Arthur Hayden

“ So wanton had become the destruction of magnificent furniture that the Convention, with an eye on the possibilities of raising money in the future, ordered the furniture to be safely stored in the museums of Paris.
After so great a social upheaval, art in her turn was subjected to revolutionary notions. Men cast about to find something new. Art, more than ever, attempted to absorb the old classic spirit. The Revolution was the deathblow to Rococo ornament. With the classic influences came ideas from Egypt, and the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii provided a further source of design. ”

“ Considerable skill has been exercised in combining certain parts of old furniture into a whole which is,{266} however, mostly inharmonious. In pieces of this nature there is an absence of feeling in style and carving. It is difficult to define the exact meaning of the word "feeling" as applied to art objects, it is a subtle expression of skill and poetry which communicates itself to the lover of art. It is so subtle and elusive that experts will tell one that such and such a piece requires to be "lived with" to test its authenticity. ”

“ The tendency in English furniture seems to have made towards comfort and homeliness. The English home may not have contained{136} so many articles of luxury then as does the modern house with its artistic embellishments, and a popular taste rapidly ripening into a genuine love of the fine arts. "A modern shopkeeper's house," says Lord Macaulay, "is as well furnished as the house of a considerable merchant in Anne's reign." ”

“ During the Reign of Terror the ruthless fury of a nation under mob-law did not spare the most beautiful objects of art which were associated with a hated aristocracy. Furniture especially suffered, and it is a matter for wonderment that so much escaped destruction. Most of the furniture of the royal palaces was consigned to the spoliation of "the Black Committee," who trafficked in works of great price, and sold to foreign dealers the gems of French art for less than a quarter of their real value. ”

“ Catherine of Braganza, his queen, brought with her from Portugal many sumptuous fashions in furniture, notably cabinets and chairs of Spanish and Portuguese workmanship. The cavaliers scattered by the Civil War returned, and as in their enforced exile on the Continent they had cultivated foreign tastes, it was only natural that Dutch, French, and Italian work found its way to this country and effected the character of the early furniture of the Charles II. period. ”

“ There is little doubt that the Great Fire, which did such immense destruction in London in 1666, in which some eighty-nine churches and thirteen thousand houses were demolished, gave a considerable impetus to the manufacture of furniture in the new style. It is not a pleasing reflection to think how many fine pieces of Elizabethan and early Jacobean furniture were consumed in the flames, including much of Inigo Jones's work. ”

“ To estimate more correctly the styles of the Early Jacobean and of the later English furniture extending to the days of Chippendale and Sheraton, it must be borne in mind that England was not always so insular in art as the days of Queen Anne would seem to indicate. It is impossible for the cabinetmakers and the craftsmen to have utterly ignored the splendours of France. Louis XIV. had a long and eventful reign, which extended from the days when Charles I. was marshalling his forces to engage in civil war with the Parliament down to the closing years of Queen Anne. ”

“ Old oak has always been a favourite with the public, and from the modern Flemish monstrosities, carved in evil manner and displaying proportions in the worst possible taste, to the equally vulgar home production in buffet or sideboard, and stocked by many dealers in so-called "antique" furniture, the number of grotesque styles foisted upon the public within the last fifteen years has been remarkable. ”

“ As a passing hint to collectors of old oak furniture, it may be observed that it very rarely happens that two chairs can be found together of the same design. There may be a great similarity of ornament and a particularly striking resemblance, but the chair with its twin companion beside it suggests that one, if not both, are spurious. The same peculiarity is exhibited in old brass candlesticks, and especially the old Dutch{104} brass with circular platform in middle of candlestick. One may handle fifty without finding two that are turned with precisely the same form of ornament. ”

“ Before entering upon the last phase of Stuart furniture, and leaving the days of Jacobean oak with its fine carving and handsome appearance—the careful result of selecting the timber and splitting it to show the fine figure of the wood—the attention of the reader should be drawn to the fact that the appearance of the surface of furniture made subsequent to this period begins to approach the results of the modern cabinetmaker with his polishes and spirit varnishes and highly glazed panels and table tops. The lover of old oak abominates varnish. ”

“ With regard to Chippendale furniture, a word of caution is necessary. It is as impossible for Chippendale and his workmen to have produced all the furniture attributed to them as it is for the small factory at Lowestoft to have made all the china with which it is credited. As has been shown in the chapter on Thomas Chippendale, his styles were most extensively copied by his contemporaries all over the country and by many makers after him, and modern makers produce a great quantity of "Chippendale" every year. Only a careful examination of museum pieces will train the eye of the collector. ”

“ The Elizabethan and Jacobean carved oak furniture received only a preliminary coat of dark varnish in its early days, mixed with oil and not spirit, which sank into the wood and was not a surface polish, and was probably used to preserve the wood. These old pieces, which have received centuries of rubbing with beeswax and oil, have resulted in producing a rich, warm tone which it is impossible to copy by any of the subtle arts known to the modern forger. ”

“ It has been thought advisable to touch upon French furniture as exemplified in the national collections of such importance as the Jones Bequest at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Wallace Collection, to show the influence of foreign art upon our own designers. Similarly, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch furniture, of which many remarkable examples are in private collections in this country, has been dealt with in passing, to enable the reader to estimate the relation of English art to contemporary foreign schools of decoration and design. ”

“ In Spain the Italian feeling became acclimatised more readily than in France. In the sixteenth century the wood carving of Spain is of exceeding{49} beauty. The decoration of the choir of the cathedral at Toledo is held to be one of the finest examples of the Spanish Renaissance. In furniture the cabinets and buffets of the Spanish craftsmen are of perfect grace and of characteristic design. The older Spanish cabinets are decorated externally with delicate ironwork and with columns of ivory or bone painted and richly gilded, exhibiting Moorish influence in their character. ”

