Arts and Crafts Essays Part 9

In the first small sketch-design, everything need not of course be expressed; but it should be indicated--for the purpose is simply to explain the scheme proposed: so much of pictorial representation as may be necessary to that is desirable, and no more. It should be in the nature of a diagram, specific enough to ill.u.s.trate the idea and how it is to be worked out. It ought by strict rights to commit one definitely to a certain method of execution, as a written specification would; and may often with advantage be helped out by written notes, which explain more definitely than any pictorial rendering just how this is to be wrought, that cast, the other chased, and so on, as the case may be.

Whatever the method of expression the artist may adopt, he should be perfectly clear in his own mind how his design is to be worked out; and he ought to make it clear also to any one with sufficient technical knowledge to understand a drawing.

In the first sketch for a window, for example, he need not show every lead and every piece of gla.s.s; but there should be no possible mistake as to how it is to be glazed, or which is "painted" gla.s.s and which is "mosaic." To omit the necessary bars in a sketch for gla.s.s seems to me a weak concession to the prejudice of the public. One _may_ have to concede such points sometimes; but the concession is due less to necessity than to the--what shall we call it?--not perhaps exactly the cowardice, but at all events the timidity, of the artist.

In a full-sized working drawing or cartoon everything material to the design should be expressed, and that as definitely as possible. In a cartoon for gla.s.s (to take again the same example) every lead-line should be shown, as well as the saddle bars; to omit them is about as excusable as it would be to leave out the sections from a design for cabinet work. It is contended sometimes that such details are not necessary, that the artist can bear all that in mind. Doubtless he can, more or less; but I am inclined to believe more strongly in the _less_.

At any rate he will much more certainly have them in view whilst he keeps them visibly before his eyes. One thing that deters him is the fear of offending the client, who will not believe, when he sees leads and bars in a drawing, how little they are likely to a.s.sert themselves in the gla.s.s.

Very much the same thing applies to designs and working drawings generally. A thorough craftsman never suggests a form or colour without realising in his own mind how he will be able to get such form or colour in the actual work; and in his working drawing he explains that fully, making allowance even for some not impossible dulness of apprehension on the part of the executant. Thus, if a pattern is to be woven he indicates the cards to be employed, he arranges what parts are "single," what "double," as the weavers call it, what changes in the shuttle are proposed, and by the crossing of which threads certain intermediate tints are to be obtained.

Or again, if the design is for wall-paper printing, he arranges not only for the blocks, but the order in which they shall be printed; and provides for possible printing in "flock," or for the printing of one transparent colour over another, so as to get more colours than there are blocks used, and so on.

In either case, too, he shows quite plainly the limits of each colour, not so much seeking the softness of effect which is his ultimate aim, as the precision which will enable the block or card cutter to see at a glance what he means,--even at the risk of a certain hardness in his drawing; for the drawing is in itself of no account; it is only the means to an end; and his end is the stuff, the paper, or whatever it may be, in execution.

A workman intent on his design will sacrifice his drawing to it--harden it, as I said, for the sake of emphasis, annotate it, patch it, cut it up into pieces to prove it, if need be do anything to make his meaning clear to the workman who comes after him. It is as a rule only the dilettante who is dainty about preserving his drawings.

To an artist very much in repute there may be some temptation to be careful of his designs, and to elaborate them (himself, or by the hands of his a.s.sistants), because, so finished, they have a commercial value as drawings--but this is at best pot-boiling; and the only men who are subject to this temptation are just those who might be proof against it.

Men of such rank that even their working drawings are in demand have no very urgent need to work for the pot; and the working drawings of men to whom pounds and shillings must needs be a real consideration are not sought after.

In the case of very smart and highly finished drawings by comparatively unknown designers--of ninety-nine out of a hundred, that is to say, or nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand perhaps--elaboration implies either that, having little to say, a man fills up his time in saying it at unnecessary length, or that he is working for exhibition.

And why not work for exhibition? it may be asked. There is a simple answer to that: The exhibition pitch is in much too high a key, and in the long run it will ruin the faculty of the workman who adopts it.

It is only fair to admit that an exhibition of fragmentary and unfinished drawings, soiled, tattered, and torn, as they almost invariably come from the workshop or factory, would make a very poor show--which may be an argument against exhibiting them at all. Certainly it is a reason for mending, cleaning, and mounting them, and putting them in some sort of frame (for what is not worth the pains of making presentable is not worth showing), but that is a very different thing from working designs up to picture pitch.

When all is said, designs, if exhibited, appeal primarily to designers.

_We_ all want to see each other's work, and especially each other's way of working; but it should not be altogether uninteresting to the intelligent amateur to see what working drawings are, and to compare them with the kind of specious compet.i.tion drawings by which he is so apt to be misled.

LEWIS F. DAY.

FURNITURE AND THE ROOM

The art of furnishing runs on two wheels--the room and the furniture. As in the bicycle, the inordinate development of one wheel at the expense of its colleague has been not without some great feats, yet too often has provoked catastrophe; so furnishing makes safest progression when, with a juster proportion, its two wheels are kept to moderate and uniform diameters. The room should be for the furniture just as much as the furniture for the room.

