19th Century Arts and Crafts Oak Table by James Shoolbred

James Shoolbred & Co were established in the 1820s and started out as a draper and later became a department store in Tottenham Court Road. Shoolbred expanded into the stores either side and by the 1870s they were designing, manufacturing and selling high quality furniture, until 1931 when the company ceased trading.
James Shoolbred was one of many who specialised in furniture of the Aesthetic Movement, although they also used fashionable trends of the time like Japanese design, Art Nouveau and Gothic influences. The Aesthetic Movement started in the 1860s in the homes and studios of a small group of artists and designers, including William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The movement grew over the next two decades to create a movement dedicated to pure beauty. As a style aestheticism was elaborate, allusive, extravagantly literary, infused with a love of the medieval, going overboard for the exotic and outlandish.