Christopher Dresser
One of the first industrial designers.
Christopher Dresser was a botanist and designer who travelled to Japan in 1877. His teapots and dishes look modernist several decades ahead of their time.
Christopher Dresser was born in Glasgow in 1834. At the age of only thirteen he entered the government School of Design in London, where he was trained in ornamental design. He also became an accomplished botanist and taught the subject. For his botanical studies he received a doctorate from the University of Jena around 1860. His knowledge of the structure of plants shaped all his design work.
In the 1860s and 1870s he wrote books on decorative design in which he advocated stylised, geometric forms instead of naturalistic decoration. In 1876–77 he travelled to Japan as one of the first European designers to do so. He visited workshops and was reportedly sent as a representative of the British government with gifts for a museum in Tokyo. In 1882 he published a book on Japanese architecture and art manufactures.
Dresser worked like a modern industrial designer. Instead of making the objects himself, he produced designs for many different manufacturers: ceramics for Minton, Wedgwood and Linthorpe, among others, where he was art director; glass for the Clutha range; and metalwork for Elkington, James Dixon & Sons and Hukin & Heath. Unusually for the time, his name was often stamped on the objects.
His teapots, jugs and cruet stands in electroplated metal from around 1880 are his most celebrated works. They have angular, geometric forms, visible rivets and straight handles, and were intended to be simple to make and easy to use. Many critics feel they look like modernism thirty or forty years before the Bauhaus. He often considered how much material was used and how a vessel would pour.
Dresser died in 1904 while travelling, in Mulhouse in Alsace. He was partly forgotten in the early 20th century but was rediscovered by collectors and scholars in the second half of the century. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held a major exhibition on him in 2004. Today he is counted among the first independent industrial designers and as an early channel for Japanese design sensibility into Europe.