Art decoration applied to furniture

The following chapters on the history and character of Household Furniture, originally published in Harper'a Bazar are reprinted at the solicitation of many readers, with some additions and emendations.

While admitting inevitable deficiencies, it is but just to say that they have been compiled with care and research, much time has passed in their preparation, and almost every known authority has been consulted - the resources of the Congressional Library, directed by the great learning of its librarian, having been placed at the disposal of the writer during the study of the subject.

Particular acknowledgment of indebtedness is made to the writings of Turner, Strutt, Palmer, Fergusson, Wornum, and Dresser, as well as to such volumes as Nash's "Mansions of England," S. C. Hall's "Baronial Halls," Chippendale's Plates, Sir Samuel Myrick's "Specimens of Ancient Furniture," Shaw's "Elizabethan House," Texier and Pullan on "Byzantine Art," Racinet on "Polychromatic Ornament," Sir William Chambers's Chinese plates, and the South Kensington hand-books, together with the invaluable works of MM. La Rousse, Paul La Croix, August Demmin, Jules Jacquemart, and Viollet-le-Duc, with many more, indeed, whose names it is unnecessary to enumerate.

For personal courtesies, for information, and for designs, the writer begs to thank, in company with others, Messrs. Pottier & Stymus, Kimbel & Cabus, Herter Brothers, and Cottier & Co., of New York; Messrs. Goupil, of Paris; and Messrs. William Morris & Co., Cox & Sons, Herbert & Co., and William Dalgleish, of London.

While the Renaissance was working its way to the beauty of the antique in Italy, it was having no such success in Holland; for although their Flemish neighbor caught its spirit, the products of the Dutch themselves remained dull and heavy evidences of the use of a manner whose raison d'etre was not understood. In their struggle for civic life and religious liberty, they had little thought to waste on gewgaws; but their habits of thrift remained, and if people wished their furniture thus and thus shaped and thus carved, the Dutch made them to suit the market. Nevertheless, age adds a sanctity to everything; and many of those old Dutch cabinets, gloomy, top - heavy, and overloaded as they are, sometimes covered with carving to the last splinter, and sometimes a solid patchwork of pottery of the most exquisite colors, are still so much sought after that it pays the counterfeiter well to fashion them in darkened wood with worn profiles to-day.

It was by way of Holland that the Renaissance reached England, partly by reason of the extensive commerce with the Low Countries; partly, perhaps, through the English sympathy with the people in their struggle there. It is only to Dutch example that we can attribute the heavy character of the Elizabethan style in furniture - the immense diameters of the supports, for instance, as sturdy as the legs of any plethoric burgomaster.

The Gothic had already begun to forget itself in England, and in the reign of Henry VII. had bent its high flight into the hunched and low-browed Tudor arch. It was ready now for further change, but not quite ready to surrender its existence; and thus all the Renaissance that came into England through the Elizabethan gate had still to pay tribute to the Gothic on its way. Neither pure Classic, nor pure Gothic, nor pure Renaissance, it yet had a certain royal warrant of its own, a stately charm, of which the English are still proud, speaking of it as the " noble Elizabethan manner," although this applies to the decoration of walls and ceilings, perhaps, more closely than to articles of furniture. There are many ancient drawing-rooms in England, in whose decoration there may be observed a delicate fancy of interlacing line on nearly as satisfying a plane as the Saracenic. The strap-work, indeed, which was the first distinguishing feature of the Elizabethan, was, after all, nothing but a play of line, and allowed the greatest liberty to the individual artist. It required genius, though, to develop it properly, and it was too frequently nothing but a medley of uninteresting sequences; and when the shield-work was added, and pierced shield-work at that, it sometimes became confusion worse confounded. This strap and shield work, it may be remembered, was very noticeable in the Henri Deux style in France, with which, indeed, the Elizabethan was contemporary, that style ranging over the reigns of several successive monarchs.

Shield-work - the cartouch - is simply what it purports to be, the representation of the armorial shield and its supports, the latter pierced in every conceivable manner, with circles, lozenges, crescents, and all sorts of openings, at first sight without rhyme or reason, although the interstices will be found, on examination, to assist in the general outline and effect. This use of the cartouch seems to be derived from the escutcheon and its heraldic ensigns, and the influence of those armorial bearings in the stormy periods of their assumption. Strap-work, also, is a term used as fitly as words can be used in description. What it describes is an elaborate tracery, in imitation of straps and buckles, varied sufficiently to atone for the meagreness of the type; and where it pleases at all, pleasing by its repetition, its symmetry, and the exact way in which each line seems to fit its place. It would be interesting to follow to its origin this strap -work, used so largely in Saracenic ornament as to suggest the Arab love and admiration of the horse of the desert ; and to discover if both strap and cartouch were not reminiscent of the time of chivalry and the Crusades, with all their harnessing, their shields, and banners.

