Long-Case ClockLONG-CASE CLOCK.Maker, Martin (London). 1710.Finely decorated in marquetry, with turned pillars in hood. Showing transitional period.(In the possession of Mr. John Girdwood, Edinburgh.)
LONG-CASE CLOCK.Maker, Martin (London). 1710.Finely decorated in marquetry, with turned pillars in hood. Showing transitional period.(In the possession of Mr. John Girdwood, Edinburgh.)
Long-Case ClockLONG-CASE CLOCK.Decorated in marquetry in the "all-over" style.(By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons.)
LONG-CASE CLOCK.Decorated in marquetry in the "all-over" style.(By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons.)
No Common Origin of Design.—All art is derivative. It is not a crime for the craftsman to assimilate the best of all the great artists who have preceded him. This was the insanity ofL'Art Nouveau. It wanted to commence again at elementary principles and to use poor forms that had long been discarded by great artificers. It wished us deliberately to ignore the past. An anvil has arrived by a process of evolution through long centuries of metal-workers, since man first smelted ore and fashioned metal, to its present form. It would be idle to equip the blacksmith with a square anvil.
From China to Japan, from India to Armenia, from Bagdad to Cairo, from Alexandria to Venice, from Canton to Goa and thence to Lisbon, backwards and forwards across the world's trade routes art impulses have throbbed to the tune of the monsoons. Pulsating with life, they carried, and still carry, Eastern ideas to the West, and Western inventions to the East. Behind modernity and man's latest devices somnolently lies the great dead past—China and the Far East, Persia and Babylon, Egypt and Greece and Rome. Aztec gods and Ashanti gold ornaments, Peruvian Inca clay vessels and Malayan idols, surprise and bewilder theethnologist with the similarity of rudimentary forms or with the marvellously pure ornament that comes out of the so-conceived dark corners of the earth to suggest older civilizations as artistic as those of the modern world.
Le Style Réfugié.—The history of art is not hidden. Holbein and Hollar and Vandyck, Lely and Kneller worked in this country. The number of foreign artists and artist-craftsmen working in this country as acclimatized or as "naturalized" was stupendous. The beautiful swags and delicately carved woodwork embellishing so many English houses and proudly held as heirlooms are by a Dutchman's hand—Grinling Gibbons. The list could be extended. It is natural that the gold of England should have a hypnotic attraction to artistic temperaments. It is the law of supply and demand. Like bananas and pineapples, oranges and dates, foreign talent comes to a great emporium.
Thestyle réfugiéwas something definite. It was a term employed in Holland just at the time when a similar immigration was occurring in this country. The French Protestant refugees fleeing from the insane fury of Roman Catholic bigots naturally fled to Protestant countries—to England, to Holland, and to Germany. It is admitted on the Continent that these highly skilled artist craftsmen had an influence on the art of the country of their adoption. It is acknowledged asle style réfugié. In England, writers on furniture have half-heartedly alluded to this influence, but it was very real. Daniel Marot, a descendant from an eminent family of Frenchartists, a pupil of Lepautre, formerly at the Gobelins factory, and one of the creators of the Louis Quatorze style, took refuge in Holland, where William of Orange appointed him as Minister of Works. From The Hague he followed his patron to England at the "Glorious Revolution." It was his genius in design that made our William and Mary and Queen Anne styles. At Hampton Court his personality predominates. Sir Christopher Wren occupied himself with the architecture, but the decorations are by Daniel Marot. Marot died in 1718. He stands in the forefront of the exponents ofle style réfugié, and behind him are hundreds of his compatriots. It is idle to ignore this influence.
Chippendale owed more than most people imagine to Marot.Le style chinoisis to be found, so to speak, in embryo, in Marot's design books, and suggestions of it appear in some of his executed work.
The un-English marquetry became acclimatized, and later, as we shall show, the equally un-English lac became a fashion.
Derivative Nature of Marquetry Clock-cases.—The laying of marquetry as a craft is one thing, the conception of marquetry as a creative art is another. We may admire the dexterity of the inlay but deplore the design. At the Mortlake tapestry works Vandyck and Rubens made drawings for the craftsmen. In England, whenever the craftsman has been allied with the artist he has produced great results; whenever he has run alone he hasrapidly run downhill. Josiah Wedgwood had on the one side Bentley the classical scholar, on the other Flaxman the artist and modeller with a perfect continental training. Chippendale, great craftsman that he was, would have been better advised to prune his Chinese taste and discard his worthless Gothic style. An artistic brain behind him would have saved him from such atrocities. Sheraton, more the artist than the craftsman, made no such blunders.
