Needlework As Art Part 10

The phases of the naturalistic patterns are constantly recurring. Art is always tending to realism, in the laudable effort to reach the motive without the shackles of rules. Each phase has fallen a prey to symbolism, to conventionalism, or to mannerism, which last symptom marks the decline and fall of art. We shall find these phases everywhere in the design of patterns.

Naturalism has always striven, by simple repet.i.tion, to reduce to patterns the forms of flowers, fruits, animals, birds, insects, reptiles, and other natural objects.

In flower patterns the simplest forms by repet.i.tion make sometimes the richest patterns, and the most effective. (Plate 11, Nos. 1 and 2.)

It is remarkable that one very beautiful cla.s.s of natural objects is rarely employed in ancient decoration[98]--sh.e.l.ls and corals. The barbarous tribes of the West Coast of Africa alone seem to have appreciated their forms, and added them to their small repertory of naturalistic patterns. They do not appear in any European or Asiatic textiles till the seventeenth century, when sh.e.l.ls were much used in the decorations of the reigns of Queen Anne and Louis Quatorze.

The first change from naturalism into the conventional was through symbolism, and belonged to the time when unwritten thought was first recorded by pictured signs, which then ceased to be merely decoration.

We find that the naturalism of the earliest Egyptians and Asiatics was soon entirely absorbed by the effort to express some hidden meaning or mystery, and then to fit the representation to a special place and purpose, and to restore it, as it were, to decorative art.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Pl. 11.

1. Persian Flower Border.

2. Egyptian Border, composed of Head-dress of the G.o.d Nile (Wilkinson's "Ancient Egyptians").

3. a.s.syrian.

4. a.s.syrian.]

The lotus and the patterns founded on its forms, and the many emblematic meanings attached to them, are notable examples of these trans.m.u.tations in style and intention, and of the value given to their intention and use in Egypt and India, where each development was immediately crystallized into a recognized pattern, and given its place and language. It received its "_mot d'ordre_," and continued to act upon it long after the meaning was forgotten or out of date.

The rolling pattern which had so long represented only the "wave," was given to the really straight stem of the lotus, and its blossom, subst.i.tuted for the wave's crest, now filled many a frieze in Indian temple architecture; whereas the lotus stems in Egypt were still bound in sheaves to form columns, and the flowers, buds, and leaves spread and blossomed into capitals. Here we have symbolism and conventionalized naturalism, all combined, showing how their principles, though quite distinct, can mix and unite. The conventional form often superseded and effaced the naturalistic, and became the sign of an idea, or the hieroglyphic picture of a thing; immovable and unalterable in Egypt, where every effort was made to secure eternity on earth, but continually returning to naturalism in India, where the Aryan tendency, with the a.s.sistance of the "Code of Manu," always recurred to the restoration of the ancient naturalistic motive.

In the India Museum we may see the "wave" motive converted into a lotus pattern by rolling the long stems, and filling up the s.p.a.ces between with the full-faced blossom. Sometimes the pattern is started by the figure of an elephant, from whose mouth the stem of the flower of the sun proceeds. This occurs so often that it must originally have had a meaning. Sometimes the sacred convolvulus takes the place of the lotus. (Plate 12.)

On an Egyptian mural painting are seen parties of men snaring ducks among papyrus and lotus plants. These are entirely conventional, and are, in fact, a sort of recognized hieroglyphic representing the idea of a lotus.[99]

The lotus was the accepted emblem of the sun, and reduced to a many-leaved radiating pattern may be found as an architectural ornament on the outside of the Buddhist "topes," of which the models are on the staircase of the British Museum.[100] (Plate 13.)

We have Sir G. Birdwood's authority for believing that, though the actual lotus was a native of India, and carried thence to Egypt, its decorative use as a pattern was Egyptian, and so returned to India.

Both accepted it as their "sunflower."[101]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Pl. 12.

1. Indian Rolling Lotus Pattern.

2, 3. Indian Lotus Patterns.

4, 5. Egyptian Lotus Patterns.

6. Sacred Convolvulus. Indian (seventeenth century).]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Pl. 13.

1, 2. Indian Designs of a.s.syrian Daisy and Egyptian Lotus.

3. Vitruvian Scroll. Vignola. Architecture.]

Can it be our Aryan descent which induces in us the earnest adoration, in our art of to-day, of our northern prototype of the sun's emblem? I fear that we must acknowledge that our aesthetic worship of our sunflowers is somewhat false and affected. aestheticism is not art.

Sunflowers, painted or embroidered as decoration, do not "take" if they are ordered and ranged, and reduced to a pattern like those of Egypt. They must be naturalistic, and, if possible, remind us of a disorderly cottage garden; whereas in India they were adapted from nature on fixed principles, which immediately reduced them to the conventional.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sunflower pattern, R. S. A. N.

XIX. Century]

I give an ill.u.s.tration of a Gothic sunflower resembling a transfigured rose; and another of an ordered naturalistic sunflower pattern, from a design of the Royal School of Art Needlework. (Plate 14.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 9.

Gothic Sunflower. From Christ's College Chapel, Cambridge.]

I have given this account of the patterns founded on the lotus, as we can almost from this distance of time take a bird's-eye view of its rise in naturalism, its spread, dispersion, and its crystallization into conventional forms; also we can trace how the lotus patterns of Indian art have resulted, when accepted in Europe, in nothing but the rolling wave, carrying flower forms which no longer represent a lotus; and how the lotus bud and flower pattern has become in time the cla.s.sical "egg and tongue;" which, however, may have resulted also from a combination of other motives.

Representations of animal forms are sometimes very remarkable in phases of naturalism. The few remains of Celtic art that have survived are entirely animal, or very nearly so. In their stone, gold, silver, and bronze work, and in illuminated MSS., we meet with only animal forms; never a flower or a leaf.

