Creators of decorative styles; being a survey of the decorative periods in England from 1600 to 1800, with special reference to the masters of applied art who developed the dominant styles

Front matter

/ DUVEEN BROTHERS

LIBRARY 720 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK

INIGO JONES After the original painting by Van Dyke

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

L The Development of Applied Art in

England 3

Chapter I The Development Of Applied Art In England

LEARNING for its own sake, pure culture and erudition, are not held in as high esteem in America as in some of the European countries. The American mind, as a rule, is utilitarian in type. It desires to know why it learns what it learns, to what use it may put its learning. The average American reader demands some practical raison d'etre for any work which purports to be a study or analysis or investigation in a field that does not obviously touch the manifold interests of his daily life. Hence these introductory remarks.

Of late years Americans have been taking a more general and studious interest in that branch of decorative and applied art which is chiefly exemplified in the decoration and furnishing of their homes. Popular taste has been improving. The American householder has begun to demand something better than the builder's architecture of a generation ago and the ready-made hodge-podge which filled the homes of that period. And in looking for that better thing, we have begun to appreciate the fact that there are things worth knowing about the styles that have stood the test of time, the merits of which have been recognized by those qualified to judge.

The first step in this movement, for it is a movement, was the vogue for so-called American Colonial furniture and its accompaniments which spread over the country a few y^ears ago and which has not yet spent its force. Collecting of the antique became a fad, and manufacturers responded to the demand by the production of more or less accurate adaptations and reproductions.

That vogue served a good end. It started popular taste in the right direction, and we have now begun to look farther and deeper for something still better. Gradually we have been getting better educated. We have begun to question whether even Chippendale is the last word in all that is fine and desirable in furniture style. Some of us have even begun to discard our highly coloured mahogany for the softer walnut, and to-day the shop windows are displaying quite as many adaptations of Jacobean and Queen Anne styles as Colonial or Georgian.

The thing has come upon us rather rapidly, and

Dining table of the plainer Jacobean type. 1650-1675. Metropolitan

Museum of Art

Small table of oak and walnut, Oak gate-leg table, with carved legs

showing the popular spiral and supports. Restoration period,

turning. 1660-1685. Metro- about 1OS5. Metropolitan Museum

politan Museum of Art of Art

DEVELOPMENT OF APPLIED ART IN ENGLAND 5

the time seems to have arrived to give a little more thought to the fundamental truths involved. The furnishing of a home is too important and permanent a matter to be hurried through lightly. We need something more than the hasty advice of a sales clerk. And since the American pocketbook is involved, the average American will not fail to see the value of a sound basis for discrimination.

What is style? What is its significance? What are the distinguishing features of various styles and periods? By what standards shall we judge of excellence? Is all this talk of styles and periods the mere chatter of a pseudo-artistic cult, or does it in some way vitally concern us?

It is not because the average American is greatly interested in so highly specialized a branch of history that the following pages have been written, but in order to give him a comprehensive survey of the subject of style development and the more important and fundamental facts that he needs to know in order to distinguish and appreciate what is going on about him in the realm of home furnishing and decoration.

Style, according to Webster, is a mode of presentation in any of the fine arts. It is the expression of an instinct, a feeling, an appreciation of the beautiful which has changed and developed with the altering tastes of mankind. In the field of the decorative and applied arts this feeling finds its expression in form, colour, and ornamental details, based chiefly on what has gone before, showing improvement or decadence with the variation of popular taste, its direction changed by many influences, but developing naturally and steadily through the action of explanatory causes. To understand this development, one must inquire into the influences which affected it before one can fully comprehend its significance or become familiar with its manifestations.

I shall confine myself to the development of style in England, because therein lies our American heritage. Our importations of style from France and other countries have usually proved to be exotic and transitory; the English styles are the ones that have always found the surest welcome in English-speaking America. Whether we recognize them or not, we are living constantly amid reminders of England's artistic past, and a full appreciation of the styles that we are reviving to-day depends upon a knowledge of that past.