The Elizabethan pure and simple, that belonging to the exact era of the queen, has this strap-work sometimes finished off with slight scrolls - foliages, the Italians called them - and associated with some classical ideas not yet very exclusively or carefully managed; straps appearing well riveted to the middle of classic ornaments, and antique shapes rising, like the afrite out of the jar, from the curious Renaissance pilaster, neither a vase nor a pilaster, in truth, broken as it is half-way by the rising shape, like those of the Terms, with which the ancients made their boundaries sacred, smaller at the base than anywhere else, and bearing straps, arabesques, and rosettes on its face. The spirit which allowed this mingling of the Gothic and the Classic in the Elizabethan is nowhere more perfectly illustrated than where Shakespeare, in his "Midsummer Night's Dream," sends his Gothic fairies to frolic in the Athenian forest.

You will sometimes find an Elizabethan chimney-piece, the fluted and channelled columns and the entablature of which leave little to be desired except the absence of the strap, which is apt to be bound somewhere about their length. Yet oftener the chimney-pieces are examples of cumbrous classical, in which the drawing of the figure is not sufficiently correct to warrant the artist in giving the whole of it. Over the chimney-piece there was frequently an elaborate dais, and another over the door, thus giving prominence to the hospitality of the age, dignifying the door-way of the guest's entrance and the chimney-side to which he was made welcome. Above these places pithy mottoes, expressive of the duties of the entertainer, were carved.

Nothing can be finer in a lofty room than an old Elizabethan ceiling with all its intersecting curves and angles. Some of these ceilings were of a rich plaster-work, with deep square caissons, and bosses at all the intersections, or else a light crossing and recrossing of the interlaced arcs and chords of a small circle, with a mask, a rose, a leaf, or a star, at every crossing of the lines ; but others were of the oaken beams, carved and gilt and often picked out in gay colors.

The panelling of the Elizabethan mansions was not the linen or parchment panel, popular in the preceding reign, although that was frequently adopted, but a simpler rectangular form of ornamentation that breaks up the surface of the wainscot nearly to the top of the room.

The Elizabethan chair is generally a very narrow and high-backed, low-seated chair, and except in its ornament, where the scroll plays "a graceful but still rather unmeaning part, does not vary greatly from the chairs that preceded it; and we have seen chairs with an indubitable genealogy attached to them as Henri Deux and as Louie Treize, square, uncouth, half-backed, with twisted wood and fringed coverings, that could not be told from other of the chairs used in Elizabeth's day; there were also broad straight - backed seats, indicative of a time when lounging was not thought of, and hardly comfort, unless the human back was a stouter mechanism than it is to-day. But the tables, beds, and cabinets of the period are much more novel, and are to be rivalled, in the queer taste they display, only by the Dutch, These are characterized, wherever the column is used in their construction - and that is almost everywhere - by a slight inversion of regular Greek architecture, in a base of foliage to the column, something after the style of the Assyrian base, although in that the leaves grow down instead of up. Out of this globular mass of foliage the bulky column rises to complete itself, sometimes going straight to the top, some- times pausing on the way to bulge out in another great globular mass, as if the not yet century old discovery that the world was round was a fact that the artists were still playing with. There are yet existing massive tables of the period that stand on four legs bound together by strong cross-bars at right angles, as if they were not stout enough to go alone, although able to uphold a moderate roof; at some distance above the cross-bars the legs effloresce into the big spheres, the foliage on the lower half of the sphere growing up, and on the upper half growing down, divided in the middle by a ring or strap, or else efflorescing into a hemisphere of acanthus leaves. Other elephantine structures are extension-tables made to pull apart till the top falls into place, when it has doubled its apparent size. There are cabinets, too, of equally heavy design, with the vase-like pilasters and their Termae between the doors, and with all sorts of relief in the favorite style of work, sometimes with sculptured figures and groups, the mighty cornice meanwhile upheld by pillars that again put forth the globular excrescence at some point, usually at about the centre of their length; there are others whose great curling side posts are one enormous scroll, beside which the inspiring but bulky Dutch ones, with their finely bevelled panels, have an air of noble dignity. The great size of the rooms for which these articles were designed should always be taken into account both in judging them and imitating them; for massive and mighty pieces, within narrow bounds, simply assume their fit and unnoticeable size when space expands around them. Although the style exercises a certain fascination from the fact, perhaps, that it is so essentially and individually a style, and from its suggestion of a people making use of it, full of strength and of ideas, its interest attaches to the past, and it is not exactly suited, we think, to modern reproduction. Yet there was something about this furniture curiously in accord with the mighty farthingales and high heels and starched ruffs of the ladies who moved among it, waited on by their ruffed and rapiered, stiff and stately, gallants. Hardly any other would seem be much in keeping with stout old Queen Bess herself and it acquires another interest when we remember that it was articles of this description that surrounded Shakespeare and Raleigh and Bacon and Spenser, and all the rest of that noble cluster that loom through the mist of history in the stature of demi-gods.