This rudimentary chair was designed by William Morris either for his lodgings in Red Lion Square, which he shared with Edward Burne-Jones in the late 1850s, or for Red House at Bexleyheath in the early 1860s. It features stylised birds and flowers in oil paints. The shape of the chair is thought to have inspired the similar chairs depicted by Burne-Jones in the first of his ‘Holy Grail’ tapestries, ‘The Summons’ which he designed for Morris & Co. for the dining room of Stanmore Hall in 1890.
The fictional chairs in Burne-Jones’s tapestry in turn inspired the real ones created by M. H. Baillie Scott in 1898 for Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse’s New Palace at Darmstadt. From these ‘barrel chairs’ can be traced a numerous progeny of similar furniture by European and American designers of the 1900s. Morris’s chair was deliberately simple and could have been easily put together by a joiner rather than a specialist furniture maker.
