Biography
Ronald Carter OBE (b. UK 1926 - d. 2013) studied industrial and interior design at Birmingham Central College of Art, where he won an internal scholarship for silversmithing, before progressing to the Royal College of Art in London to specialise in furniture design, under Dick Russell who was also the chief designer for Gordon Russell Ltd, the family firm based in Broadway in the Cotswolds and whith whom Ron worked on the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion at the Festival of Britain (1951).
He was a furniture designer whose work combined Scandinavian style with an Arts and Crafts influence, although his desgns were for commercial production. Early on one of his chairs was selected by the rector for the new RCA senior common room. Another was chosen by the architect Frederick Gibberd for the new London airport at Heathrow. This was the chair that appears in David Hockney's lithograph Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (1961). He then won a travel scholarship to the US, sailing on the Queen Mary in unaccustomed luxury and working for a year as a staff designer for Corning Glass on Fifth Avenue, New York. He was friends with the cutlery designer, David Mellor (1930-2009) and togeher they built an Enterprise sailing dinghy.
Throughout the 1960s, Carter, then in partnership with his RCA contemporary Robert Heritage, worked for companies such as LM Furniture, Gordon Russell and the Stag Cabinet Company. He was made Royal Designer for Industry in 1971 in recognition of his furniture design and an honorary fellow of the RCA on his retirement in 1974. In 1980, with Peter Miles as business partner, he established a new company, Miles Carter, employing a workforce of 20 skilled cabinet makers at Wirksworth in Derbyshire. Ron was made a royal designer for industry and, in 1999, was appointed OBE. He is probably best known for the commission for furniture for the British Library which came through the architect Colin St John Wilson, whose ideas for the seating were inspired by the painting of Saint Jerome (about 1475) by Antonella da Messina in The National Gallery, London.