“ The art, too, of the Flemish woodcarvers found sympathetic reception in this country, and the harmonious blending of the designs of the Renaissance craftsmen of the Italian with those of the Flemish school resulted in the growth in England of the beautiful and characteristic style known as Tudor. ”

“ Broadly speaking, English furniture falls under three heads—the Oak Period, embracing the furniture of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the Walnut Period, including the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; the Mahogany Period, beginning with the reign of George III. It may be observed that the names of kings and of queens have been applied to various styles of furniture as belonging to their reign. Early Victorian is certainly a more expressive term than early nineteenth century. ”

“ Before leaving this period of French furniture, when so much marquetry work was done of unsurpassed beauty and of unrivalled technique, a word may be said as to the number of woods used. Oeben and Riesener and their contemporaries used many foreign woods, of which the names are unfamiliar. Mr. Pollen, in his "South Kensington Museum Handbook to Furniture and Woodwork," has given the names of some of them, which are interesting as showing the number of woods especially selected for this artistic cabinetmaking. Tulip-wood is the variety known as Liriodendron tulipifera. ”

“ The cheaper "Honduras stuff" was then unknown, and English crews landed and cut timber from the Spanish possessions in spite of the protests of the owners. Many a stiff fight occurred, and many lives were lost in shipping this stolen mahogany to England to supply the demand for furniture. These nefarious proceedings more than once threatened to bring about war between England and Spain.
The furniture of France, during the four great periods treated in the previous chapters, was designed for the use of the nobility. One wonders what furniture was in common use by the peasantry in France. ”

“ It is not too much to hope that enough has been said concerning Jacobean furniture of the early and middle seventeenth century to show that it possesses a peculiar charm and simplicity in the lines of its construction, which make it a very pleasing study to the earnest collector who wishes to procure a few{105} genuine specimens of old furniture, which, while being excellent in artistic feeling, are not unprocurable by reason of their rarity and excessive cost. ”

“ Men's minds, led by Raleigh, the Prince of Company Promoters, and fired by Drake's buccaneering exploits, turned to the New World, hitherto under the heel of Spain. Dreams of galleons laden with gold and jewels stimulated the ambition of adventurous gallants, and quickened the nation's pulse. ”

“ The public has taken to inquiring into art matters a little more closely. Nowadays the latest thing is "fumed" oak, which is modern oak discoloured by means of ammonia, which darkens the surface of the wood to a depth of a sixteenth of an inch. It is not infrequent to find an attempt made to represent this as old oak after an elaborate treatment with linseed oil, turpentine, and beeswax, though an examination of the interior edges of the wood will discover its modernity at once. ”

“ As a general rule a dealer will readily point out the details of workmanship and offer technical information of much value to a beginner, if he discovers that his customer is a collector desirous of acquiring only fine specimens. It is more often than not the folly of the public, and not the dishonesty of the dealer, which results in trade frauds being committed in the attempt to execute some impossible and imperative order, which the moneyed collector has given. The difference between the genuine and the replica is most clearly made by old-fashioned firms of high standing. ”

“ In comparison with the sixteenth-century ebony cabinet of the period of Henry IV., finely inlaid with ivory in most refined style, it is obvious that a great variety of sumptuous furniture was being made by the production of such diverse types as these, and that the craftsmen were possessed of a wealth of invention. ”

“ As there is no record of the makers of most of the old English furniture, and as a piece of furniture cannot be judged as can a picture, the date of manufacture cannot be precisely laid down, hence the vagueness of much of the classification of old furniture. ”

“ Unfortunately, the early days of the nineteenth century and the dreary Early Victorian period, both before and after the{253} great Exhibition of 1851, display the most tasteless ineptitude in nearly every branch of art. From the days of Elizabeth down to the last of the Georges, English craftsmen, under various influences, have produced domestic furniture of great beauty. ”

“ If a clever workman possessed of great artistic feeling turns his attention to forging works of art, it is obvious that his triumph is complete over amateurs possessed of less artistic taste and knowledge than himself.
Many secret processes are employed to impart an appearance of age to the wood and to the metal mountings. The cruder methods are to eat off the sharper edges of the metal mountings by means of acid, and to discolour the newer surfaces by the aid of tobacco juice, both of which are not difficult to detect. ”

“ By permission of the proprietors of the "Connoisseur."
CHIPPENDALE MIRROR.
Furniture is not like silver, where the mark of the maker was almost as obligatory as the hall mark. Artists, both great and small, have signed their pictures, and in the glorious days of the great French ébénistes and metal-chasers, signed work is frequently found. But in England, at a time when furniture of excellent design, of original conception, and of{231} thoroughly good workmanship was produced in great quantities, the only surviving names are those of designers or cabinetmakers who have published books. ”

“ It will be seen that the designers had not yet thrown off the trammels of architecture which dominated much of the Renaissance woodwork. The garlands are not the garlands of Grinling Gibbons, and although falling within the Jacobean period, it lacks the charm which belong to typical Jacobean pieces.
At Knole, in the possession of Lord Sackville, there are some fine specimens of early Jacobean furniture, illustrations of which are included in this volume. The chair used by King James I. when sitting to the painter Mytens is of peculiar interest. ”

“ The settle, the illustration of which is given (p. 149) , bearing the date 1705, the year after Blenheim, shows that Jacobean models of early days were not forgotten. The inlaid borders are very effective, and there is nothing vulgar or offensive in the carving. It is simple in style and the joinery is good. A walnut mirror, carved and gilded (illustrated p. 137) , exhibits the same solidity. There is nothing to show that the glorious age of Louis XIV. had produced the most sumptuous and richly decorated furniture the modern world had seen. ”