Liberty & Co.

Products from this producer offered by Prague Art & Design

The name Liberty & Co. stands for a company and at the same time the famous shop located on the Regent Street in London. The company was established by Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty (1843–1917) in 1875 and it focused on selling textiles, clocks, decorative objects and objects of art imported from the Far East. In the beginning, Liberty & Co. planned to offer an eclectic mixture of popular styles but it eventually developed a style of its own, closely linked with the new aesthetic movement of the 1890s – Art Nouveau. It soon came to symbolize the given style into such extent that it even entered common awareness as “Stile Liberty” in Italy.

Even though the style was strongly affiliated to the Art Nouveau movement in its linear forms, it developed a different and characteristic British interpretation by completely abandoning erotic curves of human body and instead focusing on distinct line and organic details.

The main effort of Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty was to make high-quality objects of art available to wide public, and thus while his shops offered objects created by many leading European designers, Liberty & Co. developed its own lines produced at high numbers. These were the line of silver products and jewels Cymric and the line specializing in tin objects, called Tudric. The two collections at the same time employed enamel and semi-precious stones. They represented a great return of Celtic motifs and Renaissance influences, combined with the typical features of Art Nouveau. Also highly valued was the company selection of printed and colored fabrics, especially silk and satin, which gained fame for its wide scale of refined colors.

In 1890, Liberty & Co. became a shareholding company and Arthur Lasenby Liberty its majority shareholder. He was awarded the honorary title of Knight in 1913.