Enfilade

From The Furniture History Society:

‘In Pursuit of the Maker’: Shaping Furniture Research

The Furniture History Society Annual Symposium

London, 6 March 2027

Proposals due by 7 September 2026

Side chair (one of a pair) after a design by Thomas Chippendale, ca. 1755–60 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 64.101.983).

The Furniture History Society Annual Symposium will be held next year on the 6th of March in central London, to mark and celebrate the tenth anniversary of British and Irish Furniture Makers Online (BIFMO). Over the past decade the project created a digitised version of the Dictionary of English Furniture Makers, 1660–1840, which now serves as the foundation of the database. Through research initiatives and generous contributions, BIFMO currently contains the details of nearly 100,000 furniture makers across the British Isles, c.1500–1914, some presenting skeletal details of trade and craft people’s lives, others offering comprehensive and illustrated histories.

The day will be divided into plenary sessions: recounting the origins of Christopher Gilbert’s and Geoffrey Beard’s Dictionary, leading to the establishment of BIFMO; the historiography of British and Irish furniture makers and the structure of the trade they worked within; the influence of trans-Atlantic migration and immigration on the design, style and construction of furniture, their workshop practices and trade networks; and furniture making in Britain and Ireland throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We hope that papers might demonstrate the use of BIFMO in research.

We invite submissions for papers (15–25 minutes) for topics including, but not limited to
• Documenting British and Irish furniture history, from the early modern to the Edwardian periods.
• Trans-Atlantic migration and immigration
• The relationship between designers and furniture makers, 1660–1900
• Nineteenth-century research and discoveries

Our audience will include members and non-members of the FHS, including academics, curators, conservators, and members of the art market. The proceedings will also be live-streamed. The deadline for submission is Monday, September 7. Please submit an abstract of 250–300 words and a short biography to bifmoeditor@furniturehistorysociety.org.