Part 5 (1/2)

Veneers are both saw and knife cut; the saastes about as e from 8 to 15 to the inch The French saw-cut their veneers thinner than the English do

The woods in every-day use at the present day are white holly, box, pear (in various shades), and holly (dyed all colours); while the veneer merchants sometimes supply also planetree, sycamore, chestnut, Brazilwood, yellow fustic, barwood, tulipwood, kingwood, East and West India satinwood, rosewood, ebony, ash, harewood, Indian purplewood, hornbeaewood ht

Dye woods used for ua, red sanders, sapan, ebony, fustic (a species of mulberry), Zante (a species of suascar, at least theyexcursus on furniture manufacture in his book on the Paris Exhibition of 1867, in which he gives further details of ancient manufacture and its modern imitation ”I know a factory,” he says, ”where the tortoiseshell is false, the mother-of-pearl false, the ivory holly wood; the brass is the only real thing, because science applied to industry has not yet found out how to imitate it When Boulle employed wood in his work it was ebony--they have abandoned that for blackened pear wood, under the pretext that ebony is a hard, close hich twists, splits, and cracks, takes glue badly, and refuses varnish So that they call a man who never uses ebony 'ebeniste' They did not trouble about these things in the time of Louis XIV They never varnished their furniture, so it did not matter that ebony would not take varnish There are two sorts of tortoiseshell, that of the Antilles, often bad and scaly, but good enough for common work, because it is thin and equal in thickness, and a little carives it a not unpleasant red tint The Indian tortoiseshell is thick and opaque and unequal, de It can only be used for expensive work, and takes easily a black preparation which ht to ood shell was often treated with carround it loses half its beauty and value

”In ht couples of shell and ether, whereas tas the number in the fine period This saves money A new Boulle bed, secretary, or chest of drawers should cost 15 to 20,000 francs You et one for 2000 made of rubbish An honest chest of draith tolerable elatine tortoiseshell and brass or zinc of the future 100 is the price The e'

in preparation for marquetry or Boulle work is as follows:--A thicker or thinner sheet of Italian poplar is placed between two sheets of oak with the grain the other way, then on the external sheet of oak is placed the wood intended to be seen, also with the grain the other way, the whole of convenient thickness, and glued with the best glue Good glue is the nurse of the wood, say the ainst each other neutralise all bad effects, and the result is very good The external covering is usually either any, American walnut, or violet wood (a sort of cedar) Sometimes it is ebony, or perhaps a collection of small pieces of wood, such as acacia, which are called by all sorts of pretty naood 'plaque' that they still make cupboards at 1000 francs, beds at 600 francs, and bureaus at 800 francs, which are the success and the pride of Parisian joinery” The rounds, orange and lemon for pale yellow, carob for dark red, jujube tree for rose colour, holly for white, and charred fig for black; arbutus served for dark flesh, and suht

It is advisable after the ether to reduce the surface to a level and do soh it is not necessary to carry the process as far as is often done by the cheap furniturebut wood has been used, the surface should be reduced to a level with a toothing plane and scraped with a joiner's scraper, taking care to apply it obliquely to the joints as far as possible, so as to avoid digging down and so failing in the object aimed at If done very well and carefully it sos, but it is lass-paper on a flat piece of cork, but the dust must not be allowed to collect into hard lumps upon it, as these lumps would scratch the surface Holtzapffel says that when metal, ivory, pearl, shell, or tortoiseshell are mixed with the wood the surfacewith a very smooth one, after which the scraper should be used if possible and followed by glass or ely When ood _sand_ paper may also be used, but all paper should have very little ”cut,” should be applied dry, and allowed to becoed, so as to act principally as a hard dry rubber or burnisher If the polishi+ng is at all in excess the ill get rubbed or worn down below the metal The fine finish required when tortoiseshell andwith blocks of charcoal used endith oil and the finest rotten-stone powder,oil instead of water Wet polishi+ng should not be used for inlaid works; the wateris likely to warp the woods and rain of the wood is alht woods are al powders and fluid To avoid this modern marquetry is often covered with varnish applied with friction like French polish, or laid on in several coats with a brush and polished off with pu first levelled with a file or scraper and slass-paper

FOOTNOTES:

[3] The panel illustrated froe specimen of this kind, but not quite a masterpiece