Evidently the making of clock-cases became an industry. Personally we incline to the belief that seventy-five per cent. of them were of foreign manufacture, either in Holland and imported here, or made by Dutch immigrants or French refugees in this country. The derivative nature of their design tells its own story. It has nothing English about it. Take the early geometric star pattern or the early coloured birds and flowers, what else are they but Dutch? Is there anything in English art like them? The conclusion to which one must arrive is that the marquetry clock-case panel is Dutch or Anglo-Dutch. The derivative character runs through the whole gamut from the reticent and well-balanced panel period to the "all over" phase, when every inch was covered with marquetry, to the arabesque and intricate mosaic work reminiscent of Persia, and finally to the decadent period when Eastern carpets found themselves reproduced in marquetry on the clock-case.
William and Mary Chest of DrawersWILLIAM AND MARY CHEST OF DRAWERS.On original stand. Decorated in marquetry. Side showing panel in common use by cabinet-makers and clock-case makers.(By courtesy of Messrs. Hampton & Son.)
WILLIAM AND MARY CHEST OF DRAWERS.On original stand. Decorated in marquetry. Side showing panel in common use by cabinet-makers and clock-case makers.(By courtesy of Messrs. Hampton & Son.)
Chest of Drawers Decorated in MarquetryCHEST OF DRAWERS DECORATED IN MARQUETRY.Side showing panel in common use by cabinet-makers and clock-case makers.(By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons.)
CHEST OF DRAWERS DECORATED IN MARQUETRY.Side showing panel in common use by cabinet-makers and clock-case makers.(By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons.)
When the hood of the clock-case became arched and the dial correspondingly had a lunette, thedecorative marquetry panel in the case below followed the same form. It is possible, indeed very probable, that many such shaped panels were imported and were especially intended to meet the demand for use on clock-cases. It is always possible to a trained eye to see whether a panel has been made to fit the place in which one finds it. Is it part of a sanely conceived decorative scheme, or was it used because it happened to be handy as part of a cabinet-maker's stock-in-trade? We illustrate two examples of marquetry chests of drawers of the William and Mary period which offer many interesting features. In regard to the example with the oval panels (illustrated p.93), the side of the piece exhibits a panel that is incongruous where it is. It is a clock-case panel. Similarly in the "all-over" marquetry chest of drawers of the same period (illustrated p.95), the panel at the side is undoubtedly a clock-case panel. To examine both these chests of drawers in detail is to discover that the former shows that the panels of the drawers were carefully thought out before execution. The metal drop-handles in the centre were each intended to be there. They were in the cabinet-maker's mind when he made his design and laid his marquetry. He has accommodated his pattern to receive these handles. In the other example it is seen that no such care was taken. The escutcheon of the locks covers a portion of the marquetry. The cabinet-maker in London had his Dutch-imported panels ready to hand and he used them as he found them.
If some collector or expert were to come along anddetermine that all the green and purple and flecked glass of the Early Victorian period, bottles with long necks and gilded stoppers, in English leather cases, vases of inimitable colour but execrable form, were typically English as representing early nineteenth century glass, we should put his theories aside as nonsense. Partly because we happen to know what Bohemia was exporting and partly because we know what the English glassworkers were doing in the same period. But in regard to 1650 to 1700 it is less easy to determine whether a wonderful school of expert marquetry-workers existed in London as a secret industry. One must assume that they had quietly assimilated all the technique of the Dutch craftsmen, and descended on the town, just at the right moment, with a new art, quite un-English, just at that moment when Dutch fashions were in the ascendant and when Mary, the consort of William of Orange, was employing Marot, the late Surveyor of The Hague, to convert Hampton Court from a Tudor into an Anglo-Orange palace.
On an examination of delft earthenware of the period and Dutch decorative art in general, it is fairly obvious that the art impulses coincide with the various phases of ornament as found on the marquetry panel, whether they were the floriated designs of Italy with the vase and the symmetrical flowers in conventional form, further conventionalized by the Dutch, who clung to tulips and carnations, or the arabesque designs derived from the Dutch traffic with the East Indies, the pseudo-Persian sherbet trayas a panel, the prayer rug as a full design. With his black delft to imitate lacquered work of Japan and his blue delft to imitate the Kang-he Chinese porcelain, the Dutchman proved himself a superlative translator. The Dutch East India Company, till it was supplanted, was the conduit-pipe through which the arts of the East were allowed to pass into Europe.
In another portion of this volume we show how apparently obscure ornament has a long lineage, and that craftsmen in minor details were producing something of which possibly they knew not the origin nor the significance; but it behoves the intelligent collector, who, after all, is in possession of more facts, spread over a wider area, to arrive at sane conclusions in regard to workers who wrought better than they thought.
