Ancient and Modern Furniture and Woodwor

Ancient and Modern Furniture and Woodwork is a substantial decorative arts catalogue and guide by John Hungerford Pollen, the English Catholic decorative artist, designer, writer, and museum curator who lived from 1820 to 1902. Pollen produced substantial work across multiple decorative arts fields including ecclesiastical decoration, book design, and museum cataloguing during a substantial career that spanned the substantial second half of the nineteenth century.

Pollen was substantially associated with the substantial Pre Raphaelite circle and contributed substantially to the various decorative projects that the substantial movement produced across its substantial active years. He worked on the substantial decoration of the Oxford Union murals with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Edward Burne Jones in 1857, and was substantially involved in various of the other substantial Pre Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts decorative projects of the substantial period. His substantial position as both a substantial practising decorative artist and a substantial museum cataloguer gave him substantial standing in the substantial Victorian decorative arts world.

Pollen served for substantial years as a senior curator at the South Kensington Museum, the substantial predecessor of the modern Victoria and Albert Museum, where he was substantially responsible for the substantial cataloguing and interpretation of the museum’s substantial decorative arts collections. The substantial South Kensington Museum had been established in the substantial 1850s to support the substantial development of English decorative arts education and to provide substantial educational resources for the substantial English designers, manufacturers, and craft workers who were attempting to substantially improve English decorative arts production in the wake of the substantial 1851 Great Exhibition.

Ancient and Modern Furniture and Woodwork belongs to Pollen’s substantial museum cataloguing work and provides substantial historical and descriptive material on the substantial furniture and decorative woodwork collections that the South Kensington Museum had assembled across the substantial decades of its operation. The substantial catalogue covers the various substantial historical periods and national traditions represented in the substantial museum collection, with substantial attention to both the substantial technical and stylistic questions that decorative arts education required.

The book is of interest now to historians of nineteenth century English decorative arts, of the substantial South Kensington Museum and its successor Victoria and Albert, and of the substantial broader Victorian decorative arts education tradition that the museum supported. It pairs naturally with Pollen’s other substantial museum cataloguing work and with the substantial broader Victorian decorative arts literature.