Arts and Crafts Essays Part 11

The great charm in furniture of the simplest structure may best be seen in old illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, where a chest, a bench, and against the wall a cupboard, the top rising in steps where are set out tall "Venice gla.s.ses," or a "garnish" of plate under a tester of some bright stuff, make up a whole of fairy beauty in the frank simplicity of the forms and the innocent gaiety of bright colour. Take the St. Jerome in his study of Durer or Bellini, and compare the dignity of serene and satisfying order with the most beautifully furnished room you know: how vulgar our _good taste_ appears and how foreign to the end of culture--Peace.

From records, and what remains to us, we know that the room, the hangings, and the furniture were patterned all over with scattered flowers and inscriptions--violets and the words "_bonne pensee_"; or vases of lilies and "pax," angels and incense pots, ciphers and initials, badges and devices, or whatever there be of suggestion and mystery. The panelling and furniture were "green like a curtain," as the old accounts have it; or vermilion and white, like some painted chairs at Knole; or even decorated with paintings and gilt gesso patterns like the Norfolk screens. Fancy a bed with the underside of the canopy having an Annunciation or spreading trellis of roses, and the chamber carved like one in thirteenth-century romance:--

"N'a el monde beste n'oisel Qui n'i soit ovre a cisel."

If we would know how far we are from the soul of art, we have but to remember that all this, the romance element in design, the joy in life, nature, and colour, which in one past development we call Gothic, and which is ever the well of beauty undefiled, is not now so much impossible of attainment as entirely out of range with our spirit and life, a felt anachronism and affectation.

All art is sentiment embodied in form. To find beauty we must consider what really gives us pleasure--pleasure, not pride--and show our unashamed delight in it; "and so, when we have leisure to be happy and strength to be simple we shall find Art again"--the art of the workman.

W. R. LETHABY.

OF DECORATED FURNITURE

Decorated or "sumptuous" furniture is not merely furniture that is expensive to buy, but that which has been elaborated with much thought, knowledge, and skill. Such furniture cannot be cheap, certainly, but the real cost of it is sometimes borne by the artist who produces rather than by the man who may happen to buy it. Furniture on which valuable labour is bestowed may consist of--1. Large standing objects which, though actually movable, are practically fixtures, such as cabinets, presses, sideboards of various kinds; monumental objects. 2. Chairs, tables of convenient shapes, stands for lights and other purposes, coffers, caskets, mirror and picture frames. 3. Numberless small convenient utensils. Here we can but notice cla.s.s 1, the large standing objects which most absorb the energies of artists of every degree and order in their construction or decoration.

Cabinets seem to have been so named as being little strongholds--"offices" of men of business for stowing papers and doc.u.ments in orderly receptacles. They are secured with the best locks procurable. They often contain secret drawers and cavities, hidden from all eyes but those of the owner. Nor are instances wanting of owners leaving no information on these matters to their heirs, so that casual buyers sometimes come in for a windfall, or such a catastrophe as befell the owner of Richard the Third's bed.

It is not to be expected that elaborate systems of secret drawers and hiding-places should be contrived in cabinets of our time. Money and jewels are considered safer when deposited in banks. But, ingenuity of construction in a complicated piece of furniture must certainly be counted as one of its perfections. Sound and accurate joinery with well-seasoned woods, properly understood as to shrinkage and as to the relations between one kind of timber and another in these respects, is no small merit.

Some old English cabinets are to be met with in the construction of which wood only is used, the morticing admirable, the boards, used to hold ends and divisions together from end to end, strained and secured by wedges that turn on pivots, etc. Furniture of this kind can be taken to pieces and set up, resuming proper rigidity _toties quoties_.

To look at the subject historically, it seems that the cabinet, dresser, or sideboard is a chest set on legs, and that the "press," or cupboard (closet, not proper _cup_-board), takes the place of the panelled recess closed by doors, generally contrived, and sometimes ingeniously hidden, in the construction of a panelled room. The front of the elevated chest is hinged, and flaps down, while the lid is a fixture; the interior is more complicated than that of the chest, as its subdivisions are more conveniently reached.