There are leaders of artistic thought in America, particularly in the Middle West, who deride all this harking back to a dead past, who consider all tradition as trammeling, who seek rapid progress. But

DEVELOPMENT OF APPLIED ART IN ENGLAND 7

I do not believe their influence to be firmly grounded or permanent. There have always been men with the itch for novelty, but it has not been their work that has survived, but that of masters who based their creations on established principles, on the experience of their predecessors.

Of architecture I shall speak in passing for the reason that the styles of interiors and their furnishings often followed or were influenced by the changing styles in architecture, or rather, the same influences affected both. They are parallel and cognate arts, and some of the leaders in English style development in all lines were architects.

Now it seems to me that the development of architectural and decorative style through succeeding periods of history becomes more interesting and more easily understood when we turn our attention to the personalities of the leaders of artistic thought, their lives and purposes, their education, ideals, and traditions. Thus may we reincarnate the decorative periods, giving them a human significance instead of classifying them entirely by names of monarchs or dynasties or design types or mere dates.

Yet it is not entirely easy to follow this plan through the history of period decoration in England, for the lives of the masters overlapped or left gaps in the continuity, and some of them were architects, while others were craftsmen, connoisseurs, or designers. Still, a fairly continuous line of artistic descent may be traced from the period of the late Renaissance to the nineteenth century, and the lives of the men involved are not without elements of human interest.

It is not likely that we shall ever go back to the Gothic or early Renaissance periods for material for our modern homes. Those periods, while Classic from one point of view, were in a measure unformed, and their conditions were so different from those of modern life that they hold little of interest for any but the student and the connoisseur.

And our study of personalities must begin at a later date. In the days of the Tudor period or early Renaissance no such artistic leader appeared. Henry VIII was the patron of the Renaissance, largely because of his anti-Papist and hence anti-Gothic sympathies. He brought several artists, architects, and artisans from Italy, including John of Padua; but of John we know little, and his personality was submerged in the composite personality of Henry's court.

During the wonderfully creative period of Elizabeth's reign, when genius in literature, statecraft,

DEVELOPMENT OF APPLIED ART IN ENGLAND 9

and commerce flourished, the art impulse was further quickened, but it found its expression in the work of no single man of power. Elizabethan architecture, furniture, interior decoration, and landscape design are worthy of our study as a starting-point, but not through the personality of a master.

It was not, in fact, until the Jacobean period that the real spirit of the Renaissance — a genuine revival of Classicism — took form in England, and the first great exponent of English style, Inigo Jones, lived and wrought his work. This Renaissance spirit, further developed by Sir Christopher Wren, followed by the architects, craftsmen, and designers of the Georgian era, continued alive in England until the dawn of the last century, and produced its men of genius.

The history of the decorative styles teaches us clearly that every lasting and deserving development has not been a sudden mushroom growth, responding to the demand for novelty, but has been solidly built upon what went before. The Italian Renaissance was but a revival of the ancient Greek and Roman Classic at the hands of men of originality and creative power. If, as Mr. Frank Alvah Parsons and other authorities appear to believe, we are witnessing the birth of a new Renaissance in this twentieth century, it behooves us to become familiar with the work of the worthiest of our predecessors and the styles upon which our modern revivals and development are based.

A study of the lives of those masters of applied art who created and developed the historic styles of England, their artistic creeds, traditions, and training, should form, it seems to me, the soundest basis for a discriminating understanding of the true significance of those styles upon which we are building an art for the beautification of our modern homes.

Beginning, therefore, with Inigo Jones, it is my purpose to consider the lives and personalities of eleven of these leaders of artistic thought in England, tracing, at the same time, the contemporary [development of styles in the cognate arts.

Chapter II

IT IS with Inigo Jones, and not with the unknown artists of the Gothic and Tudor periods, that our present consideration must have its beginning. He was the first English architect whose name stands out above the others, the first to reflect the spirit of the Renaissance in its classic purity, though living after what is commonly known as the period of the Renaissance. He has been called "the English Vetruvius" and "the English Palladio." He was the father of the Classic revival in English architecture, the first to discard Gothic elements entirely, and when his background and traditions are taken into consideration, the magnitude of his achievement becomes apparent. He was an artistic prophet who led a people into new paths of thought and appreciation. For though his own work was that of an architect, his influence was felt throughout the entire field of decorative and industrial art. He was, indeed, a dictator of style during the reign of Charles I.

