A Heal's oak four-poster bed, panelled head board with turned columns, adorned with Morris & Co

A Heal's oak four-poster bed, panelled head board with turned columns, adorned with Morris & Co Bird woven jacquard bed spread, curtains and canopy, designed by William Morris, unsigned, 219cm high, 137cm wide (headboard)

Literature

Charlotte Gere & Michael Whiteway Nineteenth Century Design, Thames & Hudson, page 210 plate 261 for a comparable example of the 'Bird' textile.

Provenance

Sir Ambrose Heal, thence by descent

Catalogue notes

The four-poster bed that is being offered for sale is a fairly simple piece of early 20^th century furniture and yet this particular bed is laden with symbolism. This was the bed in which Sir Ambrose Heal (1872-1959) slept for much of his life. It brings together comfort, design history and social history.

The Heal’s business in London’s Tottenham Court Road had been founded in 1810 to manufacture beds and mattresses. Bedding was at the heart of the business throughout the 19^th century and most of the 20^th century, even as the firm expanded into dealing in other items of furniture and furnishing. The small bedding factory remained on the same site in Tottenham Court Road until the 1980s and the skilled upholsterers and makers continued to use the same traditional techniques and the finest natural materials that their ancestors had used. One of Heal’s major contributions to sleep comfort was the design of the “Sommier Elastique Portatif” which was patented in 1860 by John Harris Heal. It was still in production over 100 years later. It folds in order to make cleaning, removals and storage easy and has no top stuffing so it was “quite free from all risk of moth”. The Victorian catalogue described it as “the most comfortable Spring Mattress yet invented” and it “requires just one good mattress over it”. The Four-Poster is fitted with one of these bed-bases containing nine rows of star-lashed, nine inch, nine turn, hourglass springs made from eight-and-a-half gauge wire mounted on insulating pads.

As well as being a furniture designer, Sir Ambrose was fascinated by the history of London trades. Before the buildings in streets were numbered many displayed hanging signs to enable businesses to be found. Heal recorded hundreds of these 18^th century signs which were eventually published under the title “London Shop Signs” in 1939. For example there were no less than sixteen that incorporated an anchor, ranging from the Anchor & Bible in St Paul’s Churchyard to the Anchor & Wheatsheaf, Whitehouse Court near Tooley Street. In 1904 when looking for a symbol that would act as a logo and trademark for the Heal firm he came up with the idea of using the Four-Poster bed. Since then Heal & Son Ltd has traded “At The Sign of The Four-Poster”. Appropriately this bed is thought to date from that time. Not only did he trade under the four-poster sign but henceforth he slept in one.

Sir Ambrose was inspired by the work and writings of William Morris so it was fitting that he acquired some of Morris’s original “Bird” pattern wool cloth to make up a bed-spread and curtains for the Four-Poster. There was no better way of signalling his connection to the Arts & Crafts Movement that influenced his own design philosophy. Morris designed this pattern (with a huge repeat) in 1877-8 and it was hand-loom jacquard-woven. It was available through Morris & Co but interestingly Morris himself used this particular pattern to decorate the walls of the drawing room of his own home at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith. An inventory of Ambrose Heal’s home taken in 1914 records “An oak frame four post bedstead with panelled back and floral linen curtains and valances lined green twill 4’ 6” wide”. It was then valued at £20.

Oliver S Heal.