Before leaving this part of the subject, it is worth notice that the architectural, or rather architectonic, character seems to have deeply impressed the makers of cabinets when the chest-type had gradually been lost. Italian, German, English, and other cabinets are often found representing a church front or a house front, with columns, doors, sometimes ebony and ivory pavements, etc.

Next as to methods of decorating cabinets, etc. The kind which deserves our first attention is that of sculpture. Here, undoubtedly, we must look to the Italians as our masters, and to that admirable school of wood-carving which maintained itself so long in Flanders, with an Italian grace grafted on the ingenuity, vigour, and playfulness of a northern race. Our English carvers, admirable craftsmen during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, seem to have been closely allied with the contemporary Flemings. Fronts of cabinets, dressers, chimneypieces, etc., were imported from Belgium and were made up by English joiners with panelling, supplemented with carving where required, for our great houses. But the best Italian carving remains on chests and chest fronts which were made in great numbers in the sixteenth century.

Some of these chests are toilet chests; some have formed wall-seats, laid along the sides of halls and galleries to hold hangings, etc., when the house was empty, and have served as seats or as "monumental" pieces when company was received.

As the chest grew into the cabinet, or bureau, or dresser, great attention was paid to the supports. It need hardly be pointed out that, for the support of seats, tables, etc., animals, typical of strength or other qualities--the lion or the sphinx, the horse, sometimes the slave--have been employed by long traditional usage. And carvers of wood have not failed to give full attention to the use and decoration of conventional supports to the furniture now under discussion. They are made to unite the central ma.s.s to a shallow base, leaving the remaining s.p.a.ce open.

Next to sculptured decoration comes incrusted. The most costly kinds of material, precious stones, such as lapis lazuli, agate, rare marbles, etc., have been employed on furniture surfaces. But such work is rather that of the lapidary than of the cabinetmaker. It is very costly, and seems to have been confined, in fact, to the factories kept up in Italy, Russia, and other states, at government expense. We do not produce them in this country; and the number of such objects is probably limited wherever we look for them.

Incrustation of precious woods is a more natural system of wood-decoration. Veneered wood, which is laid on a roughened surface with thin glue at immense pressure, if well made, is very long-lived.

The woods used give a coloured surface, and are polished so as to bring the colour fully out, _and_ to protect the material from damp. In fine examples the veneers form little pictures, or patterns, either by the arrangement of the grain of the pieces used, so as to make pictorial lines by means of the grain itself, or by using woods of various colours.

A very fine surface decoration was invented, or carried to perfection, by Andre Charles Boule, for Louis XIV. It is a veneer of tortoise-sh.e.l.l and bra.s.s, with occasional white metal. An important element in Boule decoration is noticeable in the chiselled angle mounts, lines of moulding, claws, feet, etc., all of which are imposed, though they have the general character of metal angle supports. In fact, the tortoise-sh.e.l.l is held by glue, and the metal by fine nails of the same material, the heads of which are filed down. Incrustation, or _marquetry_, of this kind is costly, and most of it is due to the labours of artists and craftsmen employed by the kings of France at the expense of the Government. A considerable quant.i.ty of it is still made in that country.

Now as to the way in which sculptors, or incrusters, should dispose of their decoration, and the fidelity to nature which is to be expected of them, whether in sculpture or wood mosaic, _i.e._ wood painting. First, we may suppose they will concentrate their more important details in recognisable divisions of their pieces, or in such ways that a proportion and rhythm shall be expressed by their dispositions of ma.s.ses and fine details; placing their figures in central panels, on angles, or on dividing members; leaving some plain surface to set off their decorative detail; and taking care that the contours of running mouldings shall not be lost sight of by the carver. But how far is absolute natural truth, even absolute obedience to the laws of his art in every particular of his details, to be expected from the artist? We cannot doubt that such absolute obedience is sometimes departed from intentionally and with success. All Greek sculpture is not always absolutely true to nature nor as beautiful as the sculptor, if free, could have made it. Statues are conventionalised, decorative scrolls exaggerated, figures turned into columns for good reasons, and in the result successfully. In furniture, as in architecture, carved work or incrustation is not _free_, but is in _service_; and compromises with verisimilitude to nature, even violence, may sometimes be required on details in the interests of the entire structure.

