Oak cot 73.1959

Designed by Ernest Gimson and made in his Daneway workshop.

 

Oak

107.2 x 152 x 72cm

 

Gimson adapted this design from a cot designed and made by Sidney Barnsley for his daughter Grace born in 1896. Note the chamfered rails and lines of gouged decoration on legs. The end frames of the cot have double-arched tops and shaped tails echoing the Cotswold farm wagons which inspired this design. The two sides, which lift off, have a gently curved top rail in the central section.

 

In 1904 Katharine (known as Kanty) Cooper was born, the first child of May and John Paul Cooper. They were living in Birmingham where Cooper was teaching metalwork and enamelling at Birmingham Municipal School of Art and running a studio producing metalwork and jewellery to his design. Cooper wanted to encourage the artistic leanings of his children and this may have encouraged him to commission the cot for his first-born from Gimson. His second child, Francis Cooper who became a silversmith like his father, recalled sleeping in it as a child and, ‘how knobbly it was to knock elbows on.’

 

Purchased from Kanty Cooper in 1959

73 1959