Of late it has not been so; we have been indulging in the "disproportionately wheeled" type, and the result has been to crowd our rooms, and reduce them to insignificance. Even locomotion in them is often embarra.s.sing, especially when the upholsterer has been allowed _carte blanche_. But, apart from this, there is a sense of repletion in these ma.s.ses of chattel--miscellanies brought together with no subordination to each other, or to the effect of the room as a whole.

Taken in the single piece, our furniture is sometimes not without its merit, but it is rarely exempt from self-a.s.sertion, or, to use a slang term, "fussiness." And an aggregation of "fussinesses" becomes fatiguing. One is betrayed into uncivilised longings for the workhouse, or even the convict's cell, the simplicity of bare boards and tables!

But we must not use our dictum for aggressive purposes merely, faulty as modern systems may be. In the distinction of the two sides of the problem of furnishing--the room for the furniture, and the furniture for the room--there is some historical significance. Under these t.i.tles might be written respectively the first and last chapters in the history of this art--its rise and its decadence.

Furniture in the embryonic state of chests, which held the possessions of early times, and served, as they moved from place to place, for tables, chairs, and wardrobes, may have been in existence while the tents and sheds which accommodated them were of less value. But furnishing began with settled architecture, when the room grew first into importance, and overshadowed its contents. The art of the builder had soared far beyond the ambitions of the furnisher.

Later, the two const.i.tuents of our art came to be produced simultaneously, and under one impulse of design. The room, whether church or hall, had now its specific furniture. In the former this was adapted for ritual, in the latter for feasting; but in both the contents formed in idea an integral part of the interior in which they stood. And while these conditions endured, the art was in its palmy state.

Later, furniture came to be considered apart from its position. It grew fanciful and fortuitous. The problem of fitting it to the room was no problem at all while both sprang from a common conception: it became so when its independent design, at first a foible of luxury, grew to be a necessity of production. As long, however, as architecture remained dominant, and painting and sculpture were its acknowledged va.s.sals, furniture retained its legitimate position and shared in their triumphs.

But when these the elder sisters shook off their allegiance, furniture followed suit. It developed the self-a.s.sertion of which we have spoken, and, in the belief that it could stand alone, divorced itself from that support which was the final cause of its existence. There have been doubtless many slackenings and tightenings of the chain which links the arts of design together; but it is to be noted how with each slackening furniture grew gorgeous and artificial, failed to sympathise with common needs, and sank slowly but surely into feebleness and insipidity.

We had pa.s.sed through some such cycle by the middle of this century.

With the dissolution of old ties the majority of the decorative arts had perished. Painting remained to us, arrogating to herself the role which hitherto the whole company had combined to make successful. In her struggle to fill the giant's robe, she has run unresistingly in the ruts of the age. She has crowded her portable canvases, side by side, into exhibitions and galleries, and claimed the t.i.tle of art for literary rather than aesthetic suggestions. The minor coquetries of craftsmanship, from which once was nourished the burly strength of art, have felt out of place in such ill.u.s.trious company. So we have the forced art of public display, but it has ceased to be the habit in which our common rooms and homely walls could be dressed.

The attendant symptom has been the loss from our houses of all that architectural amalgam, which in former times blended the structure with its contents, the screens and panellings, which, half room, half furniture, cemented the one to the other. The eighteenth century carried on the tradition to a great extent with plinth and dado, cornice and encrusted ceiling; but by the middle of the nineteenth we had our interiors handed over to us by the architect almost completely void of architectural feature. We are asked to take as a subst.i.tute, what is navely called "decoration," two coats of paint, and a veneer of machine-printed wall-papers.

In this progress of obliteration an important factor has been the increasing brevity of our tenures. Three or four times in twenty years the outgoing tenant will make good his dilapidations, and the house-agent will put the premises into tenantable repair--as these things are settled for us by lawyers and surveyors. After a series of such processes, what can remain of internal architecture? Can there be left even a room worth furnishing, in the true sense of the term? The first step to render it so must usually be the obliteration of as much as possible of the maimed and distorted construction, which our leasehold house offers.

What wonder, then, if furniture, beginning again to account herself an art, should have transgressed her limits and invaded the room? Ceilings, walls and floors, chimneypieces, grates, doors and windows, all nowadays come into the hands of the artistic furnisher, and are at the mercy of upholsterers and cabinetmakers to begin with, and of the antiquity-collector to follow. Then we bring in our gardens, and finish off our drawing-room as a mixture of a conservatory and a bric-a-brac shop.

The fashion for archaeological mimicry has been another pitfall. The attempt to bring back art by complete reproductions of old-day furnishings has been much the vogue abroad. The Parisians distinguish many styles and affect to carry them out in every detail. The Americans have copied Paris, and we have done a little ourselves. But the weak element in all this is, that the occupier of these mediaeval or cla.s.sic apartments remains still the nineteenth-century embodiment, which we meet in railway carriage and omnibus. We cannot be cultured Epicureans in a drawing-room of the Roman Empire, and by the opening of a door walk as Flemish Burgomasters into our libraries. The heart of the age will mould its productions irrespective of fashion or archaeology, and such miserable shams fail to reach it.

