Part 21 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: Chair, In the Cla.s.sic Style, inlaid with Ivory.
Manufactured for the King of Sardinia by M. G. Capello, Turin. 1851 Exhibition, London.]
Amongst the latter was Monbro, a Frenchman, who established himself in Berners Street, London, and made furniture of an ornamental character in the style of his countrymen, reproducing the older designs of ”Boule” and Marqueterie furniture. The present house of Mellier and Cie. are his successors, Mellier having been in his employ. The late Samson Wertheimer, then in Greek Street, Soho, was steadily making a reputation by the excellence of the metal mountings of his own design and workmans.h.i.+p, which he applied to caskets of French style. Furniture of a decorative character and of excellent quality was also made some forty years ago by Town and Emanuel, of Bond Street, and many of this firm's ”Old French” tables and cabinets were so carefully finished with regard to style and detail, that, with the ”tone” acquired by time since their production, it is not always easy to distinguish them from the models from which they were taken. Toms was a.s.sistant to Town and Emanuel, and afterwards purchased and carried on the business of ”Toms and Lus...o...b..,” a firm well-known as manufacturers of excellent and expensive ”French” furniture, until their retirement from business some ten years ago.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Cabinet of Ebony, in the Renaissance Style. With Carnelions inserted. Litchfield and Radclyffe. 1862 Exhibition.]
Webb, of Old Bond Street, succeeded by Annoot, and subsequently by Radley, was a manufacturer of this cla.s.s of furniture; he employed a considerable number of workmen, and carried on a very successful business.
The name of ”Blake,” too, is one that will be remembered by some of our older readers who were interested in marqueterie furniture of forty years ago. He made an inlaid centre table for the late Duke of Northumberland, from a design by Mr. C. P. Slocornbe, of South Kensington Museum; he also made excellent copies of Louis XIV. furniture.
The next International Exhibition held in London was in the year 1862, and, though its success was somewhat impaired by the great calamity this country sustained in the death of the Prince Consort on 14th December, 1861, and also by the breaking out of the Civil War in the United States of America, the exhibitors had increased from 17,000 in '51 to some 29,000 in '62, the foreign entries being 16,456, as against 6,566.
Exhibitions of a National and International character had also been held in many of the Continental capitals. There was in 1855 a successful one in Paris, which was followed by one still greater in 1867, and, as every one knows, they have been lately of almost annual occurrence in various countries, affording the enterprising manufacturer better and more frequent opportunities of placing his productions before the public, and of teaching both producer and consumer to appreciate and profit by every improvement in taste, and by the greater demand for artistic objects.
The few ill.u.s.trations from these more recent Exhibitions of 1862 and 1867 deserve a pa.s.sing notice. The cabinet of carved ebony with enrichments of carnelian and other richly-colored minerals (ill.u.s.trated on previous page), received a good deal of notice, and was purchased by William, third Earl of Craven, a well-known virtuoso of thirty years ago.
The work of Fourdinois, of Paris, has already been alluded to, and in the 1867 Exhibition his furniture acquired a still higher reputation for good taste and attention to detail. The full page ill.u.s.tration of a cabinet of ebony, with carvings of boxwood, is a remarkably rich piece of work of its kind; the effect is produced by carving the box-wood figures and ornamental scroll work in separate pieces, and then inserting these bodily into the ebony. By this means the more intricate work is able to be more carefully executed, and the close grain and rich tint of Turkey boxwood (perhaps next to ivory the best medium for rendering fine carving) tells out in relief against the ebony of which the body of the cabinet is constructed. This excellent example of modern cabinet work by Fourdinois, was purchased for the South Kensington Museum for 1,200, and no one who has a knowledge of the cost of executing minute carved work in boxwood and ebony will consider the price a very high one.
The house of Fourdinois no longer exists; the names of the foremost makers of French _meubles de luxe_, in Paris, are Buerdeley, Da.s.son, Roux, Sormani, Durand, and Zwiener. Some mention has already been made of Zwiener, as the maker of a famous bureau in the Hertford collection, and a sideboard exhibited by Durand in the '51 Exhibition is amongst the ill.u.s.trations selected as representative of cabinet work at that time.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Cabinet of Ebony with Carvings of Boxwood. Designed and Manufactured by M. Fourdenois, Paris. 1867 Exhibition, Paris. (Purchased by S. Kensington Museum for 1,200.)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Cabinet in Satinwood, With Wedgwood plaques and inlay of various woods in the Adams' style. Designed and Manufactured by Messrs.
Wright & Mansfield, London. 1867 Exhibition, Paris. Purchased by the S.
Kensington Museum.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Ebony And Ivory Cabinet. In The Style of Italian Renaissance by Andrea Picchi, Florence, Exhibited Paris, 1867.
NOTE.--A marked similarity in this design to that of a 17th Century cabinet, ill.u.s.trated in the Italian section of Chapter iii., will be observed.]