The Wall-paper Period.—It was a sad time when the idea originated to make wall-paper simulate marble or tapestry or leather, or anything else. Wall-hangings made of paper by the Chinese came into England in the early seventeenth century. But European wall-paper is a modern abomination. Chintz has a better excuse to imitate satin. "Callicoes" were tabooed at first, but they had and have a legitimate place. Wall-paper is an affectation which cannot be defended. It always pretends to be what it is not. It is really wonderful that amateurs did not paste it over clock-cases. Perhaps they did, and other persons, wiser in their generation, removed it.
But if wall-paper of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was not affixed to theclock-case, it was there in spirit, as it was on strident bureaus and other equally offensive articles of the period. The "all-over" style exhibits marquetry run mad. Artisans could apply the thin veneer, ten sheets to the inch, like paper, and they did. They had borders as common as modern factory-made imitation lace at a few pence per yard, and they laid them beside the pilasters and around the already well covered case. There was no square inch that could be said to be free from the attentions of the gluer of marquetry sheets. He began to dominate decoration till happily he was extinguished.
The Incongruities of Marquetry.—To those who have handled a good many examples of marquetry furniture in which panelling is predominant, such as clock-cases, there is one feature which always strikes the practised eye. The question arises, How did the marquetry panel come there? It is another way of expressing the view that the proportion is radically wrong. A glance at a poor panel of a clock-case, or a faked panel, or a stupidly wrought panel, is enough. To the collector of old books nothing is more annoying than to find that the binder with all his fine tooling has trimmed off the margins of the printed matter and the illustrations. It is an edition with the space expurgated. It is the binderversusthe printer, and similarly in the clock-case it is too often the cabinet-makerversusthe designer of the marquetry panel. This is the sentiment one has on looking at many of the marquetry clock-cases. The persons who receivedthem from Holland did not always know how to use them correctly. They either cut off their edges or left so little space as to convey the idea of a curtailed edition of the original. In the case of the panelled period, when there were three panels, two of them had more often than not to be cut off in the middle to make room for the circular aperture in the door showing the swinging pendulum. When the case-maker received his panels according to order from the Continent, one would have thought he would have done away with the hole in the case. But perhaps the clockmaker insisted otherwise. At any rate, it is a point showing the absence of intimate relationship between clockmaker and case-maker. Holland seems to be the answer, in spite of all experts to the contrary.
On the "all-over" marquetry clock-cases there is a decided inclination to follow the designs found on contemporary delft ware. As to repetition, however well joined they are, the glue and the wax cannot hide the poverty of design. Twice or thrice in one case are patterns repeated. It is the wall-paper artist at work in a smaller area. In this connection one recalls the decadence of the wood-engravers, where three or four artists worked on portions of one picture cut into sections and screwed together as one block. The old journals, theIllustrated London News, and theGraphicand others of the early 'eighties, tell of this decadence. The thin white lines, as long as ink and paper last, record this subterfuge. It was the last note of wood-engraving. Similarly, in marquetry, when we find the almostinvisible lines denoting several hands, or the piecing together of the same design cunningly to deceive the persons at the period, we at a later stage read this as the note determining the end, and the end soon came.
THE LONG-CASE CLOCK—THE PERIOD OF LACQUER
What is lac?—Its early introduction into this country—"The Chinese taste"—Colour versus form—Peculiarities of the lacquered clock-case—The English school—English amateur imitators—Painted furniture not lacquered work—The inn clock.
Lacqueredwork is the most un-English style of decoration that has ever been employed by the cabinet-maker in the embellishment of his furniture. It came from the East and was introduced into this country about the same period as tea-drinking. At first tea was drunk by fashionable folk from cups without handles, now it is the national beverage. Lac is a natural product of China, the sap of a tree in appearance resembling our ash-tree. It is not an artificial compound of resin and oils, worked down by turpentine. This natural gum is refined and coloured red, black, golden yellow, green, or grey. The surface of the wood is carefully prepared, and a ground is laid on by degrees, care being taken that each is of the right temperature and perfectly hard and dry before any layer is applied. Neverless than three and sometimes as many as eighteen thin layers are thus applied to the surface of the wood before the actual decoration of this ground by the artist commences. In regard to the use of lac in this country, practical experts have questioned as to whether it is possible in a climate like this to effect the clean drying so necessary to attain perfection. London and other cities, on account of their dust-charged atmosphere, are unsuited for lacquer work.
The artist draws his design of landscape or figures or birds or flowers, filling his details with gold or silver and superimposed colours built up with mastic, of those parts which are intended to be in slight relief.
