Beech ‘Sussex’ armchair with rush seat made by Morris & Co.

This turned beech chair with a rush seat has four concave rails in the back, the top pair spaced apart and joined with four decoratively turned spindles, the lower pair set close together. The raked back posts have flat finials on the tops and are continuous with the back legs. The arms are curved and terminate with button finials; they are supported on splayed turned and tapered posts which rise through the seat rails from a cross stretcher under the seat.  The seat frame is tapered and rushed, with squared blocks at the corners above the front legs.  The edges of the rush seat are protected by wooden slips, now all missing apart from a short piece on the front edge. There are double stretchers at the front and sides, a single stretcher at the back and a single cross stretcher under the seat.  All the wooden parts are beech and are ebonised, i.e. stained dark brown.

This chair is in the style of the ‘Sussex Chair’ thought to have been designed by Philip Webb in around 1864 for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Sons, the firm established by William Morris (Gere and Whiteway, 1993).  It is one of a range of designs made for the firm and retailed as Sussex chairs, said to be based on vernacular chairs made in Sussex, although no direct antecedent has been identified.  Chairmakers active in Sussex in the mid-19^th century include Henry or Harry Rich (1786-1867) in East Hoathly (Pennington, 1995) and the Hook family in Beckley, Henry (1798-1876) and his sons Thomas and James (Poulter, 2023).  

The Sussex chair range retailed by Morris & Co proved to be popular and was one of the staple products up to the firm’s eventual closure in the 1940s.  William Morris and his wife, Jane, had Sussex chairs at their home, Red House, Bexleyheath, as did Edward Burne-Jones and Albert Gilbert. In the influential Decoration and Furnishing of Town Houses (1881), the author, Robert Edis, recommended this chair as 'excellent, comfortable and artistic'.

This chair differs from the Morris chair in several respects: the turned spindles in the back are not the Morris pattern; there are no rails under the arms, where the Morris chair has double rails; and the legs are tapered at the toes while on the Morris chair they are not.  It is not known where this chair was made or where it was retailed, but firms like Liberty & Co. and Heal’s sold versions of the fashionable Morris design and it is thought almost all of them, including the Morris chairs, were made in High Wycombe, notably by James Cox, Oxford Road, High Wycombe (Parry, 1996 and Heal 2023).

A Morris & Co Sussex armchair is in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (CIRC.288-1960).