Charles Wyllys Elliott

“ The florid and foolish taste of the perruquier prevails everywhere, in architecture, in painting, in sculpture, in dress; all is tainted with the showy and the shallow. The flowing scroll appears in all its splendor, decoration is piled in meaningless profusion, and talent and taste, heart, mind, hand, and gold, are lavished in folly and vice, which finally culminated in the social and political Revolution of Louis XVI., when king and noble, lord and lady, went under in a sanguinary flood of anarchy and ruin. ”

“ The art and the maiolica which she now produces are but copies, and too often bad copies, of that past. The manufactories of Ginori at Florence, and of Giustiniani at Naples, make much good work; but, so far as I have seen, they blindly copy the shapes, the colors, and the decoration, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and attempt nothing more. And the pity is that we, who buy to-day, seem to want only those!
In our pursuit of art it may be well to remember that no nation can be created by “art,” and none can be saved by it. ”

“ The history of pottery is in a good degree the history of man. All nations have done something in this way, from the rude clay pots of the barbarians, through the gayly-painted dishes of the incipient civilization, up to the culmination of the art, when perfection seems to have been reached in China through the centuries extending up to the sixteenth. This manufacture, which reached in China and Japan to the point of finest art, has not been surpassed by any civilized race, if equaled. ”

“ These figures are of value, of course, as illustrations of the possibilities, and also as historical illustrations, of the growth and development of the fictile art. No man will wish to have an Ariadne in china made by an excellent artist, if he can have the same work of the same artist in marble.
We have the same feeling in regard to a fine painting: would any one wish to exchange the Dresden Madonna of Raphael on the canvas for a perfect copy in mosaic, or in the most exquisite Gobelin tapestry? None. And yet the mosaic or the tapestry has cost ten times more of human labor. ”

“ At the period of which we write, Italy had become the leading nation of Europe in all that pertained to literature and the arts; her painters, sculptors, and poets, had thrown over her people and history a glory, or rather a glamour, which was but the iridescence which whispered of decay. Within a century all had sunk into insignificance and palsy. To-day the world visits Italy to see with curious eyes what she has been, not what she is. ”

“ Through thousands of years a peculiar people have developed a peculiar social system—most striking, most distinct, and, in its way, as complete as any other, even if compared with ours, of which we loudly boast. And now this singular people—a people who have grown into a population of four hundred millions, having their barriers broken down by the guns and rams of England, so that trade should enter—are themselves coming out to do the work of the world cheaper than any others can do it. ”

“ By no possibility can war be careful of the rights of man. War is intended to hurt, to exhaust, to consume other nations. War not only takes food and munitions in the conquered country; it takes whatever it wants and can take, whether of necessaries, luxuries, gold, or art. War, we know, enabled the first and great Napoleon to enrich his palaces and the museums of Paris with the finest works of art found in the countries he overran. War, I do not doubt, brought into Sweden the beginnings of those collections which now count many of the fine pictures of Guido and Raphael, of Teniers and Douw. ”

“ What the keen and artistic mind wants to know is, not only what fine work was done by the Greeks, but why they did it—what, indeed, made that life more beautiful than any we find in all the earlier histories of man.
Through the wrecks and convulsions of time this crowd of delicate, perishable things still exists; what vast numbers must have been made and destroyed in the varying populations of Greece, Rome, Tyre, Carthage, and wherever Grecian civilizations and tastes made their way, it is not easy for the mind to compass. ”

“ In our modern time it has come to pass that men worship strength, power, words, gold, brass—everything but beauty. They care little to have beautiful things about them, less to be beautiful themselves, to create beautiful children, or to do beautiful work. And what is the result? Often they are as unlovely in their souls as in their persons; and so, while we boast of great cities, and long railways, and amazing cotton-mills, we boast not of beautiful men who make beautiful work. ”

“ We do not give the workman half his due when we fail to feel how much we owe to him. An eye to see the beautiful, the good, the true, is to be prayed for.
When the turner and modeler has perfected his pot, it has to go through its firings, glazings, paintings, until it comes to us a perfected work, which we too often hardly look at. It is only a jug!
There is more than the money’s worth in every good piece of cabinet-work, iron-work, woven fabric, etc.; for with every honest workman’s hand goes a part of his soul: he gives it willingly, gladly. ”

“ I believe, too, that the best style of decoration for porcelain is not imitative, but suggestive—that is, an elaborate and careful copy of a flower or a figure upon the clay is not so appropriate or so satisfactory as a free translation of the sentiment of the flower or the figure, which suggests it to the soul rather than tickles the eye. ”