The Japanese brought the art of lacquer to the highest perfection. To those readers who desire to see the art of lacquer shown in its various stages, there is in the Botanical Museum at Kew Gardens a collection of specimens in various stages, including sections of the lacquer-tree, from which the lac exudes, and of various coloured lacs, and examples illustrating no less than fifty different methods of lacquering sword-sheaths.
An examination of lacquer work is to be found inChinese Art, vol. i, by Dr. Stephen W. Bushell, formerly physician to His Majesty's Legation at Peking. In the print-room of the Imperial Library at Paris is an album with drawings of the processes and explanatory notes.
The Lacquer Industry in Japan forms a Report of His Majesty's Acting-Consul at Hakodate(Mr. J. J. Quin), printed as a Parliamentary Paper in 1882.
Its Early Introduction into this Country.—At first the Portuguese had the monopoly of trade with the Far East. When Philip of Spain annexed Portugal in 1598, he sought to shut out the Dutch traders from participation in this trade. By this act he laid the foundation of the Dutch East India Company. It was only when Cornelius Houtman procured some Portuguese charts that the Dutch navigators first rounded the Capeen routefor India and China and Japan. The great Dutch East India Company was established in 1602.
Porcelain and lacquered cabinets and boxes were thus at an early date distributed as rare articles of curious art at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Drake and Raleigh had captured Spanish galleons with such treasure, and the Portuguese possession of Goa in India had brought the wealth of the Far East to Western Europe. Evelyn tells us in hisDiary, in 1681, of the richness of the apartments of the Duchess of Portsmouth at Whitehall. "The very furniture of the chimney was massy silver. The sideboards were piled with richly wrought plate. In the niches stood cabinets, the masterpieces of Japanese art." The dowry of Queen Catherine of Braganza did not come up to the expectations of the spendthrift Charles, although she came loaded with "japanned" boxes and rare artistic treasures from the East. Memoirs of this time furnish abundant proof that lacquered work was, in pieces of imported furniture, known in this country.But it is little likely that anything of that nature was manufactured here at that date. As a nation we had not developed on those lines; it is a fact worth remembering that as late as the reign of Charles II the greater part of the iron used in this country was imported from abroad.
"The Chinese Taste."—This is a term which finds itself repeated like a parrot-cry from the late years of the seventeenth century. The vogue reached its height in 1750 as a fashion for the wealthy and a pastime for the dilettanti, and disturbed the steady growth of national spirit in art. There was a Chinese Festival at Drury Lane Theatre in 1755.
Chippendale snatched his fretwork in his brackets and the angles of his chairs from the Chinese worker in ebony. He erected pagoda-like structures on his cabinets. The Bow china factory termed itself "New Canton," Worcester copied Chinese models, Bristol carried on the story. Staffordshire with her earthenware brought out the "willow-pattern," and a hundred other designs were acclimatized as reflections of the blue and white Canton porcelain.
"Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world and the world of letters, and, indeed, seems to be considered as the quintessence of almost all the arts and sciences. The fine ladies and gentlemen dress with taste, the architects, whether Gothic or Chinese, build with taste." So writes the essayist in theConnoisseurjournal in 1756, and he continues ironically, "Whoever makes a pagoda of his parlour fits up his house entirely in taste."
This "Chinese taste" had seized France and Holland.The French artist-craftsmen readily saw that the great influx of Chinese and Japanese furniture would stifle their national artistic impulses. Louis Quatorze had to issue a decree at the end of the seventeenth century to prohibit the import of Oriental wares. The craze reached England later and developed later. But early in the eighteenth century the cabinet-makers of London petitioned Parliament against the importation of manufactured articles from the East Indies to this country. But nothing much seems to have come of their protest. The East India Company had become too powerful to brook interference with its trade by interested artisans. Thousands of lac panels were brought over in the company's ships, even in spite of the deep-rooted belief that lacquer work had at that time become an English art. It is to be presumed that some of the contentions of the old European lacquer-workers may be said to be parallel with the assertions of old potters who asseverated that they had discovered the true porcelain of China. In 1709 Böttger, at Meissen, had for the first time succeeded in producing white hard, paste porcelain, not in imitation of the Chinese, but actually a reproduction of the Oriental technique. But the secret was well kept, and Böttger and his workmen were imprisoned in a fortress. Since Father Du Halde, the Jesuit, had published in Paris in 1725 hisDescription de l'Empire de la Chine, other European potters had endeavoured to find the natural earths of the Chinese, kaolin and petuntse. When William Cookworthy, the chemist and potter of Plymouth, wrote of his discovery ofthe china clays, Josiah Wedgwood journeyed to Cornwall on a wild-goose chase.
