chair record dates the Sussex chair to about 1865 and states that it resulted in production in 1865. All three datings come from the same museum.

The certainty of the Philip Webb attribution also varies. For the O7883 armchair the V&A says it was probably designed by Webb; for the high chair the attribution is stated without hedging. Why the records give differing production dates is not established by the evidence available here.

A reader can hold both facts at once: the firm was producing Sussex chairs by the mid 1860s, and the V&A's own records span a wide range for the surviving examples.

Where the chairs were used

The chair reached its audience quickly. According to the V&A, William Morris and his wife Jane used Sussex chairs at Red House, Bexleyheath, Kent, from 1860 and later at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith.

Other artists bought them too. The V&A records that Edward Burne-Jones had Sussex armchairs in his studio, as did the sculptor Alfred Gilbert.

Documented settings and endorsements from the V&A's records:

• Morris and Jane's homes: Red House from 1860, later Kelmscott House
• The studios of Burne-Jones and Alfred Gilbert
• Students' rooms at Newnham College, Cambridge
• Galleries in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The range also served institutions. The V&A records that examples from the Sussex range were supplied for students' rooms at Newnham College, Cambridge, and for galleries in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

The chair in Morris's wider furniture

The V&A interprets Morris's furniture ambitions in terms of the machine age. According to the V&A, Morris wanted to move furniture making away from the machine age and make original pieces of furniture for individual users, and he looked backwards into history for alternatives to machine-age goods, focusing on what he saw as more 'honest' work reviving craft-based styles and techniques. The Sussex chair, with its vernacular model and simple materials, fits that account.

A comparison piece shows how the firm's furniture combined designers. The V&A holds an armchair, museum number O372099, with an adjustable back, made for Morris & Co., British, c.1883 to 1900, from the Grove, Harborne. According to the V&A, it was designed by Philip Webb with upholstery covers of 'Violet and Columbine' wool and mohair fabric designed by William Morris. Webb drew the frame; Morris supplied the cloth.

For comparison on how Morris built up pattern on flat surfaces, see the parent guide to Morris's pattern structure, and for a related seating design see our guide to the Morris chair.