Before sketching his career in detail, it may be well to glance briefly at the background and traditions to which I have referred.

• Gothic architecture, the only style that received serious consideration, had passed through the perpendicular and florid stage and had become rather confused by the beginning of the sixteenth century, so that architects were at a loss which way to turn for leadership. As has been said, Henry VIII encouraged the adoption of Italian Renaissance ideas, though his influence was as much negative as positive, rather anti-Gothic than pro-Renaissance. Gothic architecture had long been associated with the Roman Catholic Church, and the Protestant Henry was eager for anything worth while that would supplant it. And undoubtedly he did have considerable artistic appreciation and enthusiasm.

It was during Henry's reign, or about 1524, that Holbein settled in England, but his influence on architecture and decoration was not as powerful as that of John of Padua, who brought the Renaissance principles direct from Italy. John arrived in England about 1544.

By the middle of the century the restless, upreaching spirit of the Elizabethan era began to make itself felt in architecture, home furnishings,

Chimneypiece and wall decorations designed by Daniel Marot

State bed designed by Daniel Marot and gardens, as well as in the more active walks of life. It became an age of poetic appreciation and creation, with an increased taste for luxury, comfort, and beauty in living conditions, and this spirit was seeking for a master mind to direct it.

During the reign of Elizabeth, which covered the last half of the sixteenth century, the Gothic traditions persisted, but the spirit of the Renaissance grew ever stronger. More and more attention was paid to the suitable designing of houses and furniture. As early as 1575 strict rules of proportion, lost sight of in the elaboration of Gothic details, had become a principle of architecture, and the Greek orders were occasionally employed. More or less Classic porticoes, cornices, columns, and pilasters were introduced, and a new system of fenestration. Doors, walls, and ceilings were richly paneled in oak, fireplaces were improved and became a decorative feature of the interior, and tapestries and upholstery came into more general use. All of this was paving the way toward the Palladian style of architecture and the work of Inigo Jones.

Andrea Palladio, of Vicenza, Italy, was born in 1518, in the midst of the Italian Renaissance movement. He studied Roman architecture and published a book on the subject in 1570. He died in

1580. To him may be traced the influences which gave direction to the work of Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren, and even to the Adam brothers and our American Mclntire in the eighteenth century. Jones got his inspiration direct from Palladio and was the chief exponent of the Palladian style, which wrought a complete change in English architecture and sounded the knell of Gothic supremacy.

Inigo Jones was born July 15, 1573, in the midst of the Golden Age of Elizabeth. His father was a cloth maker of West Smithfield, London, and Inigo was probably apprenticed at an early age to a joiner. The father died in 1597, leaving no fortune, and the boy had to make his own way in the world.

He early showed an aptitude for drawing and design and later for landscape painting. It is not known where or how he acquired his technique, but his work attracted the attention of the Earl of Pembroke, who sent him to Italy to study landscape painting. While at Venice he became interested in architecture and he visited Rome, where the ruins fascinated him.

In 1604 King Christianus of Denmark sent for him and it is said that he designed the Danish palaces of Rosenborg and Fredericksborg, though he appears to have remained in Denmark less than a year. He then accompanied Anne of Denmark to the English Court, where he became the protege of the Queen and of Prince Henry.

In 1605 King James gave a court masque — Ben Jonson's 44 The Masque of Blackness." This was the poet's first royal employment, and Jones was appointed to design the scenery and costumes and to stage the masque. In the course of the next few years he served in a similar capacity in London and Oxford. In 1610 he became a sort of stage manager for the Queen and her court at Whitehall and was appointed Surveyor of the Works to the Prince of Wales.