It may be imagined, with data such as these to guide us—first, the growing intensity of the "Chinese taste"; second, the demand for furniture and porcelain on the part of the wealthy classes—that as a consequence an attempt was made to supply the demand.
There were various sources of supply for lacquered furniture, especially lacquered clock-cases. There was the Dutch market, from which was obtained, as in the case of marquetry, panels of lacquered work. At first, without doubt, these came from the East through Holland. The next stage was the Dutch lacquered panel actually produced in Holland. Later there was again the Oriental panel coming straight from the East through our own East India Company. Contemporaneously with these importations, which served as models, there was the lacquered work produced in this country. We shall later attempt to differentiate between these styles.
Colour versus Form.—In various epochs the struggle has gone on in the applied arts in regard to the use and abuse of colour in decoration as an adjunct. In furniture the pendulum has swung to and fro. Colour follows form in the process of evolution. In England there is the oak period and the walnut period, where the beauty is solely dependent upon form. The conception of the cabinet-maker has usually been confined to form, eschewing colour, or to colour more or less ignoring the beauty of form, or as a compromise,when form has been subservient to colour. When form and colour are in exact harmony the highest ideals are reached in furniture. The Chinese have reached these ideals. The Italian school of the fifteenth century in the marriage coffer, where painting or coloured intarsia is of parallel beauty with the rich carving, achieved like success. With similar judgment, in holding the balance evenly between form and colour, André Charles Boulle conceived his wonderful work in tortoiseshell and brass and ebony and silver, forming a brilliant marquetry of colour, the colour effect being further heightened with a reddish-brown and sometimes a bluish-green ground beneath the semi-transparent tortoiseshell. Riesener and David Roentgen, in equally masterful technique, produced marquetry of tulip-wood, holly, rosewood, purple wood, and laburnum. With the style embodying the enrichment of the plain surface with colour came the use, and later the abuse, of lacquered panels.
A Dutch cabinet-maker, Huygens, had won renown by reproducing remarkable imitations of the Japanese lacquered panel. In Holland, Chinese prototypes had served as models for delft ware. The Dutch potter had simulated the appearance of blue and white Chinese porcelain, but his results were obtained by a white enamel covering a brown body. Dutch lacquer work is similarly imitative of the results rather than a duplication of the Oriental processes. Chintzes and printed "callicoes" equally are surprising efforts at simulation, if not dissimulation.
As a supreme effort of the successful attempt ofthe European to reproduce the wonderful limpid transparency of the old Chinese and Japanese work, the secret of Sieur Simon Etienne Martin, a French carriage painter, stands supreme. His varnish, called after himVernis-Martin, has become the term, as in the case of Boulle, for a certain class of technique. In 1744 he obtained the monopoly in France for the manufacture of lacquered work in the Oriental style. He obtained the ground of wavy golden network, such as in rare Japanese panels, and on this Boucher and other artists painted Arcadian subjects.
In England it cannot be said that these great foreign styles have been emulated in the grand manner or even attempted. When colour came to England it came straight from Holland, andle style réfugiéis responsible for the intermingling of the Dutch and French styles, though the former were at first greatly predominant. The important bureaus and splendid lacquered cabinets produced in the period when colour was employed so lavishly as to disregard form, are attributable, not for the least part of their excellent technique in the skilful employment of lacquer, to the great number of French and other foreign workmen who had settled in this country.
Peculiarities of the Lacquered Clock-case.—The use of the lacquered panel in the long case of the clock cannot be said to have a definite period of its own. We cannot mark an exact date when marquetry panels or marquetry "all-over" cases were no longer the vogue, and when lacquered cases succeeded them. The two styles were comparatively contemporaneous.Marquetry cases, as we have seen, are as early as 1680, and they continued till about 1725, and later in the provinces. The lacquered case may be said to have run its day from about 1700 to 1755. On the whole they seemed to have had a longer vogue, mainly on account of the prevalence of the "Chinese taste," which demanded colour. Lacquered decoration jumped the experimental stage of reserves or panels that apparently were not quite in exact proportions to the case, but had to be fitted in and sometimes trimmed. It came at a juncture when this difficulty had been mastered. Accordingly, we find the whole of the lacquered case has been regarded as a rectangular surface to be decorated, and we have not met with any instance of more than one lacquered panel being employed on the case. The marquetry case offered other features which indicated the struggle of colour for supremacy. In the early marquetry specimens the turned walnut pillars of the hood belong to an earlier style. They indicate that that form had not been completely ousted. The marquetry worker in the end overcame this and drove these pillars out. In the lacquered case no such struggle is visible. The case is entirely a scheme in colour. It is red, or green, it is black and gold, but the design is never so strong as to tempt one to examine its form. It is simply decorative, but much in the manner that, in textile art, tapestry is pleasing, not challenging a critical examination of form, but suggesting a somnolent restfulness.