Next let a word or two be reserved for Painted Furniture. Painting has been employed on furniture of all kinds at many periods. The ancients made theirs of bronze, or of ivory, carved or inlaid. In the Middle Ages wood-carving and many kinds of furniture were painted. The coronation chair at Westminster was so decorated. The chest fronts of Delli and other painters are often pictures of great intrinsic merit, and very generally these family chest fronts are valuable records of costumes and fashions of their day. In this country the practice of painting pianoforte cases, chair-backs, table-tops, panels of all sorts, has been much resorted to. Distinguished painters, Angelica Kauffmann and her contemporaries, and a whole race of coach-painters have left monuments of their skill in this line. It must suffice here to recall certain modern examples, _e.g._ a small dresser, now in the national collections, with doors painted by Mr. Poynter, with spirited figures representing the _Beers_ and the _Wines_; the fine piano case painted by Mr. Burne-Jones; another by Mr. Alma Tadema; lastly, a tall clock-case by Mr. Stanhope, which, as well as other promising examples, have been exhibited by the Arts and Crafts Society.

J. H. POLLEN.

OF CARVING

It is not uncommon to see an elaborate piece of furniture, in decorating which it is evident that the carver has had opportunity for the exercise of all his skill, and which, indeed, bears evidence of the most skilful woodcutting on almost every square inch of its surface, from the contemplation of which neither an artist nor an educated craftsman can derive any pleasure or satisfaction. This would seem to point to the designer of the ornament as the cause of failure, and the writer of this believes that in such cases it will generally be found that the designer, though he may know everything that he ought to know about the production of designs which shall look well on paper or on a flat surface, has had no experience, by actually working at the material, of its difficulties, special capabilities, or limitations.

If at the same time he has had but a limited experience of the difference in treatment necessary for carving which is to be seen at various alt.i.tudes, his failure may be taken as sufficiently accounted for.

An idea now prevalent that it is not advisable to make models for wood-carving is not by any means borne out by the experience of the writer of this paper.

Models are certainly not necessary for ordinary work, such as mouldings, or even for work in panels when the surfaces are intended to be almost wholly on one plane, but the carved decoration of a panel, which pretends to be in any degree a work of art, often depends for its effect quite as much on the masterly treatment of surface planes, and the relative projection from the surface of the more prominent parts, as upon the outline. Now, there are many men who, though able to carve wood exquisitely, have never given themselves the trouble, or perhaps have scarcely had the opportunity, to learn how to read an ordinary drawing.

The practice obtains in many carving shops for one or two leading men to rough out (_viz._ shape out roughly) all the work so far as that is practicable, and the others take it up after them and finish it. The followers are not necessarily less skilful carvers or cutters than the leaders, but have, presumably, less knowledge of form. If, then, one wishes to avail oneself of the skill of these men for carrying out really important work, it is much the simpler way to make a model (however rough) which shall accurately express everything one wishes to see in the finished work; and, a.s.suming the designer to be fairly dexterous in the use of clay or other plastic material, a sketch model will not occupy any more of his time than a drawing would.

To put it plainly, no designer can ever know what he ought to expect from a worker in any material if he has not worked in that material himself. If he has carved marble, for instance, he knows the extreme care required in under-cutting the projecting parts of the design, and the cost entailed by the processes necessary to be employed for that purpose. He therefore so arranges the various parts of his design that wherever it is possible these projecting portions shall be supported by other forms, so avoiding the labour and cost of relieving (or under-cutting) them; and if he be skilful his skill will appear in the fact that his motive in this will be apparent only to experts, while to others the whole will appear to grow naturally out of the design.

Moreover, he knows that he must depend for the success of this thing on an effect of breadth and dignity. He is not afraid of a somewhat elaborate surface treatment, being aware that nearly any variety of surface which he can readily produce in clay may be rendered in marble with a reasonable amount of trouble.

In designing for the wood-carver he is on altogether different ground.