“ To one man the especial honor has been given of making them, whether he was the discoverer or not. He is known as Maestro Giorgio Andreoli, usually called “Maestro Giorgio.” He was not only a painter and designer, but he early saw and seized upon the magical art of imparting an added beauty by the use of what is termed lustre. It was applied before his day by the Moors of Spain and Majorca, and also by the potters at Pesaro. But Giorgio seems to have produced results finer than any; and one, the ruby-color, seems to be identified with him. ”

“ SO ancient is the potter’s art that it may be said to have begun with the beginnings of man. A belief exists still in Silesia that there is a mountain out of which cups and jugs spring spontaneously, as the mushrooms shoot from the moist soil of the plains. Interwoven, then, as pottery is with the history of the race, having relations daily and hourly with man’s universal and greatest vocation—the preparation of{14} the food which supports and continues life—it has had and will have an interest as vital as it is wide-spread. ”

“ We are forcing ourselves and our civilization upon the Japanese who do not want us, and we curse them. We have attacked the simplicity of their lives, we shall increase their immorality, and we shall degrade their art. Twenty years hence, artistic and patient work will have disappeared from among them.
Good work has almost disappeared from among us, as well as from Europe: we do all in a hurry, all for cheapness, all for money. The artist, the workman, delight no more in perfect work, which is Godlike. ”

“ Assuming that the Orientals are races who perceive or feel, rather than reason—while the reverse of this is true of Europeans and Americans—we find our art often losing its way, which that of the Orientals seldom does. The natural or instinctive soul, by its native sense, is guided in matters of color and decoration more truly than we who attempt to reason out these things. Now, applying this to the facts of fictile art, we find that the Chinese and Japanese never attempted figure-work in porcelain, except in some few cases of burlesques, or of animals and birds. ”

“ Perfection tends to perfection, and ugliness to ugliness. Therefore, let the perfect man and the perfect woman marry, that thus we may have the perfect race once more. To bring this to pass we must insist upon perfect form and perfect decoration in all things about us; we must know beauty and value it. One step to this great end is to study the Greek vase. The next step is to make every home a temple of art.
What can we not believe of such a house as that of Aspasia in Athens, when she was virtually the wife of Pericles in the best period of Greece? ”

“ Madame de Pompadour, herself an artist in her way, not only came weekly to enjoy the work of others, but she often applied her own hands to making designs, or to touching or perfecting what fine thing might be going forward. Under such stimulus as this it was inevitable that every modeler, every artist, every colorist, should be inspired to do his best. ”

“ Porcelain-painting is done in two ways: under the glaze directly on the clay, or upon the glaze. Most of it is upon the glaze, into which it is melted by a mild heat. To show to the uninitiated what time, talent, and labor, are applied to pottery and porcelain, it may be well to state that fine work requires many firings, and that the delicate teacup, which fools hardly look at, passes through some seventy hands to{197} reach its perfectness! In some eyes a big thing (even if ugly) is admirable; a small thing, however beautiful, is contemptible. ”

“ They swarmed down upon Italy, and into Spain, where they became strong and great. As we read history, we see almost nothing but one long, fierce, destructive fight, and we wonder that there could have been any art, any learning, any kindness, in the world; for every man’s hand was against every man, and the chief vocation of great men was to rob and enslave other men. So it has been, so it is now; the forms change, the fact remains. We have our feudal barons to-day. But how came the Moors—the Arabs, rather—in Spain? ”

“ I must say for myself that, having seen the original—now in the British Museum, where it is most jealously guarded—I cannot but admire the careful and beautiful cutting of the figures in the designs which surround the body; but I did not when I saw it, nor do I now, think the form of the vase in any degree equal to the best of the Greek or Etruscan vases.
Wedgwood’s life was an active and a productive one. He learned how to live, not from books, not in schools, but in doing the work his hands found to do. He was born a potter, he remained a potter, and he died a potter. ”

“ While, therefore, we cannot but admire the care, the pains, the skill, of the workmen and the artists, let us not be misled by the false glamour of that time, so as to learn to love or to imitate their florid and extravagant tastes in architecture, in furniture, in dress, or in porcelain. ”

“ It is not possible that the men who worked at the potter’s wheel in{37} Athens, or in Samos, or in Crete, were “educated,” as we say it, to such a fine sense of the beautiful. We, with all the education we can put into our people, do not equal them. We can no more explain this than we can tell how such a wonderful growth of beautiful cathedrals shot up into life in France in what we call the “Middle Ages.” Nor was this perfection only to be found among the potters who worked in Greece. ”