Touches of incongruity appear in later examplesof the lacquered clock-case when the arched hood came into fashion and the panel followed suit. It is a shape unsuited to an Oriental design. Such a Western architectural style used in combination with so Eastern a technique as lacquered work is like putting a Corinthian pillar on a Japanese bronze.
The lacquered cases illustrated in this chapter indicate the style. The example with the movement by Joseph Dudds (1766-82), (illustrated p.115), shows the early attempt to simulate the Eastern style. It is poor and thin, and has not stood the ravages of time and a damp climate.
The specimen (illustrated p.117), with the movement by Kenneth Maclellan (1760-80), is of more grandiose character. The panelled door was probably an importation, and the other decorations in lacquer done in this country.
Among the Scottish clocks, the Patrick Gordon example (1705-15), (illustrated p.263), proves this usage of imported Oriental panel with added decoration in as near a style as could be done on the spot. In this example the remainder of the so-called lacquered decoration is stencilled.
Long-Case Clock With LacquerLONG-CASE CLOCK WITH LACQUER DECORATION.Brass dial with circular medallion with maker's name, "Joseph Dudds, London" (1766-82).
LONG-CASE CLOCK WITH LACQUER DECORATION.Brass dial with circular medallion with maker's name, "Joseph Dudds, London" (1766-82).
Lon-Case ClockLONG-CASE CLOCK.Maker, Kenneth Maclennan (London).Finely decorated in green lacquer.Date, 1760-80.Height, 8 ft. Width, 1 ft. 8 in. Depth, 10 in.(By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq.)
LONG-CASE CLOCK.Maker, Kenneth Maclennan (London).Finely decorated in green lacquer.Date, 1760-80.Height, 8 ft. Width, 1 ft. 8 in. Depth, 10 in.(By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq.)
The English School.—Dutch lacquered work was as prevalent between 1680 and 1725 as was Dutch marquetry. The rivalry between "John Company" and the Dutch traders was one factor that has to be considered. Lacquered work was coming straight from the East to Amsterdam and to English ports. What was not absorbed by the Dutch burghers came to England. Apart from this competitive Oriental trade, there was the lacquered work actually madein Holland. In examining the state of that country at this time one meets with a surprise. It was a land teeming with colour. Dutch painters have taught us to think otherwise. The Rijks Museum exhibits the prevalent styles of the seventeenth century. Here we find leather decorations derivative from Spain in rich gilding, Louis Quatorze boudoirs with classic gods and goddesses. The "Chinese Boudoir" from the palace of the Stadtholder at Leeuwarden shows the intense love of colour that had conquered Holland in the late seventeenth century. Here we find the Chinese prototypes in porcelain which provided the potters at Delft with problems to solve, and lacquered work which suggested patient imitation by Dutch cabinet-makers, but the colour and advanced technique of such Oriental originals must have confounded the old craftsmen.
The potter simulated the porcelain with his enamelled earthenware, the cabinet-maker produced lacquered work which passed muster in Holland and England. Take the house of the rich burgher. The table was covered with an Eastern rug, called a "table carpet." The linen cupboards so beloved by the Dutch were surmounted by Chinese and Japanese porcelain. Often a Japanese lac cabinet gave another touch of colour to the interior. Rich damask curtains, Spanish leather hangings, Oriental rugs, finely inlaid cabinets of ebony and silver, and a glowing array of copper and brass, filled the heart of the Dutchvrouwwith pride. Such rooms were regarded as a "holy of holies," and the family hadtheir meals in the kitchen or living room and were warned off the show room. The seventeenth-century Dutchwoman, according to all accounts, seems to have been a shrew. But enough is extant to prove that Holland was artistically, in regard to the home-life of Stadtholder and burgher, resplendent with colour, in spite of the low tones of the canvases of Dutch painters.
In England, too, the love of colour was becoming predominant. Fifty thousand Huguenot families, with their Latin blood and love of colour, scattered in the Protestant countries had no inconsiderable influence. Spitalfields silk is as English as the dark and tortuous lanes from which it emanates. But every weaver had a French name, and although the industry has come to an end, tomorrow, if the demand arose, the descendants of these French Huguenots would again stand at the looms to produce English silk.
The sudden outburst of colour in the now rarely prized English lacquered cabinets and bureaus must be attributed to the foreign workmen in our midst at the close of the seventeenth century. It is English perforce, because it was made in England. The followers of Huygens the Dutchman and the disciples of Martin the Frenchman were capable of producing something new and something surprising in English cabinet work. The foreign quarters of London have always been the centre of art industry. Armenians sit on the roofs of fashionable West End emporiums and restore carpets and rugs. Polish and Russian furriers travel by theTube from Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, from the Commercial Road and Shoreditch to Regent Street and Bond Street with their handiwork. What is now, was two hundred and fifty years ago. Alien craftsmen, more skilled than the English workmen, worked for less wages and produced better work.
