Charles Voysey Biography

Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941) was an English architect and furniture and textile designer. Voysey's early work was as a designer of wallpapers, fabrics and furnishings in an Arts and Crafts style and he made important contribution to the Modern Style (British Art Nouveau style), and was recognised by the seminal The Studio magazine. 

Born at Kingston College, at Hessle, Yorkshire in 1857, he was the eldest son of Rev. Charles Voysey, a Church of England priest who was deprived of his living in 1871 for his heterodox views. The family moved to London, where his father founded the Theistic Church. Voysey was educated by his father, then briefly at Dulwich College.

In 1874 Voysey was articled for five years to the architect J.P. Seddon, with whom he subsequently remained for a further year as chief assistant. 

As well as his architectural pursuits, Voysey was a distinguished designer of flat patterns for wallpapers, fabrics, carpets and tiles. It was Mackmurdo who first introduced him to the techniques of wallpaper design, and some of Voysey's early pattern designs incorporated more restrained versions of the swirling motifs beloved by Mackmurdo and the Century guild of artists. Voysey sold his first wallpaper design in 1883; by the late 1880s his reputation as a wallpaper designer was established at home and abroad, and he was still selling pattern designs in 1930. His career as a pattern designer was thus longer and more prolific than his career as an architect. But it was also complementary to his architectural career, because selling patterns supplemented his income in the lean years of his architectural practice, before c.1895 and after c.1910.

Typical patterns of this period include The Saladin wallpaper, 1897 and The Owl jacquard-woven woollen textile, 1898. From 1910 onwards, his patterns became more narrative, with isolated motifs, and were often meant for the nursery. The Alice in Wonderland furnishing fabric, c.1920, is typical of this phase. His last recorded wallpaper commission was dated 1930.

Voysey was influenced by the work of William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau, and was concerned with form and function rather than ornamental complexities. He felt that "simplicity in decoration is one of the essential qualities without which no true richness is possible" and often worked in a limited colour palette, "emphasising outline, eliminating shading, and minimising detail." He joined as a member of the Art Workers' Guild in 1884, "the conscientious core of the Arts and Crafts Movement", being elected to the position of Master in 1924.

Voysey died in Winchester in 1941.