Lewis F. Day

Lewis Foreman Day (29 January 1845 – 18 April 1910) was a British decorative artist and industrial designer and an important figure in the Arts and Crafts movement.

Biography

Day was born at Peckham Rye, south London, on 29 January 1845. His father, Samuel, was a wine merchant. His mother was Mary Ann Lewis. He was educated in France, at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood and subsequently in Germany.

He was first employed as a clerk, then, at the age to twenty he worked for the glass painters and designers Lavers, Barraud and Westlake. He moved to the stained glass makers of Clayton and Bell, where he designed the cartoons. In 1870 he worked for Heaton, Butler and Bayne on the decoration of Eaton Hall, Cheshire.

He started his own business in London in 1870, expanding his activities beyond glass painting to a wide range of media including wallpapers for W. B. Simpson & Co., textiles for Turnbull & Stockdale, and tiles for Maw's and Pilkington's.

He was an active member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, one time master of the Art Workers Guild, which he helped to found, and a member of the Council of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) for much of the period between 1877 and his death. He was an influential educator and wrote widely on design and pattern. His Cantor Lectures on Ornamental Design for the RSA (1886) led to a series of publications, including The Anatomy of Pattern (1887), The Planning of Ornament (1887), Pattern Design (1903), Ornament and its Application (1904), and Nature and Ornament (1908–9). He published in many journals, including the Magazine of Art, the Art Journal and the Journal of Decorative Art. Other books were Windows (1897), Stained Glass (1903), Alphabets Old and New (1898) and Lettering in Ornament (1902).