If we, who live in this century, can at all ourselves appraise the position, its most essential characteristic in its bearing upon art has been the commercial tendency. Thereby an indelible stamp is set upon our furniture. The making of it under the supreme condition of profitable sale has affected it in both its functions. On the side of utility our furniture has been shaped to the uses of the million, not of the individual. Hence its monotonously average character, its failure to become part of ourselves, its lack of personal and local charm. How should a "stock" article possess either?

But the blight has fallen more cruelly on that other function, which is a necessity of human craftsmanship--the effort to express itself and please the eye by the expression. Art being the monopoly of "painting,"

and having nothing to do with such vulgar matters as furniture, commercialism has been able to advance a standard of beauty of its own, with one canon, that of speedy profits. Furniture has become a mere ware in the market of fashion. Bought to-day as the rage, it is discarded to-morrow, and some new fancy purchased. The tradesman has a new margin of profit, but the customer is just where he was. It may be granted that a genuine necessity of sale is the stimulus to which all serious effort in the arts must look for progress, and without which they would become faddism and conceit. But it is a different thing altogether when this pa.s.ses from stimulus into motive--the exclusive motive of profit to the producer. The worth of the article is impaired as much as the well-being of the craftsman, and furniture is degraded to the position of a p.a.w.n in the game of the sweater.

We must, I fear, be content at present to put up with exhibitions and unarchitectural rooms. But while making the best of these conditions, we need not acquiesce in them or maintain their permanence. At any rate we may fight a good fight with commercialism. The evils of heartless and unloving production, under the grind of an unnecessary greed, are patent enough to lead us to reflect that we have after all in these matters a choice. We need not spend our money on that which is not bread. We can go for our furniture to the individual craftsman and not the commercial firm. The penalty for so doing is no longer prohibitive.

In closing our remarks we cannot do better than repeat our initial axiom--the art of furnishing lies with the room as much as with the furniture. The old ways are still the only ways. When we care for art sufficiently to summon her from her state prison-house of exhibitions and galleries, to live again a free life among us in our homes, she will appear as a controlling force, using not only painting and sculpture, but all the decorative arts to shape room and furniture under one purpose of design. Whether we shall then give her the time-honoured t.i.tle of architecture, or call her by another name, is of no moment.

EDWARD S. PRIOR.

OF THE ROOM AND FURNITURE

The transient tenure that most of us have in our dwellings, and the absorbing nature of the struggle that most of us have to make to win the necessary provisions of life, prevent our encouraging the manufacture of well-wrought furniture.

We mean to outgrow our houses--our lease expires after so many years and then we shall want an entirely different cla.s.s of furniture; consequently we purchase articles that have only sufficient life in them to last the brief period of our occupation, and are content to abide by the want of appropriateness or beauty, in the clear intention of some day surrounding ourselves with objects that shall be joys to us for the remainder of our life. Another deterrent condition to making a serious outlay in furniture is the instability of fashion: each decade sees a new style, and the furniture that we have acquired in the exercise of our experienced taste will in all probability be discarded by the impetuous purism of the succeeding generation.

At present we are suffering from such a catholicity of taste as sees good in everything, and has an indifferent and tepid appreciation of all and sundry, especially if consecrated by age.

This is mainly a reaction against the austerity of those moralists who preached the logic of construction, and who required outward proof of the principles on which and by which each piece was designed.

Another cause prejudicial to the growth of modern furniture is the canonisation of old.

That tables and chairs should have lasted one hundred years is indeed proof that they were originally well made: that the conditions of the moment of their make were better than they are now is possible, and such aureole as is their due let us hasten to offer. But, to take advantage of their survival and to increase their number by facsimile reproduction is to paralyse all healthy growth of manufacture.

As an answer to the needs and habits of our ancestors of one hundred years ago--both in construction and design--let them serve us as models showing the att.i.tude of mind in which we should meet the problems of our day--and so far as the needs and habits of the present time are unchanged, as models of form, not to be incorporated with our vernacular, but which we should recognise as successful form, and discover the plastic secrets of its shape.

With this possession we may borrow what forms we will--shapes of the Ind and far Cathay--the whole wide world is open to us--of past imaginations and of the dreams of our own.

But without this master-key the copying is slavish, and the bondage of the task is both cruel and destructive.

Cruel, because mindless, work can be reproduced more rapidly than thoughtful work can be invented, and the rate of production affects the price of other articles of similar kind, so that the one dictates what the other shall receive; and destructive, because it treats the craftsman as a mere machine, whose only standard can be mechanical excellence.

Now, all furniture that has any permanent value has been designed and wrought to meet the ends it had to serve, and the careful elaboration of it gave its maker scope for his pleasure and occasion for his pride.