He may safely lay aside some portion of his late dignity, and depend almost entirely on vigour of line; the ease with which under-cutting is done in this material enabling him to obtain contrast by the use of delicately relieved forms. Here, however, he must not allow the effect in his model to depend in any degree on surface treatment. Care in that respect will prevent disappointment in the finished work.

The most noticeable feature in modern carved surface decoration is the almost universal tendency to overcrowding. It appears seldom to have occurred to the craftsman or designer that decorating a panel, for instance, is not at all the same thing as covering it with decoration.

Still less does he seem to have felt that occasionally some portions of the ground are much more valuable in the design than anything which he can put on them. Indeed, the thoughtful designer who understands its use and appreciates its value, frequently has more trouble with his ground than with anything else in the panel. Also, if he have the true decorative spirit, his mind is constantly on the general scheme surrounding his work, and he is always ready to subordinate himself and his work in order that it may enhance and not disturb this general scheme.

We will suppose, for example, that he has to decorate a column with raised ornament. He feels at once that the outlines of that column are of infinitely more importance than anything which he can put on it, however ingenious or beautiful his design may be. He therefore keeps his necessary projecting parts as small and low as possible, leaving as much of the column as he can showing between the lines of his pattern. By this means the idea of strength and support is not interfered with, and the _tout ensemble_ is not destroyed.

This may seem somewhat elementary to many who will read it. My excuse must be that one sees many columns in which every vestige of the outline is so covered by the carving which has been built round them, that the idea of their supporting anything other than their ornament appears preposterous.

There has been no opportunity to do more than glance at such a subject as this in a s.p.a.ce so limited; but the purposes of this paper will have been served if it has supplied a useful hint to any craftsman, or if by its means any designer shall have been induced to make a more thorough study of the materials within his reach.

STEPHEN WEBB.

INTARSIA AND INLAID WOOD-WORK

Although decoration by inlaying woods of different colours must naturally have suggested itself in very early times, as soon indeed as there were workmen of skill sufficient for it, the history of this branch of art practically begins in the fifteenth century. It is eminently an Italian art, which according to Vasari had its origin in the days of Brunelleschi and Paolo Uccello; and it had its birth in a land which has a greater variety of mild close-grained woods with a greater variety of colour than Northern Europe. By the Italians it was regarded as a lower form of painting. Like all mosaic, of which art it is properly a branch, it has its limitations; and it is only so long as it confines itself to these that it is a legitimate form of decoration.

Tarsia is at the best one of the minor decorative arts, but when well employed it is one that gives an immense deal of pleasure, and one to which it cannot be denied that the buildings of Italy owe much of their splendour. Their polished and inlaid furniture harmonises with the rare delicacy of their marble and mosaic, and goes far towards producing that air of rich refinement and elaborate culture which is to the severer styles and simpler materials of the North what the velvet-robed Senator of St. Mark was to the mail-clad feudal chief from beyond the Alps. As to its durability, the experience of four centuries since Vasari's time has proved that with ordinary care, or perhaps with nothing worse than mere neglect, Intarsia will last as long as painting. Its only real enemy is damp, as will be readily understood from the nature of the materials and the mode of putting them together. For though in a few instances, when the art was in its infancy, the inlaid pattern may have been cut of a substantial thickness and sunk into a solid ground ploughed out to receive it, this method was obviously very laborious, and admitted only of very simple design, for it is very difficult in this way to keep the lines of the drawing accurately. The recognised way of making Intarsia was, and is, to form both pattern and ground in thin veneers about 1/16 of an inch thick, which are glued down upon a solid panel. At first sight this method may appear too slight and unsubstantial for work intended to last for centuries, but it has, in fact, stood the test of time extremely well, when the work has been kept in the dry even temperature of churches and great houses, where there is neither damp to melt the glue and swell the veneer, nor excessive heat to make the wood shrink and start asunder. When these conditions were not observed, of course the work was soon ruined, and Vasari tells an amusing story of the humiliation which befell Benedetto da Majano, who began his career as an _Intarsiatore_, in the matter of two splendid chests which he had made for Matthias Corvinus, from which the veneers, loosened by the damp of a sea voyage, fell off in the royal presence.