Upon the death of Prince Henry in 1613, Jones went again to Italy, where he made a special study of the works of Palladio. He returned to England in 1615 under the patronage of the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke and was made Surveyor of the Works to the King. His duties included the repairing of the royal palaces, the purchasing of art objects, and the production of masques, though this last activity ceased when he quarreled with Jonson.

One of his first commissions was the preparation of designs for the remodeling of Westminster, but these were never carried out, though he did superintend the alterations in the Star Chamber.

On January 12, 1619, the Banqueting House at Whitehall burned down and Jones was ordered to rebuild it. He rose to the emergency, and by June first the new plans had been approved, the ground was cleared, and the corner stone laid. The new building, in the Palladian style, was completed in 1622.

In 1620 he was commissioned to make a study of the mysterious ruins at Stonehenge, which he decided had been a temple of the Tuscan order, built by the Romans and consecrated to the worship of the god Caelus. In this theory he had but few followers even then.

In 1618 he commenced work on the chapel at Lincoln's Inn, which was completed in 1623. It was a well proportioned structure, bastard Gothic in style. The Doric pilasters in the crypt illustrate the architect's fondness for everything Roman, and yet the edifice was truer to Gothic traditions than any other of that day.

Other works of this period were the Chapel for the Infanta at Somerset House in the Strand, the water gate to the town house of the Duke of Buckingham, and the Queen's House at Greenwich, be-

Six chairs designed by Daniel Marot

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- r: c gun for Anne, queen of James I, and completed in 1635 for Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I. Then he started on the restoration of St. Paul's, completing the plans and the west portico.

Jones continued in office under Charles I and became even more powerful as an arbiter of taste. He built the theatre of the Hall of Barber-Surgeons in Monkwell Street, London; Somerset House, York House, and Ashburnham House, Westminster, and designed the western side of Lincoln's Inn Fields. Finally he planned the square or piazza of Covent Garden for the Earl of Bedford, and a chapel for the square, which was begun in 1631 and finished in 1638.

This was his last great work, for though he lived fourteen years longer and made designs for both palaces and private residences, the Civil War practically put an end to building, and most of his greatest tasks were never completed. The fall of royalty was a severe blow to him, and he died, an unhappy man, on June 21, 1652.

Inigo Jones took up his residence at Scotland Yard in 1615, and lived there quietly the rest of his life. He was a Roman Catholic and he never married. He was never in perfect health, which perhaps accounts for his occasional tendency to quarrel and for the despondency of his latter years.

Besides houses, he designed cabinets, grottoes, gates, garden fronts, church towers, bridges, and interiors. In his portfolio were numerous designs for ceilings, walls, wainscot panels and moldings, wall fountains, etc.

Largely on account of the war he left no school of design, though one loyal follower, John Webb, kept the Palladian traditions alive until Sir Christopher Wren took up the work where Jones had left it.

The Palladian style of Inigo Jones was a form of Italian Renaissance based on the Roman and Greek, as opposed to the Gothic. He wrought the emancipation of English ideas from Gothic traditions and turned the attention of architects and designers to the fundamental principles of proportion. His style was perhaps weighed down too much by Roman heaviness, especially his mantels and doors, but he led the way to better things. He introduced Greek columns, pediments, and capitals, and his interiors abounded in fluted columns and pilasters and the lavish use of oak.

Inigo Jones was undoubtedly born with an eye for proportion, as, I think, was Stanford White, and that means genius in architecture. He was more careful than any of his predecessors of measured working drawings, and for the first time everything, including details, was drawn to scale.

Inigo Jones was a pioneer in English decorative art, but the work of those who followed him was required to complete the artistic revolution which he began.

In furniture design it is not altogether easy to trace the influence of Inigo Jones, for there was no equivalent to the Palladian style in Jacobean furniture. Still, there was a constant improvement in taste in all the artistic development of the period, with a cordial reception of foreign influences, and Jones undoubtedly was largely responsible for this.

