Offices of "The Studio"

Holme, Charles (1848–1923), magazine editor, was born in Derby on 7 October 1848, the younger son of George Holme, silk manufacturer, and his wife, Anne, née Brentnall. Educated at a private school in Derby, he was put to his father's trade, and at the age of twenty he went to Bradford to act as agent for his father's business. His sound commercial transactions brought financial success, and through his interest in art he developed trade in the East. A lecture by Robert Barkley Shaw, the oriental traveller, at the Bradford chamber of commerce in 1873, led him to exchange Bradford goods with products from Turkestan and, later, India, China, and Japan. In 1879 he joined Christopher Dresser in the firm of Dresser and Holme, while his own newly formed company traded in Asian merchandise for the home interior market. Dresser, eighteen years Holme's senior, was a designer, writer, and dealer in Middle Eastern and Asian art objects and became art manager of the Art Furnishers' Alliance, also backed by Arthur Lasenby Liberty. Holme was profoundly struck by the perfection of Japanese craftsmanship. During a world tour in 1888–9 Holme spent some months in Japan with Arthur and Emma Liberty and the artist Alfred East; in 1892 he became one of the founders of the Japan Society. He amassed a large collection of Japanese art and objects (including numerous netsukes) as well as old books, prints, letters, drawings, paintings, documents, embroidery, and Kelmscott books, later sold in 1923 and 1924.

In 1893, after his retirement in 1892, Holme founded The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Arts to promote good design. The magazine first cost 6d., then 8d., and then a shilling by the late 1890s. Annual subscriptions before the First World War cost 16s. in England (38s. abroad). Writers included professional critics such as Marcus Huish (editor of the Art Journal), D. S. MacColl, and Aymer Vallance, and they worked freelance, also writing for other periodicals. C. Lewis Hind was the first editor, for only four months, followed by Gleeson White, editor until 1895, who continued to write for the magazine until his death in 1898. Walter Shaw Sparrow was art editor from 1899 to 1904. The Studio's intended audience was middle class and its contents sympathetic to mass production. Its advertising was extensive (occupying up to one-third of its total pages) and diverse: home appliances, medicines, artists' supplies, and classifieds. The magazine promoted selected galleries and artists, thus also appealing to a specialized clientele. The Studio attained a very wide circulation before the First World War. One innovation, dating from 1894, was the special number; these usually appeared three times a year and were written by specialists on such topics as crafts, etching, architecture, and photography. In 1906 the magazine began its Year Book of Decorative Art; later other annuals appeared.

The Studio held competitions (for drawings, glass, photos, furnishings), a device of the ‘new journalism’, the methods of which—conversational style, human-interest stories, interviews, and glimpses inside artists' studios (one of its most popular series)—The Studio shared with other periodicals, such as the Magazine of Art. Art students were encouraged to participate in the magazine's competitions. Appearing when photo-engraving made possible new continuous tone reproduction, The Studio promoted the camera (including advertisements for Kodak). Printmaking techniques were common subjects for articles written by master artists, such as Whistler.

Despite sympathies with journalism and commercial interests and his dual role as proprietor and editor after 1895, Holme was also influenced by William Morris, into whose Red House at Bexleyheath, Kent, he moved in 1889. Holme believed architecture and the applied arts to be as valuable as the fine arts. The Studio maintained a high standard of production; lavishly illustrated special numbers were, in effect, books. The Studio's fashionableness co-existed with insular resistance to continental modernism. It advocated works by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Charles F. A. Voysey, and Japanese design, but promoted furniture made from stock patterns and condemned post-impressionism (J. J. Shannon, The Studio, 8, 1896, 72) and early Picasso (The Studio, 56, 1912, 65). The Studio struggled to combine progressive attitudes with commercial appeal to a domestic audience. The first issue had a cover by Aubrey Vincent Beardsley and work by Frank Brangwyn, then unknown artists. Despite their appearance, the editor censored Beardsley's cover design and, subsequently, Studio reviewers condemned his illustrations in The Yellow Book (The Studio, 3, 1894, 131). The Studio included articles on women artists and their education and had a large female readership.

Holme hoped to improve international understanding through art and design. The magazine had worldwide distribution, covered foreign art, and published in foreign editions abroad. Foreign correspondents' reports from Paris appeared in the first issue. The Studio soon had correspondents in all continental capitals and throughout the British empire, America, and Japan.

Holme had married, in 1873, Clara, daughter of George Benton, brass founder, of Birmingham; they had four children. He continued to participate in The Studio work until ill health compelled him to retire in 1919. In 1903 he moved to Upton Grey, near Basingstoke in Hampshire, where he had the manor house redesigned in arts and crafts style by Ernest Newton, with a garden laid out to the design of Gertrude Jekyll. He died at Upton Grey on 14 March 1923. His only son, Geoffrey Holme, succeeded to the ownership of The Studio, having been editor since 1919.

Julie F. Codell

Sources

A. Brothers, A Studio portrait: the marketing of art and taste, 1893–1918 (1993) · B. Holme, ‘Introduction’, in B. Holme, The Studio: a bibliography: the first fifty years (1978) · D. J. Gordon, ‘Dilemmas: The Studio in 1893–4’, Studio International, 175 (1968), 175–83 · C. Ashwin, ‘The Studio and modernism: a periodical's progress’, Studio International, 193 (1976), 103–13 · WWW · C. Holme, General index to the first twenty-one volumes of The Studio (1901) · Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge sale catalogues (1923–4) · W. S. Sparrow, Memories of life and art (1925) · T. Huberman, ‘Charles Holme (1848–1923), founder of The Studio and connoisseur of Japanese art’, Britain and Japan: biographical portraits, ed. H. Cortazzi, 6 (2007) · T. Huberman, S. Ashmore, and Y. Suga, eds., The diary of Charles Holme's 1889 visit to Japan and North America with Mrs Lasenby Liberty's photographic record (2008) · private information (2008) [T. Huberman]

Likenesses

P. A. de Laszlo, portrait, 1908, repro. in The Studio (1911)

Wealth at death

£88,447 17s. 7d.: probate, 14 June 1923, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

Julie F. Codell, ‘Holme, Charles (1848–1923)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/33950, accessed 24 Aug 2017]