Besides the Indo-Chinese patterns in Celtic art, which suggest the Chinese lattice-work (so strongly insisted on by Semper as a constant motive), we also find in all their decorations compartments containing involved patterns of cords or strings knitted or plaited, suggesting the entrails of animals, which by these hunting people were consulted as being mysteriously prophetic of approaching events, especially success or failure in the chase, and impending warlike raids.[102]

There is no other way of accounting for these designs, which are peculiar to the race, unless we believe they always represent snakes.

(Pl. 15.)

In England much that was characteristic of the style was lost as soon as the Saxons drove out the Celts, who carried it to Ireland, as may be seen in the Book of Kells, and the carving of the Harp of Tara, and the Celtic jewels in the Irish museums; but the interlacing patterns survived throughout Anglo-Saxon art, and were marvellously ingenious and beautiful; witness the Durham Book of St. Cuthbert.

We have no Celtic textiles remaining to us, unless some embroidery in the Marien-Kirche collection at Dantzic may be of that style and time.

This is suggested by its altogether Indo-Chinese and very barbarous character;[103] and one of the coronation mantles in Bock's "Kleinodien" is Runic in its peculiar serpent design.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Illumination from the Lindisfarne Gospels, about A.D.

700]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Pl. 16.

Demeter. From a Greek Vase in the British Museum.]

"Judging from their illuminated MSS.," it is said, "the elements borrowed from textile art by the Celts are plaits, bows, zigzags, knots, geometrical figures in various symmetrically developed combinations, crosses, whorls, and lattice-work; next, those taken from metal work, such as spirals and nail-heads let into borders; thirdly, simple or composite zoomorphic forms, such as bodies of snakes, birds'

heads on long necks, lizards, dogs, dragons, and the like."[104] They well understood how to make a pattern by the repet.i.tion of objects of any cla.s.s.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Pl. 17.

1. Embroidery on a Greek Mantle, third century B.C., from the Tomb of the Seven Brothers, Crimea.

2. Egyptian Painted and Embroidered Linen. The cone, the bead, the daisy, the wave, the lotus under water, are all shown on this fragment.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Pl. 18.

EGYPTIAN TAPESTRY.

1. Woven and embroidered on a Sleeve. 2. Woven and embroidered. 3.

Painted and embroidered.]

Representations of human figures in embroideries probably originated in hangings for the wall; but have been treated as decorative forms, both by the Indians and the Greeks, for wearing apparel. The peplos of Minerva was bordered with fighting G.o.ds and giants, and the Empress Theodora's dress in the Ravenna mosaic repeats exactly the same motive. (See Fig. 4, and Pl. 6.)

There are two other examples of such Greek patterns. The mantle of Demeter on a Greek vase in the British Museum, of the best period (Pl.

16), is embroidered with flying genii and victorious chariots; and the embroidered mantle lately found in a Crimean tomb, is of precisely the same style of design, and the one ill.u.s.trates the other. These instances are so exceptional, that it is curious that here, as in the case of the peplos, in each case there should happen to be a duplicate. (Plates 16 and 17, No. 1.)

In Babylonian, a.s.syrian, and Chaldean art we constantly find animal forms in patterns. The lion and the hare, birds and insects, are the commonest; and there are some instances of human figures reduced to a pattern in these sculptured representations of textiles. (Plate 2.)

There are curiously woven little human figures finished with the needle on the sleeve of an Egyptian dress in the British Museum, from Saccarah (Pl. 18), and, of course, when such a design is small, it ceases to be very objectionable. On the whole, however, naturalistic designs for embroideries are more safely confined to floral decorations, excepting always flat tapestries for walls, which, representing pictures, may be as naturalistic as their purpose and style will admit.

Animal forms are often reduced to patterns by repet.i.tion in Indian and Persian embroidery.[105] The drawing is naturalistic, but the colouring is fanciful. We may see any day, on Persian rugs, scarlet lions pursuing and capturing blue or yellow hares. The flatness and want of all shadows tends to the conventional. Lions, bulls, cats, beetles, and serpents abound especially in Egyptian design; insects, reptiles, and fish in Asiatic patterns, where animals are sometimes made to walk in pairs, with their heads and tails twisted into a pattern.

Though landscapes are so rarely worked that the subject is, perhaps, hardly worthy of notice, yet such mistaken specimens of ingenuity have occurred. An altar frontal was exhibited at Zurich, in 1883, containing some really exquisitely worked landscapes, which were quite out of place, both as art and as decoration, for an ecclesiastical purpose. This was of the beginning of the last century.[106]

While we appreciate and should take advantage of our national tendency to naturalistic design, we must beware of looking on fixed rules as bonds which cramp our liberty, and of thinking that nature should be our only guide to an otherwise una.s.sisted and unfettered inspiration.

Without the wholesome checks of experience and educated taste, and the knowledge which teaches us what to avoid, as well as what to imitate, founded on the successes and failures of others, we fall into weak imitations of natural objects.

Mr. Redgrave points out how unpleasant and jarring to our sense of what is appropriate, and therefore how offensive to good taste and common sense, it is to tread on a carpet of water-lilies swimming in blue pools, or on fruits and flowers heaped up and casting shadows probably towards the light.[107] Woollen lions and tigers, as large as life, basking before the fire in a wreath of roses, are alarming rather than agreeable, and are of the nature of a practical joke in art. It is the search for novelty in naturalism that leads to such astonishing compositions; and these, being successively rejected in the heart of our civilization and culture, are drifted away to vulgarize our colonies, or to be sold cheap to furnish Continental hotels, and make the English traveller blush for his home manufactures.