The veneers being so thin, it is of course easy to cut through several layers of them at once, and this suggested, or at all events lent itself admirably to the design of the earlier examples, which are generally arabesques symmetrically disposed right and left of a central line. If two dark and two light veneers are put together, the whole of one panel, both ground and pattern, can be cut at one operation with a thin fret saw; the ornamental pattern drops into the s.p.a.ce cut out of the ground, which it, of course, fits exactly except for the thickness of the saw-cut, and the two half-patterns thus filled in are "handed" right and left, and so complete the symmetrical design. The line given by the thickness of the saw is then filled in with glue and black colour so as to define the outline, and additional saw-cuts are made or lines are engraved, and in either case filled in with the same stopping, wherever additional lines are wanted for the design. It only remains to glue the whole down to a solid panel, and to polish and varnish the surface, and it is then ready to be framed into its place as the back of a church stall, or the lining of a courtly hall, library, or cabinet.

It was thus that the simpler Italian Intarsia was done, such as that in the dado surrounding Perugino's Sala del Cambio in his native city, where the design consists of light arabesques in box or some similar wood on a walnut ground, defined by black lines just as I have described.

But like all true artists the Intarsiatore did not stand still. Having successfully accomplished simple outline and accurate drawing, he was dissatisfied until he could carry his art farther by introducing the refinement of shading. This was done at different times and by different artists in a variety of ways; either by inlaying the shadow in different kinds of woods, by scorching it with fire, or by staining it with chemical solutions. In the book desks of the choir at the Certosa or Charterhouse of Pavia, the effect of shading is got in a direct but somewhat imperfect way by laying strips of different coloured woods side by side. Each flower or leaf was probably built up of tolerably thick pieces of wood glued together in position, so that they could be sliced off in veneers and yield several flowers or leaves from the same block, much in the way of Tunbridge Wells ware, though the Italian specimens are, I believe, always cut _with_ the grain and not across it. The designs thus produced are very effective at a short distance, but the method is, of course, suitable only to bold and simple conventional patterns.

The panels of the high screen or back to the stalls at the same church afford an instance of a more elaborate method. These splendid panels, which go all round the choir, contain each a three-quarter-length figure of a saint. Lanzi deservedly praises them as the largest and most perfect figures of _tarsia_ which he had seen. They date from 1486, and were executed by an Istrian artist, Bartolommeo da Pola, perhaps from the designs of Borgognone. The method by which their highly pictorial effect is produced is a mixed one, the shading being partly inlaid with woods of different colours, and partly obtained by scorching the wood with fire or hot sand in the manner generally in use for marqueterie at the present day. The inexhaustible patience as well as the fertility of resource displayed by Messer Bartolommeo is astonishing. Where the saw-cut did not give him a strong enough line he has inlaid a firm line of black wood, the high lights of the draperies are inlaid in white, the folds shaded by burning, and the flowing lines of the curling hair are all inlaid, each several tress being shaded by three narrow strips of gradated colour following the curved lines of the lock to which they belong. When it is remembered that there are some forty or more of these panels, each differing from the rest, the splendour as well as the laborious nature of the decoration of this unrivalled choir will be better understood.

Of all the examples of pictorial Intarsia the most elaborate are perhaps those in the choir stalls of Sta. Maria Maggiore in Bergamo. They are attributed to Gianfrancesco Capo di Ferro, who worked from the designs of Lotto, and was either a rival or pupil of Fra Damiano di Bergamo, a famous master of the art. They consist of figure subjects and landscapes on a small scale, shaded with all the delicacy and roundness attainable in a tinted drawing, and certainly show how near Intarsia can approach to painting. Their drawing is excellent and their execution marvellous; but at the same time one feels that, however one may admire them as a _tour de force_, the limitations of good sense and proper use of the material have been reached and overstepped. When the delicacy of the work is so great that it requires to be covered up or kept under gla.s.s, it obviously quits the province of decorative art; furniture is meant to be used, and when it is too precious to be usable on account of the over-delicate ornament bestowed upon it, it must be admitted that the ornament is out of place, and, therefore, bad art.