The tapestry manufactory at Mortlake, founded in 1619 in imitation of the Gobelin works in France, was one of the most important decorative enterprises of the early Jacobean period, and the general demand was for better home furnishings. Sir Henry Wotton, British ambassador to Venice in 1604, sent home some specimens of Italian wood carving and published his "Elements of Architecture." Sir Walter Raleigh sent for Flemish workmen to carve an elaborate oak chimneypiece in Youghal, Ireland. These and similar instances were indications of a popular trend toward something different and better. Jacobean furniture design and architecture were

Sir Christopher Wren, after the portrait painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Owned by the Royal Society carved, and cupboards, the ancestors of the modern sideboard.

The term Jacobean or Stuart is rather loosely given to the greater part of the century, from the beginning of the reign of James I in 1603 to the end of James IPs reign in 1689. But since this interval included two distinct periods of style development, it seems logical to divide it into the Jacobean period, comprising the reigns of James I and Charles I (1603-1649), and the Restoration period, including the reigns of Charles II and James II (1660-1689), with the unproductive Commonwealth or Cromwellian period intervening between the two.

Gradually furniture design emerged from the crudities and limitations of the Gothic, though retaining some of the Gothic traditions of sturdiness and virility. Eventually the Jacobean period saw the triumph of those foreign influences which began to be felt as early as the reign of Henry VIII.

At first, under James I, the styles continued in a transition state, Tudor in feeling, reflecting the influence of the preceding century. Renaissance details were added, producing furniture rather more formal and less original. Designs became flatter and the treatment of floral ornament more stiff and conventional, the ornaments being often applied.

The Tudor style died hard, but at length the Renaissance influence became dominant. Growing political and commercial intercourse with the Low Countries had its effect, Dutch and Flemish arts were introduced, and also the styles of France under Louis XIII and Louis XIV.

Most of the Jacobean furniture was rectangular in form and heavily underbraced, the legs of chairs and tables perpendicular, chair backs straight and seats flat. But though the forms were severe, the decoration was noteworthy, chiefly flat surface ornament and carving in low relief. The most prominent details were strap-work; half balusters, spindles, and drops; a running pattern of contiguous or overlapping circles or figure eights; semi-circles filled with petals; carved jewels and bosses; geometrical arrangements of panels, such as the lozenge within a square or rectangle; the rounded arch, and more or less elaborate double scrolls. Mouldings and panels were much employed. The spiral form was often used in chair legs, cupboards, and chests of drawers, not turned on a lathe, but laboriously carved out by hand. A favourite ornament for table legs, posts of bedsteads, and the supports of cupboards and cabinets, was the swelling bulb, usually carved, a survival of the Tudor period.

As the period progressed, the strap-work became more and more intricate, and some of the finer pieces of furniture were inlaid with holly and other light woods. Carved figures were gradually supplanted by turned supports and uprights, and flat surfaces were more completely covered with geometrical panels and decorated with applied ornament in real or imitation ebony.

Oak was the universal furniture material of the Jacobean period, but toward the end exotic woods began to be imported into England and the Low Countries. Where marquetry had hitherto been chiefly in ebony and ivory, Brazilian kingwood and other highly coloured woods began to be used for inlay, and furniture was made occasionally in walnut, cedar, pear wood, etc., as well as in oak.

The most prominent pieces of furniture of the period were chairs, tables, chests, and cupboards, heavy in form and carpenter-made, but beautifully carved in sharp, low relief on their broad surfaces.

Chairs were less common at first than joint-stools, forms, and benches. The chairs were of the wainscot type, more or less carved, or else plain turned chairs with three or four legs. Then more elaborate turning was introduced and lighter forms of the wainscot chair. One type had no solid panel in the back, but two or three open arches. During the reign of Charles I twisted, spiral, and turned work became more common on the chairs, indicating Dutch influence, and a French chair was introduced, lighter than the wainscot, with turned legs and back and seat of leather or embroidered fabric.

The typical table was a heavy, rectangular affair of oak, though not so cumbersome as the Elizabethan table, with bulb-turned supports and often rails carved in arabesques or lunette patterns. Less common was a lighter, smaller table, wTith a single hinged leaf and a swinging leg to support it — the forerunner of the gate-leg table which was not fully developed until the period of the Restoration.