THE LIMITATIONS AND CAPABILITIES OF THE ART

The process described, by which the early works in intarsia were produced, was slow and tedious; and, as ht be won by its exercise, the winning of fortune was a very different thing Domenico di Nicol, who made the stalls in the chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, and was thence called ”del Coro,” or ”dei Cori,” a name which descended to his children in place of their proper name of Spinelli, is an example in point The petitions to the priors already referred to, printed in Milanesi's Documenti per la Storia dell' Arte Senese, sho little a man of talent, as constantly ereat reputation in his art, could do to provide for his old age; and many returns of both painters, sculptors, and orkers, made for the purposes of taxation and printed in the sa town like Siena, which prided itself on its artistic reputation, it was often most difficult for the crafts[4] It is true that there were thirty-four workshops for wood carving and intarsia in Florence at one tinificent), from which one may conclude that work of a certain sort was plentiful and lucrative, and panels of intarsia were certainly sometimes exported, but it may be observed that all the most celebrated intarsiatori practised soenerally abandoned intarsia sooner or later; the exceptions being those who belonged to the Olivetan and Dominican orders, and therefore had no anxiety about their living Of these craftsmen the most celebrated were Fra Giovanni da Verona and Fra Daamo, whose works were so elaborate and so finely executed as to excite the suspicion that they were painted with the brush, though supposed to be executed ood and the chisel The anecdote of the Emperor Charles V's trial of Fra Dana, attests the wonderful quality of the work, and its success in attaining a doubtful ai himself at work shows that it was not uncommon for such panels to be supposed to be the work of the brush The designs from which the intarsia was executed were often furnished by painters of repute, and pictures or portions of pictures were copied, a proceeding which Fra Giovanni's discovery of stains and washes of different kinds made easier, until the proper limits of the art were far overpassed, and its decorative quality quite lost sight of in the attempt to rival a form of art the requirements of which were quite different The beautiful arabesques, which the designers of the early Renaissance poured forth with exhaustless fertility, show the capabilities of the process for decorating flat surfaces, and the perspectives of cupboards and buildings were oftenthe limits imposed by the material

The question of the limits within which the craftsman's effort should be confined in any form of art craftsmanshi+p is a thorny one, for the attempt to overstep those limits has always had attractions for the craftshs for fresh fields to conquer, knowing better than the outsider what are the difficulties which he has overcome successfully in any piece of work froh often with disastrous results when the arded fron and purity of taste It has beenor shading of the pieces of wood used in foritiitireat addition to the resources of the inlayer was made by the discoveries of Fra Giovanni, and it seems unreasonable to refuse to make any use of the effect The earliest work, it is true, depends ether disdain lines within the main outline, and the abandonraver or saw, so reduces the possibilities of choice of subject as to restrict the designer to a sireat deal erain; soestive skies made in thisthe texture of much veined and coloured ure enters into the design these expedients are felt to be insufficient and inexpressive, and inner lines have perforce to be introduced The opposite extreme is such work as the panels by the brothers Caniana in the Colleoni Chapel at Bergaures recall the designs of the Caracci, and the technique of the shading reradation of the colours take away all i that of a coloured engraving Here it is quite evident that the desire to imitate pictorial qualities has led the craftsman far away from what should have been his aim, viz, to display the qualities of the e, consistently with the position and purpose of his work in it Not that perfection of workh it is only occasionally that one is able to make use of, or indeed produce it But the aesthetic sense demands that consideration for material and purpose in every production which the joy and pride of the craftsiving Notwithstanding the beauty of much of the marquetry of the periods of Louis XIV and Louis XV, one often feels that design has been put to one side in the endeavour to gain a realistic effect, and the same defect may be traced more clearly in the clumsier Dutch and German productions Even in the Italian work of an earlier date every now and then the sah the excellent taste of the nation at that period prevented the Italians froenerally feels the wood even in their eneral way that the more colours are used the less likelihood is there of the effect being quite satisfactory, and that any light and shade introduced should be of the siain a certain suggestion of roundness is quite admissible, but the expedient should be used with discretion, lavish e to heaviness of effect and aIf ivory or reatest care is necessary to prevent then, for neither these two materials nor mother-of-pearl marry quite with the tone of the wood; and this inequality is likely to increase with age, as the wood becomes richer and mellower in colour Such materials should be so used that the points where they occur may form a pattern in then, so that the effectof the less pro then is ruined by the uncalculated prominence and inequality of these materials here and there The Dutch soraving broke up the hard glitter of the led with brass wire and nails or studs driven into the surface of the wood The two materials appear to be quite harmonious, and small articles decorated in this manner are effective and satisfactory The Italian use of ivory for the decoration of ammon boards, and other small objects is almost always successful, the proportion betood and ivory being well judged, and the for

[Illustration: _To face page 122_

Plate 53--_Panel froano, Verona_]

The ly clever and beautiful in its use of various woods, errs by want of consideration of the surface to be decorated, the subjects flowing over the surfaces and overflowing the proper boundaries very often; and also sins in using htly different tones and textures, which will almost certainly lose their reciprocal relation in the course of time, and thereby their decorative effect The ancient intarsias were made of a small number of different woods, and the effect was kept simple; pear, white poplar, oak, walnut, and holly alen's work, in which he used a larger nun trees which Dutch coing and fading I would advise the n woods now in the market, and content himself with si rather to beauty of design to give distinction to his work than to variety of colour and startling effects of contrast

