James Leonard

James Leonard was an English Prouve. Unlike Prouve he never had his own firm and only worked for one company from leaving school until retirement. His big year was 1947, when he designed a small collection of school furniture using an unfamiliar technique: high-pressure cast aluminium. The cover of the leaflet produced to publicise the collection features one of the most beautiful chair-designs ever made. The tragedy is that no copy of that chair is known to exist, and not even Leonard's assistant, who started working with him in 1951, can recall ever seeing one. By that year his employer, ESA, had decided to replace that design with one cheaper and simpler to make, adapted from the chair that is his best-known design, and which by the mid 1960's had been made in over a million copies. I would like Leonard's work to be better-known, and dream of one day finding a copy of the chair on the cover of the ESA brochure.