The English style, therefore, of the late seventeenth century in lacquered work was as English as the work of Daniel Marot the Frenchman and of Grinling Gibbons the Dutch woodcarver at Hampton Court.
The English style is praised as something fine and original as a European replica of the Oriental. So it is. It is the French grafted on to the Dutch and acclimatized here. It holds the same place in lacquered work as the Dutch delft ware does in ceramics. It is a splendid imitation of a technique not grasped by the imitator. Lovers of lacquered rarities and collectors of the so-called English style, so rare and so much extolled, can take it to heart that it is really English—as English as the canvases of Vandyck or the painted panels of pergolesi.
English Amateur Imitators.—There are records enough to show that the art of lacquer had appealed to the amateur on account of its apparent simplicity. It is ludicrous to read of the attempts of seventeenth-century teachers of the art of "japanning" to young ladies. The seventeenth-century "miss," according to old memoirs, left her Stuart stump needlework, with its quaint costume and crude figures, to simulate the subtle art of the Chinese or Japanese lacquer-worker. At that time the greatest coach-panelpainter could not have approached the finesse of the lacquered work coming from the East. In spite of Stalker and Parker in 1688, with their treatise how to produce lacquered "japanning" in the Oriental style—a guide for amateurs and the standard work for all the academies that taught this new accomplishment—we cannot believe much of this amateur work found its way on clock-cases, which in point of time heralded the oncoming burst of colour. It is incredible that all of a sudden, following the clock-case and the chair-back, fine red and green and black and gold lac decoration, as exhibited by rich cabinets and gorgeous bureaus scintillating with colour, could have succeeded the stump-work amateurs. Stalker and company must go by the board as caterers for a very amateur taste. Their book possibly never reached the trade, or if it did, it could have had very little influence upon adept refugees practising a subtle art.
Painted Furniture not Lacquered Work.—Whatever may be determined as to the merits ofVernis-Martinor of the creations of Huygens the Dutchman in regard to comparison with Chinese and Japanese prototypes, it is certain that English amateur work, which is often dull gold design on a black ground, is not only an echo but a feeble echo of the original. They are splendid examples of dulness. Pepys complains that women wore feathers in his day. The feminine instinct is difficult to reckon with. Some years ago very up-to-date young wives "aspinalled" everything pea-green or peacock-blue. They did a lot of damage. Similarly, in theseventeenth century, when the boudoir escaped from needlework into lacquer, much otherwise harmless furniture must have been spoilt. Hundreds of fine pieces of furniture were brought up to date by the simple process of painting them and simulating the Chinese lacquered work. In the Early Victorian age of graining, sapient workmen painted solid oak panels and grained them to resemble the oak that they had painted. Folly is not the monopoly of any age. It is eternal. To-day the framer, if he is not watched and carefully instructed, glues a fine engraving to a sheet of cardboard and rubs a wet cloth over the surface of the print, destroying its beauty for ever with his clod-like smudge. Fools are ever present to confound the conservation of art treasures.
Painting a surface, however Oriental it may be in design, isnotlacquer work. Half the so-called lacquered work is merely painting with a coat of varnish put on it. When Sheraton and his school brought French painted panels into fashion in this country, they brought a true art. But it was not lacquer. Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, and Pergolesi, who used their brushes on cabinet work, and Zoffany, who did not disdain to paint clock-cases for Rimbault, brought a new style to this country. It was the age of colour-prints in the French taste; the Wards, the George Morlands, and the Bartolozzis demanded colour as a suitable environment. Satinwood and coloured marquetry and the painted panel accordingly found a place at this moment.
The amateur attempts of the late seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, up to thefuroreof the "Chinese taste" in 1750, must be disregarded as something outside the field of the collector—that is, if he is desirous of selecting lacquered work of excellent character. As a phase of fashionable caprice it is no doubt interesting, but it is to be hoped that most of these amateur efforts have succumbed to the influence of time and have been destroyed. They represent nothing in particular except a sham imitation of a great art, as stupidly offensive as was Strawberry Hill, the Gothic toy of Horace Walpole.
