About Us
John Cornall has at various times been a poet, critic, editor, collector, educator but at all times he has been a champion of the decorative and life-affirming.
In the 1990s he was an critic regularly reviewing and writing essays on art for newspapers and specialist journals. Around 1993 he made the first of many visits to the ex-Eastern Bloc where he became fascinated by the authentic culture he found there "amongst the wreckage of the old forgotten peasant half of Europe". He began making friends and contacts and collecting folk art, glass icons and rustic artefacts, "quality things that are largely unrecorded other than in obscure Soviet coffee table books with cardboard covers". The spirit and vitality of the old peasant art was a sharp contrast to the commercialism of the 90s contemporary art scene and he soon found himself exploring the rural bywaters of Europe rather than railing at the status quo on Cork St.
By 2001 he had founded "John Cornall Antiques" and in 2006 he and his partner, the artist, Sarah Loveluck, and their children, moved to a Georgian fronted 17th c. townhouse in the centre of Warwick where their shop on the ground floor sells antique pine farmhouse tables from Wales alongside original painted pine Georgian dressers, antique cigar store figures, 18th c. Irish famine chairs, primitive portraits, spoon racks from Transylvania and much more.
John travels frequently and brings in loads from across Europe, from the Far North to the West of Ireland to the easternmost fringes of the old Austrian Empire. In spite of high volume he tries to maintain a strict quality in the stock, from the smallest to the largest items, everything is picked on merit. "In the past as a critic my job depended on looking at things and having to make quick and sound judgements and this has been helpful as a decorative antique dealer, not to go by the book but always by the 'eye', which, hopefully, after half a lifetime of this kind of testing knows a little and gains an instinct."
In the last decade John Cornall Antiques has grown rapidly from a small folk art specialist dealership, which remains at the core of the enterprise, to a much broader wholesale antique furniture business supplying the decorative, painted furniture and interior design market in the UK and in many overseas countries. At first known as an importer of pine from Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Russia, John Cornall Antiques has in recent years broadened the scope of the stock to include a wide range of quality pine and country furniture from the British Isles, Ireland and other European countries.
Alongside trestle tables, rustic dressers, painted dowry chests, fruitwood tables, Russian folk art, icons, old glass jars, antique kitchenalia, shop counters and banks of drawers from Eastern Europe the stock includes Victorian painted toys and pine chests, 17th and 18th c. provincial oil portraits, secretaire cabinets and commodes from Scandanavia, English period painted pine dresser bases, old shop signs, scrub top tables and pine linen presses from Ireland.