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Figure 34: E. W. Godwin, Designs for coffee tables for Grey Towers, 1874
In regard to Godwin’s Anglo-Japoniste tendencies, however, the most
exemplary object he designed was the cabinet pictured below (Fig. 35).
Paradoxically, although it was expounded that “with the Japanese we take a
step backward some ten centuries to live over again the feudal days”, 20
Godwin’s furniture looks forward to a sense of postmodern hybridism as
much as it looks back. While this cabinet is a product of Neo-Gothicism,
which in its context signifies a rejection of the modern industrial world, it is
also truly modernist, pre-empting twentieth-century Modernism by several
decades.
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