Rupert Williamson (furniture designer)

Rupert Williamson (born 1945) has been a designer and creator of one-off furniture for over 40 years with work in many museums and public collections, together with his work written about and illustrated in many books and articles.In 1999 he received a PhD for his thesis “New Forms of Imagery in Furniture". The Reflections of a Designer working in the Craft Revival of the 1970s and beyond” together with a major collection of his designs.

He studied at High Wycombe and The Royal College of Art that he left in 1971. In the first major showing of his work in 1976 at an alumni exhibition, a chair was bought for the Victoria and Albert Museum collection. After this first exhibition his work was to be seen in Sloane Square, London, magazines and books and was shown in most of the major galleries in the UK including The Crafts Council Gallery, London Prescote Gallery, Banbury, the Contemporary Applied Arts Gallery, London.

He has created furniture mainly for individual customers, such as Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter, which is open to the public, also in combination with other artists he has worked on a number of large public commissions, including Milton Keynes Art Gallery, Norwich Museum, and Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham.

After the storms in England of 1987, The Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, London, held an exhibition pieces of furniture made from the timber blown down. Rupert Williamson made three tables from this wood, two being bought for museums collections with the other one sold at Bonhams.

His work has been collected for many public collections and museums including the Victoria and Albert, Fitzwilliam, Cambridge, and Royal Scottish Museum. In 2012 David Savage produced a book ‘Furniture with Soul” [13] detailing ten of the top furniture designer craftsmen in the world today that work in wood.