Gimson
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Background to the project
In 1849 Leicester’s town museum, centred on the Literary and Philosophical Society’s collection of arts, antiquities and natural history, was opened in New Walk. In 1885 an art gallery was added.
Following Ernest Gimson’s death in 1919, members of his family donated examples of his work both to the Museum and Art Gallery and to University College, Leicester.
William Arthur Evans was a wealthy local businessman and chairman of Imperial Typewriters. He lived in Inglewood, the house designed by Gimson, from 1913. In 1904 he married Nancy Goddard, was one of three daughters of Joseph Goddard, a Leicester chemist who developed Goddard’s silver polish. They shared an interest in the Arts & Crafts Movement. They and several other members of both the Evans and Goddard families commissioned Arts & Crafts pieces including furniture from Peter Waals. Examples of this furniture were given to the Museum and Art Gallery in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Work by Ernest Gimson was included in a ground-breaking exhibition, Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts, organised by Peter Floud at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1952. In 1969 Leicester marked the 50th anniversary of Gimson’s death with an exhibition organised by Lionel Lambourne. This was the first time that a comprehensive range of Gimson’s work had been shown in public and was the beginning of a reappraisal of his reputation.
In 1978 Leicester Museums Service published a catalogue of its collections,
'Ernest Gimson and the Cotswold Group of Craftsmen', which has been revised
by Annette Carruthers and republished in 2007.