Period furnishings

In presenting this work upon the period furnishings of the house, covering historic furniture, fabrics, wall treatments, fitments and accessories, I would lay emphasis upon the fact that the subject cannot be grasped by blind groping or desultory reading. We cannot comprehend by simply memorizing dates and incidents. We must know the underlying origin and impetus and the growth of the styles as influenced primarily by the events of history and all that makes history; the development of nations, their social customs and their characteristics. There are no short cuts to be taken in a spirit of impatience. But to the man who is not easily discouraged at the outset this line of study opens a field of worldwide and compelling interest. If he approaches the subject with an orderly mind he will comprehend from the first the broad distinctions and soon begin to differentiate in the more subtle details of decoration.

Since the study must be systematic, I have prepared charts showing the development of races as well as charts showing the development of nations. These give us a retrospect of relationship which will prepare the student to comprehend the later chronological chart which shows the development of the decorative styles.

If we would grasp the meaning and the feeling of what, for want of a better term, we call the decorative periods, we must comprehend the influence in each period of the four prime factors in the development of art, namely, temperament, religion, commerce, and education. If within the limits of this book I have been able to elucidate the subject sufficiently to give the student an intelligent grasp of the essential points, I have accomplished all that I set out to do. For the benefit of those who would pursue the investigation further, I append a list of books to which I have had access and from which I have reproduced many illustrations. I wish to express my sense of personal obligation to the authors of these books, whose original investigations have made them the highest authorities, each upon his own special branch of this subject, and whose works I have found invaluable sources of information.

THE MISSION STYLE
 

The Mission style is a commercial style. Originally it made pretense to reflect the character of the furniture found in the missions of old Mexico and the countries now New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and California; but there was never any serious effort to conscientiously follow the style which, after all, was simply primitive Gothic - the simplest style of carpenter work made for or by the missionaries under conditions which neither invited nor permitted the exercise of an artistic touch. It was simple, crude furniture bearing naturally the influences of the Spanish architecture which constituted the environment. The woods used were those most easily manipulated and obtained.

Ponce de Leon discovered Florida in 1512; in 1513 Balboa discovered the Pacific; in 1519 Cortez set forth to conquer the countries of Mexico.

In the early part of the Sixteenth Century Mexico proper and all the newly established Central American provinces were being flooded with missionaries from Spain; churches by the hundred were built and missions established on every hand, in what are now the Mexican provinces.

The colonization of Mexico by Spain naturally meant the introduction of Catholic missions. In the early times the furnishings of these mission chapels were crude in the extreme, but in the Eighteenth Century the missions gathered strength and prosperity.

It has been often claimed that the Mission style was a purely American style. Unfortunately, the Mission style could have been historically accurate were it not that it was at an early age subjugated to the exigencies of commercialism.

Lumholtz, in his extraordinary work on Mexico, gives a vast store of illustration and data regarding the work of the Aztecs, that dominating people who possessed a civilization in Mexico before the Spanish invasion under Gortez, 1519.

One finds a very good example of this work at the American Museum of Natural History. While the furniture 'is probably not authentic in style, it approximates the character of furniture which even at this early date was found by the missionaries, and with slight alteration, was adapted to their ideas of Gothic structure.

Mission ornament was necessarily ecclesiastical and to present the old Mexican or Aztec decoration as a background to the Mission furnishings is wrong, for whatever the charm of Aztec decoration, we doubt if the representative of the Christian Church adopted it in any particular.

The United States Department of Agriculture is authority for the statement that the woods of California covered a wide variety, and it is illogical to assume that Mission furniture was made of any one particular wood.

In Southern California what is known as the Pacific Coast forest yields Douglas fir, spruce, larch, western red cedar (arbor vitae), hemlock, redwood and big-tree, yellow and white pine, incense, port Oxford and yellow cedar, fir (balsam), juniper, yew, Cottonwood, maple, alder, birch, madorna and laurel.

In Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Northern Mexico, what is known as the Rocky Mountain forest yields yellow pine, Douglas fir, fir (balsam), spruce, juniper, pinon pine, aspen, cotton-wood and oak.

In other parts of Lower Mexico we find all of the sub-tropical and tropical woods, mahogany, pine, prima-vera, santa maria, logwood, Mexican rosewood, zebrawood, mesquite, aliso (alder), ash, elm, mulberry, Cottonwood, silk cotton tree or ceiba, linden, china, pimienta, John Crow wood, buttonwood, black maba and salm-wood.

In Central America and West Indies, mahogany, lignum vitae, logwood, sabicu, rosewood, fustic, quiebra hacha, zebrawood, calabash, cocobola, cork-wood, pananm, jaqua, amarillo, laurel, sarsaparilla and cocoa-wood.

It is doubtful if any Spanish furniture was brought over by the early missionaries for the furnishing of their pioneer structures. Their work was attended with great hardships, long marches and struggles for a living and a foothold in the interior of a new country. And it is unreasonable to suppose that they added to the hardships of their progress any unnecessary burdens. The famous missions of to-day are the missions of California, and in their construction the builders utilized black oak, laurel, juniper, live oak, red wood, scrub oak, sycamore and walnut.

The Arts and Crafts style has gradually become a general term for any furnishings of an unperiodic and unconventional character. Originally, it stood simply for individuality. It represented a movement that advocated the association of art and labor and had its first practical inception some forty years ago, when Morris built his famous Red House, ignoring the prevailing styles and factory products and producing through individuals an independence that was effective. But the work of Morris and his confreres was saturated with the spirit of Medievalism, hence the movement at the very beginning presented a consistency of decorative thought.

Morris developed along the ideas instilled by Carlyle and Ruskin, who preached what was practically the socialism of art, expressing contempt for the purely artificial, the carving that is plaster, the luster that is varnish, the bronze that is sheet brass, the painted woods - all the dictates of commercialism or tradition, and in no way representing an individual ambition. In the beginning the movement was undertaken by men who had something worth saying.

But to-day the movement simply expresses a contempt for all rules of order.

While Carlyle and Ruskin advocated the application of individual thought, the movement would never have developed were it not that the individual thought was born of culture, and followed with respect the pre-Raphaelite traditions.

The doctrine that no man can accomplish anything worth accomplishing if he is not free to express all that is in him, is good theory if the man is an artist, but it is dangerous to extend this encouragement to the inexperienced and uneducated.

As a result the Arts and Crafts movement has become simply a cloak behind which one hides his inability to produce a period style.