The ill.u.s.tration of Wright and Mansfield's satin-wood cabinet, with Wedgewood plaques inserted, and with wreaths and swags of marqueteric inlaid, is in the Adams' style, a cla.s.s of design of which this firm made a specialite. Both Wright and Mansfield had been a.s.sistants at Jackson and Graham's, and after a short term in Great Portland Street, they removed to Bond Street, and carried on a successful business of a high cla.s.s and somewhat exclusive character, until their retirement from business a few years since. This cabinet was exhibited in Paris in 1867, and was purchased by our South Kensington authorities. Perhaps it is not generally known that a grant is made to the Department for the purchase of suitable specimens of furniture and woodwork for the Museum. This expenditure is made with great care and discrimination. It may be observed here that the South Kensington Museum, which was founded in 1851, was at this time playing an important part in the Art education of the country. The literature of the day also contributed many useful works of instruction and reference for the designer of furniture and woodwork.[21]
One noticeable feature of modern design in furniture is the revival of marquetry. Like all mosaic work, to which branch of Industrial Art it properly belongs, this kind of decoration should be quite subordinate to the general design; but with the rage for novelty which seized public attention some forty years ago, it developed into the production of all kinds of fantastic patterns in different veneers. A kind of minute mosaic work in wood, which was called ”Tunbridge Wells work,” became fas.h.i.+onable for small articles. Within the last ten or fifteen years the reproductions of what is termed ”Chippendale,” and also Adam and Sheraton designs in marqueterie furniture, have been manufactured to an enormous extent.
Partly on account of the difficulty in obtaining the richly-marked and figured old mahogany and satin-wood of a hundred years ago, which needed little or no inlay as ornament, and partly to meet the public fancy by covering up bad construction with veneers of marquetry decoration, a great deal more inlay has been given to these reproductions than ever appeared in the original work of the eighteenth century cabinet makers. Simplicity was sacrificed, and veneers, thus used and abused, came to be a term of contempt, implying sham or superficial ornament. d.i.c.kens, in one of his novels, has introduced the ”Veneer” family, thus stamping the term more strongly on the popular imagination.
The method now practised in using marquetry to decorate furniture is very similar to the one explained in the description of ”Boule” furniture given in Chapter VI., except that, instead of sh.e.l.l, the marquetry cutter uses the veneer, which he intends to be the groundwork of his design, and as in some cases these veneers are cut to the thickness of 1/16 of an inch, several layers can be sawn through at once. Sometimes, instead of using so many different kinds of wood, when a very polychromatic effect is required, holly wood and sycamore are stained different colours, and the marquetry thus prepared, is glued on to the body of the furniture, and subsequently prepared, engraved, and polished.
This kind of work is done to a great extent in England, but still more extensively and elaborately in France and Italy, where ivory and bra.s.s, marble, and other materials are also used to enrich the effect. This effect is either satisfactory or the reverse according as the work is well or ill-considered and executed.
It must be obvious, too, that in the production of marquetry the processes are attainable by machinery, which saves labour and cheapens productions of the commoner kinds; this tends to produce a decorative effect which is often inappropriate and superabundant.
Perhaps it is allowable to add here that marquetry, or _marqueterie_, its French equivalent, is the more modern survival of ”Tarsia” work to which allusion has been made in previous chapters. Webster defines the word as ”Work inlaid with pieces of wood, sh.e.l.ls, ivory, and the like,” derived from the French word _marqueter_ to checker and _marque_ (a sign), of German origin. It is distinguished from parquetry (which is derived from ”_pare_,” an enclosure, of which it is a diminutive), and signifies a kind of joinery in geometrical patterns, generally used for flooring. When, however, the marquetry a.s.sumes geometrical patterns (frequently a number of cubes shaded in perspective) the design is often termed in Art catalogues a ”parquetry” design.
In considering the design and manufacture of furniture of the present day, as compared with that of, say, a hundred years ago, there are two or three main factors to be taken into account. Of these the most important is the enormously increased demand, by the multiplication of purchasers, for some cla.s.ses of furniture, which formerly had but a limited sale. This enables machinery to be used to advantage in economising labour, and therefore one finds in the so-called ”Queen Anne” and ”Jacobean” cabinet work of the well furnished house of the present time, rather too prominent evidence of the lathe and the steam plane. Mouldings are machined by the length, then cut into cornices, mitred round panels, or affixed to the edge of a plain slab of wood, giving it the effect of carving. The everlasting spindle, turned rapidly by the lathe, is introduced with wearisome redundance, to ornament the stretcher and the edge of a shelf; the busy fret or band-saw produces fanciful patterns which form a cheap enrichment when applied to a drawer-front, a panel, or a frieze, and carving machines can copy any design which a century ago were the careful and painstaking result of a practised craftsman's skill.
Again, as the manufacture of furniture is now chiefly carried on in large factories, both in England and on the Continent, the sub-division of labour causes the article to pa.s.s through different hands in successive stages, and the wholesale manufacture of furniture by steam has taken the place of the personal supervision by the master's eye of the task of a few men who were in the old days the occupants of his workshop. As a writer on the subject has well said, ”the chisel and the knife are no longer in such cases controlled by the sensitive touch of the human hand.” In connection with this we are reminded of Ruskin's precept that ”the first condition of a work of Art is that it should be conceived and carried out by one person.”
Instead of the carved ornament being the outcome of the artist's educated taste, which places on the article a stamp of individuality--instead of the furniture being, as it was in the seventeenth century in England, and some hundred years earlier in Italy and in France, the craftsman's pride--it is now the result of the rapid multiplication of some pattern which has caught the popular fancy, generally a design in which there is a good deal of decorative effect for a comparatively small price.
The difficulty of altering this unsatisfactory state of things is evident.
On the one side, the manufacturers or the large furnis.h.i.+ng firms have a strong case in their contention that the public will go to the market it considers the best: and when decoration is pitted against simplicity, though the construction which accompanies the former be ever so faulty, the more pretentious article will be selected. When a successful pattern has been produced, and arrangements and sub-contracts have been made for its repet.i.tion in large quant.i.ties, any considerable variation made in the details (even if it be the suppression of ornament) will cause an addition to the cost which those only who understand something of a manufacturer's business can appreciate.