The Silver Studio

British textile design studio, 1880–1963

BiographyThe Silver Studio was one of the most influential textile design studios in the UK from its formation in 1880 until the middle of the twentieth century.

The studio, founded by Arthur Silver (1853–1896) designed some of the most famous fabric, wallpaper, carpet and metalwork designs for companies such as Liberty's, Turnbull and Stockdale, Sanderson and Warner and Sons Ltd, all of which used the Silver Studio's designs for their own ranges of wallpapers and textile.

At its most productive period, the studio created more than 800 designs per year. The Silver Studio is widely recognized as having played an important part in the development of British Art Nouveau. John Illingworth Kay and Harry Napper, two of its better-known designers, executed many of its most successful Art Nouveau designs. The Studio produced several thousand designs for wallpapers, textiles and metalwork in the Art Nouveau style between around 1895 and the early 1900s.

During the 1890s, Arthur Silver was also heavily interested in and influenced by the art of Japan. He worked closely with Alexander Rottman who imported many different varieties of paper from Japan. With Rottman, the Silver Studio developed a pioneering technique of stencil decoration, influenced by Japanese stencils, which in turn came to influence the Studio's own Art Nouveau designs. Anglo-Japanese collaboration of this kind in the 1890s meant that Japanese influences were absorbed into British design and decoration, and equally that British tastes influenced the products of Japan itself.

Because the majority of the Silver Studio's clients were mass producers, Silver Studio designs would have found their way into many British homes. The Studio's most productive periods were 1891-96 and 1924-38. In those years, the minimum number of Silver Studio designs for wallpapers and textiles that were actually manufactured each year was approximately 400.

After the Silver Studio closed in the early 1960s any remaining contents were given to the Hornsey College of Art by Mary Peerless, step daughter of Rex Silver the head of the Silver Studio at that time. Hornsey College of Art later became part of Middlesex University and the contents of the Studio became a Collection, which now forms the core of the collection of the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, (MoDA), at Middlesex University.

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