[Illustration: Plate 54--_Panel froe 126_]

It is the fashi+on at the present day to exhort the designer to found his design upon the study of nature, which is right enough if acco for style Inof natural fore from the examples which one sees around one, without selection either of subject or form Now it is obvious that it is sometimes the beauty of form in natural objects which attracts the eye, and soeness of colours, either in their combination or from the unusual tint And while the former quality fits the object for translation into ornament, by means of simplification and repetition, the latter ispoint for the production of so quite different than a factor in a directly-derived composition Certain forms of flowers and leaves are also suitable for ornament expressed in a certain way, and when this harmony occurs the representation of nature is satisfactory as ornament; but the reverse is very often shown to be the case in work of a n is based on the dictu of natural for of natural for and balancing of line and mass, and the adaptation of means to ends which produce satisfactory decoration, and in the best Italian intarsias founded upon freely-growing, natural plants this is well shown The observation of natural growth shown in illustrations Nos 53, 54, and 55 is considerable, but the panels are not so beautiful because the bay, the pink, or the lily are so well rendered, but because the pattern of waving lines is so well fitted to the space it has to fill, and the shapes of the silhouettes are so expressive In the later French marquetry we often find an equal or al the natural forn to the material; but the Italian work has a fineness of style shown in a grace of arrange the ornament to the space to be filled which is unsurpassable

Certain remarks made by Mr Stephen Webb, in a paper read to the Society of Arts on April 28, 1899, as to the qualities which the designer or crafts intarsia, are worth reproducing here as the sayings of a man who himself has done much beautiful work of the kind ”Tone harree, the sense of values, he must certainly cultivate He must be able to draw a line or coenious if you like, but _orous withal, and in proper relation to any n He hly understand the value of contrast in line and surface for block to the aner and crafts possibilities of broken colour lie ready to his hand, to be n If the wood be properly selected shading is rarely necessary, and if it is done at all should be done by an artist

In the hands of an artist very beautiful effectsshades of colour of a low but rich tone Over-staining and the abuse of shading are destructive Ivory has always been a favourite material orkers in tarsia, and in the hands of an experienced designer very chars may be done with it There is, however, no material suitable for tarsia which requires so ht-coloured woods, and in the darker ordinary woods, such as ebony, stained any, or rosewood, under polish, the contrast of colour is so great that the ivory ly The ivory is so its colour round, but it is never quite satisfactory The use of inlay ht enters the rooht reaches the object decorated”

The effect of intarsia has been sought by various iuishable from it except by close inspection

In one of these wax, either in its natural state or tinted with an addition of powder colour, was used; in another glue ed, or red lead On April 7, 1902, a paper was read at the Royal Institute of British Architects on wax stoppings of this kind by Mr Heywood Sumner, in the course of which he said that the process he hin on the panel of wood to be incised; cut it, either with a V tool or knife blade fixed in a tool-handle; clear out the larger spaces with a shness in the bottoms for key; when cut, stop the suction of the wood by several coats of white, hard polish For coloured stoppings, resin (as white as can be got), beeswax, and powdered distes needful The melted wax may be run into the incisions by as jet affixed; it is attachable to the nearest gas burner by india-rubber tubing, so that a regulated heat can be applied to the funnel When thus attached and heated, pieces of wax of the required inlay colour are dropped into the funnel, and soon there will be a run offrouided by means of the wooden handle, and thus the entire panel may be inlaid with the melted wax Superfluous surface wax is cleared off with a broad chisel, so as to make the whole surface flush The suction of the wood is stopped by means of white, hard polish, otherwise the hot ill enter the grain of the wood and stain it Incised panels old size and powdered diste a palette knife to distribute the slabneedful in the wood As to design, that which is best suited ” Red lead was also used soton there are several chests and other pieces of furniture which have the incised design filled in with a lue, and linseed oil

[Illustration: Plate 55--_Panel froe 130_]

At Hardwick some of the door panels are painted with arabesques in Indian ink, and varnished (a process also eton collection), and even in certain cases, no doubt under the direction of Bess of Hardwick, engravings have been stuck on the panels, tinted, surrounded with si, and then similarly varnished over The sacristy cupboards at S Maria delle Grazie, Milan, called ”Lo Scaffale,” show paintings of no less an artist than Luini, the ornamental part of which is intended to simulate tarsia

For small objects, such as trinket boxes, a marquetry of straw tinted to different colours was so, in the hands of a worker who possessed taste in colour so results, a for well into the 19th century The writer possesses one or two objects decorated by this process which were bought from the French prisoners taken in the Peninsular War, who provided the then becohest importance, since the material has neither beauty nor intrinsic value in itself; and here, even more than in many other forent designer is most desirable, and should be paramount