Oak chests and cupboards were common, the latter, prototype of the sideboard, being perhaps the most truly typical piece of furniture of the period. The earlier ones were chest-like, but they soon took the form of a raised dresser. Two types were developed—the press cupboard and the court cupboard. The former was closed in front, and the latter open below — a sort of chest on spiral, turned, or carved supports. Most of these cupboards were richly carved and paneled. Toward the close of the period the chest of drawers appeared.

Such, then, was the furniture of the period of Inigo Jones — still heavy in form, but showing a vitality in style that we have lately begun to appreciate, and leading up to the more elegant creations of the period of the Restoration.

CHAPTER III DANIEL MAROT {Circa 1661-1720)

WHILE Sir Christopher Wren was the immediate successor of Inigo Jones, and the mantle of the master of English architecture fell upon him, his ripest work was not done until the reign of Queen Anne, and meanwhile the period of the Restoration and the Dutch invasion had added their part to the development of English style. And since the Anglo-Dutch period had its own man of genius, a contemporary of Wren and Gibbons, it seems logical to introduce him at this stage in our history, though he was not an Englishman, nor, strictly speaking, in the direct line of English artistic succession. I refer to that remarkable French designer, Daniel Marot.

Marot himself produced less effect, perhaps, on English styles than did some of the other masters whom we shall discuss, though a clever designer of notable work; he was rather the most prominent figure in a period of style development which had a profound influence on subsequent periods. He typified the swing of British taste away from provincialism and toward greater luxury and ornateness.

As Inigo Jones was rounding out an honourable career, the revolution took place which resulted in the establishment of the Commonwealth under Cromwell. For ten years artistic development in England was at a standstill. We sometimes hear of the Cromwellian style, but it was rather an austere lack of style. The period of the Commonwealth was a passing phase of restriction.

With the accession of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, a decided reaction took place. The traditions of both the Jacobean period and the Cromwellian era were largely forgotten so far as furniture and decoration were concerned, though in architecture Wren soon took up the work of the Palladians where Jones left off. Levity and gaiety became a marked characteristic of the life of the English court, and this was reflected in the homes of the people. Walnut replaced English oak as the popular furniture wood, and a much greater ornateness and freedom of line became the rule in furniture design, with much carved scroll work, luxurious upholstery, and the increasing popularity of inlay.

The interregnum of the Commonwealth was barren of artistic production. A severe, undecorative type of furniture, including a development of the wainscot chair with leather seat and back, was in favour with the Roundheads, and has been undeservedly dignified with the name of Cromwellian style.

With the return of Charles II to the throne in 1660, a reaction became immediately evident, and a taste for greater comfort, refinement of ornament, and elegance of form. Louis XIV was King of 1 France from 1643 to 1715, covering the reigns of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, and Anne. : Charles II brought back with him the manners and tastes of France, Dutch and French importations : became the vogue, and the Louis XIV influence was dominant in England for years. Dutch and Flemish workmen were introduced and the Continental spirit prevailed.

In the form and ornament of furniture of the period we can trace the French influence, with a tendency toward lighter, more graceful effects. The architectural note in furniture disappeared almost entirely. Italian, Spanish, and Flemish details are to be discovered in the English style.

Turned work and spirals were used on chair and table legs. A higher relief ornament of Baroque curves, twisted and reversed, supplanted the straight

The west prospect of St. Paul's Cathedral as designed by Wren. Begun in 1672, finished in 1 710. From an old print

Wall panels, door, and chimneypiece from a mansion of the period of Sir Christopher Wren, with carving showing the influence of Grinling Gibbons. Now in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art lines, simple curves, and low relief ornament of the Jacobean period. Inlay was indulged in more freely, and pierced carving and cut work of scrolls and double scrolls, etc., on the backs, legs, and underbraces of chairs. The tulip and other foreign design details appeared in the carving, and a peculiar hooklike Flemish double scroll on the legs of chairs and tables, the forerunner of the cabriole leg.