Brief summary

The English art critic, designer and painter Roger Fry founded the Omega Workshops in London, England in 1913 to produce and sell furniture, textiles, ceramics and other household objects designed, decorated, and often made by a group of avant-garde artists.

This chair with a caned seat and back was designed by Fry during the same year that the Workshops were founded. Dryad Ltd., a company based in Leicester, England, made the frame on behalf of the Omega Workshops. The Workshops were responsible for decorating the chair, and used red paint that imitated lacquer.

From the small number of chairs of this design that have survived, and the lack of illustration in any Omega showroom views or mention in their sales catalogue, it does not appear that this chair was intended for wider manufacture or sale. It was most likely used as a display or marketing object, emblematic of the Workshops' name. The circular motif on the top of the back is reminiscent of the Greek character omega in uppercase form. At least three other very similar chairs were made in 1913 and included in a sitting room displayed by the Omega Workshops at the Ideal Home Exhibition held in London in October 1913. This chair and at least one other like it had hollow omega-like motifs. At least two chairs in the same style featured caned omega elements. Fry subsequently retained chairs used at this event.

While this design was not put into wider production, a simpler version of the chair without the circular cresting on the top rail was available for purchase. These chairs were sold for £2 10s each and were available in different colours.


Further information

The Omega Workshops

Artist Roger Fry founded the Omega Workshops in 1913, enlisting as co-directors and fellow artist-designers his friends Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Although influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin and by the workshops, guilds and retailers of the British Arts and Crafts movement, Fry’s main aim was to integrate the forms and practice of modern art into design for the home. Omega was not an attempt to reform society or change the working conditions of craftspeople; he did not seek to avoid products made using machines per se. Instead, Fry aimed to substitute ‘the directly expressive quality of the artist’s handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction’ (‘Prospectus for the Omega Workshop’, 1913). This was to be achieved by the artist ‘allowing free play to the delight in creation in the making of objects for common life’, by the artist’s refusal ‘to spoil the expressive quality of their work by sand-papering it down to a shop finish…[and their] endeavour to satisfy practical necessities in a workmanlike manner, but not to flatter by the pretentious elegance of the machine-made article’ (Preface, Omega Workshops Catalogue, 1914).

Omega artists worked part-time, to enable their fine art practice to be maintained and in the belief that artists rather than artisans ‘can produce vital and original work’ (‘Omega Workshops Fundraising Letter’, December 1912). Omega products were marked with the Omega trademark but were otherwise anonymous, suggesting both the communal ethos of the Workshops and a desire that potential customers engage their eyes to look closely at the work before them rather than consider who had designed them. The identity of the designers of many Omega products was revealed only in the decades following the closure of the Workshops.

Omega Workshops was, in part, inspired by the example of Parisian couturier Paul Poiret’s École Martine, founded in 1911 as a school for young women artists that was soon supplying designs for furnishing fabrics, rugs and murals to Poiret’s expanding business (‘Fundraising Letter’). Fry’s ties to Poiret were also exemplified by the former’s organisation of a fine art exhibition in 1912 of ‘Quelques Indépendants Anglais’ at the Galerie Barbanzanges located, along with the École Martine in Poiret’s Paris business premises and home, on the rue du Faubourg Saint-honoré.

Roger Fry and chair design

Fry’s deep interest and advocacy of French post-Impressionist artists, especially Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso, influenced the appearance of most Omega products, including furniture, ceramics, textiles and interior decoration, which were generally decorated in a painterly manner. However, this chair—although painted—is perhaps the least painterly and (along with a related chair) most austere of Omega chairs.

The chair’s unconventional, trapezoidal back, straight lines and the unexpected addition and size of the simplified uppercase omega symbol declare it as a bold modernist design. This was reflected in the Workshops’ description of their attempt to embody in furniture designs the principles of ‘comfort and practicality’ through, in a phrase revealing of Fry’s desire to challenge the status quo and associate Omega with the avant-garde, ‘designs of extreme simplicity and architectural fitness’ (Omega catalogue, 1914).

At the same time, however, elements of the design would have been evocative to contemporaries, and especially among the refined tastes of Fry’s circle, of historical furniture. The caned seat and the back separated as a panel from the stiles suggest 17th-century, English caned chairs and the placement of the omega symbol recalls the raised cresting of such chairs by 1700 (see V&A object 184-1894). The red colour (described as ‘lacquered’ in the Omega catalogue) appears to have been intended to suggest red lacquer of a type popular in imported, late 19th-century, ivory-inlaid screens, formerly fashionable in Aesthetic movement circles.

Fry turned to the forward-thinking Harry Peach of Leicester, whose Dryad company made cane furniture and metalwork in an Arts and Crafts spirit. Peach was connected with continental European modernism with a particular interest in German and Viennese modernism. Dryad’s manufacture of the Omega chair frames was listed in the Omega catalogue.

From the small number of chairs of this design that have survived, and the lack of illustration in any Omega showroom views or mention in their sales catalogue, it does not appear that this chair was intended for wider manufacture or sale. It was most likely used as a display or marketing object, emblematic of the Workshops’ name. The more commonplace version was less challenging, omitting the omega symbol, and was offered in ‘various colours’. These chairs were sold for £2 10s each. Two examples of these with ‘gilt’ caning are in the V&A collection (MISC.2:3-1934 and CIRC.125-1961).

At least three other very similar chairs were made in 1913 and displayed at the Ideal Home Exhibition in London, as part of a sitting room furnished by the Omega Workshops. Two with caned omega symbols survive. This chair in the V&A collection was one of at least two produced without caning within the omega sign. Fry subsequently retained chairs used at this event.