The Inn Clock.—We interpolate here a short outline of a class of clocks which appeals to collectors. In America they are termed "banjo clocks." A good deal has been written about them, connecting them with Pitt's tax on clocks and watches in 1797 of five shillings on each clock per annum, which Act was repealed in the next year. It is supposed that these clocks suddenly came into being when private clocks were taxed, and were used in inns. Owing to such a deep-seated belief they are always known throughout the country as "Act of Parliament" clocks. But they were used earlier than the Act of 1797, and were probably ordinary inn clocks in common use about that time. They were wall clocks varnished with black lacquer, mostly plain, but sometimes decorated in gold. Often the figures were in white and they had no protective glass.
Inn ClockINN CLOCK.Decorated in black and gold lacquer.Maker, John Grant (Fleet Street). About 1785.Formerly in possession of Sir Augustus Harris.(By courtesy of John R. Southworth, Esq.)
INN CLOCK.Decorated in black and gold lacquer.Maker, John Grant (Fleet Street). About 1785.Formerly in possession of Sir Augustus Harris.(By courtesy of John R. Southworth, Esq.)
The example illustrated (p.125) is decorated in black and gold lacquer, and the name on the dial is John Grant, Fleet Street, about 1785. This israther an elaborate specimen, as most of the ordinary inn clocks of this shape are innocent of these rather elaborate lacquer enrichments. They are to be found all over the country; we have seen one in an inn at Evesham. They are in Kent and the south, but do not appear to have been in common use in the northern counties, unless imported there later. Ale-house jests are frequent on old earthenware mugs—"Drink faire, don't swear"—and broad hints as to credit. This is similarly found as a standing pointed jest in an "Act of Parliament" clock in a Kentish inn, minus the works, with the inscription "No Tick"—a jest which the most seasoned toper could readily understand.
Oliver Goldsmith, when he wrote hisDeserted Villagein 1770, is said to have described in "Sweet Auburn" a typical Irish village in regard to its desertion, but he introduced touches reminiscent of his town habits. When he wrote of the village ale-house:—
The whitewash'd wall, the nicely sanded floor,The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door,
The whitewash'd wall, the nicely sanded floor,The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door,
The whitewash'd wall, the nicely sanded floor,
The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door,
he may have been thinking of inn clocks he had seen in Fleet Street. By his use of the word "varnished" it would appear that Goldsmith had in mind the ale-house clock of which we are speaking. There was no other that was "varnished," that is, lacquered. The term "Act of Parliament" clocks must therefore be discarded; these clocks were common inn clocks, and had nothing to do with the Act levying the tax in 1797.
As a rule, elaborately lacquered examples of such clocks should be regarded with caution by the collector. The inn clock was "varnished," but it had no panelled lacquer and lattice-work gold ornament. It was a simple hanging wall clocksansartistic embellishment.
THE LONG-CASE CLOCK—THE GEORGIAN PERIOD
The stability of the "grandfather" clock—The burr-walnut period—Thomas Chippendale—The mahogany period—Innovations of form—The Sheraton style—Marquetry again employed in decoration.
Tocollectors and connoisseurs the most desirable period of the long-case clock is from 1700 to about 1720. As we have seen in the previous chapters, this embraces the two styles of marquetry and lacquered work, although lacquered work continued to the middle of the eighteenth century. The year 1720 is not an arbitrary date, but this year is a convenient one. It marks the accession of the first of the Four Georges and the advent of the House of Hanover. As the title to a period of time, the Georgian period is as good as any other. Just a hundred years afterwards George III died, and the Fourth George reigned only ten years, till 1830.
In regard to the clock-case, the century was not filled with great changes. The writers of memoirs of the time—Selwyn and Walpole, Lord Hervey andFanny Burney—furnish many sidelights on the Georgian period. Thackeray in hisFour Georgesilluminated the Georgian era with more vigour than Early Victorians could stand. The eighteenth century is repellent by its stupidity and coarseness, by its insipidity and dulness, and yet it is relieved by a continuity of extraordinary forcefulness and freshness of vigour, undimmed in our naval and military history, unequalled in our art and letters. The following names occur to prove this suggestion: Clive and Warren Hastings, Rodney and Nelson, Moore and Wellington, Reynolds and Gainsborough, Dr. Johnson and Burke.
We lost, but not for ever, the love of the American Colonies for the great Mother Country, whose tongue is a common heritage, and whose democratic freedom is akin to that across the Atlantic, and this through the obstinacy of a German monarch thwarting the will of the people. "The first and second Georges were not Englishmen, and therefore were not popular, and excited no enthusiasm in their subjects, but were simply tolerated as being better than the Popish Stuarts"; so says Lord Macaulay in hisEssay on Chatham. It is ludicrous to learn that Walpole, beefy Englishman that he was, spoke no French, and had, as George I spoke no English, to conduct State affairs in Latin. What a stratum of misunderstanding on which to rest a people's destinies!