The book of decorative furniture

A survey of the world's beautiful woodwork is before us. My first desire is, as artist, to express gratitude to owners, in this country and abroad, for their assent to the illustration of their choicest heirlooms; and, as author, to add thanks for information - often from family chronicles and necessitating considerable research - relative to these examples, which has materially increased the interest of the color plates.

Quite one of the most delightful features in the preparation of The Book of Decorative Furniture has been the opportunity of meeting conservators of old work, and of gauging the wealth of fine furniture remaining in this country. Though it should be superfluous, one must not omit to point out that the consent of owners to the publication of examples from their private collections is an act of courtesy to the public, and does not indicate that the collection is open to public inspection.

In expressing obligations, home and foreign state authorities are included. Without the exceptional facilities accorded, certain important and previously little-known specimens must have been omitted. Whilst, with diffidence, - deliberately dissenting at times from a few accepted conclusions, I have been greatly helped by some of the works - old and new - upon various aspects of decorative woodwork history. I trust my obligations have been fully acknowledged in the classified Bibliography forming part of this publication ; but when one has been studying a subject for a considerable time, it is obviously impossible to trace the possible source of every detail or idea. If, therefore, every such source is not included, this general acknowledgment will, I hope, be accepted in lieu thereof.

The term Furniture, originally implying a store or supply of any- thing (as is obvious if its origin is the old High German Frummen, to accomplish) is here employed in its more restricted popular sense to signify movable articles, almost invariably of wood, used in the home for personal rest, work, and pleasure, or for the storing of house- hold requisites and ornaments. In many cases, however, for the better presentation of a style, I have not scrupled to include typical examples of fixed woodwork, such as panellings and chimney-pieces among the illustrations.

Chronological sequence has been adhered to in the arrangement of the plates and matter; with the obvious exceptions of the chapters on the evolution and history of particular pieces or phases in furniture history, which, since they cover many periods, are equally in or out of order wherever inserted.

Catholicity of taste has been aimed at in the selection of the examples for the color plates; with an equal breadth of outlook and sympathy of interpretation even when treating of periods towards which one suspects oneself temperamentally antagonistic.

An endeavor has been made to show each example with con- temporary accessories and environment. When of equal beauty, preference has been given to less known specimens, or those not previously illustrated in color; though this has involved the elimination of deservedly favorite pieces, the result, it is believed, has been to add to the value and interest.

Loving labor has been expended upon the color illustrations, in the hope of achieving the happy mean between an insistence upon detail, so exacting as to destroy the real appearance of the example, and an impressionist sketch expressing details so vaguely as to be void of informative value.

I have been led to compile the charts of styles and accessories owing largely to the great difficulty experienced in obtaining promptly the information these charts embody. So far as I am aware, no attempt has been made hitherto to present such a mass of information upon decorative woodwork styles in systematized form, and, though the artistic temperament is usually in sympathy with the Chelsea Sage's ironic statement that "scarcely a fragment of man's body, soul, and possessions but has been probed and distilled," the value of this scaffolding of historic facts will, I venture to believe, be immediately recognized.

Traditions cluster round old woodwork, as round old buildings; but, granting that "the Golden Guess is Morning Star to the full round of Truth," its value to the would-be stater of facts is problematical. Romance and fact have their jocular habit of personating each other. To hold the balance between the lover of romance and the scientific appraiser of certainties is a task seldom performed to satisfaction ; for to exclude everything unattested by affidavit of actual eye-witnesses were as faulty as to include every "fairy tale" or local legend, such as that attached to the seventeenth-century chair preserved in Lutterworth Church, Leicestershire, in which Wyclif is actually stated to have died - in 1384!

Neither can one imitate to advantage the frank dogmatism of the inscription upon another old chair, that ascribed to William Penn(the founder of Pennsylvania), and treasured by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

I know not where, I know not when, But in this chair sat William Penn.

Whilst one cannot vouch the truth of every piece of alleged history, only such have been included as appear to the author's non-legal mind to present a strong prima facie case ; the crucible of probability has, it is hoped, served us well.

Study of a subject so many -faceted as that of Decorative Furniture should at least yield knowledge of ignorance upon that subject; no claim is therefore made to having explored every cranny or examined every flower in the prolific field. One realises also that words are too usually but the froth of thought, justified only by the hope of recondensation in the reader's mind into the essential mental elixir: a concluding aphorism to assist the continuance of Sir Joshua Reynolds' dislike of "talking artists."

There are two ways of knowing a piece of furniture. One, utilitarian, prosaic, superficial, and withal dreary, as a mere detail, tool, or item of existence - a table at which to eat, a chair to sit upon, "only this and nothing more." The other way is to know it as a whole, not only its purpose, but its evolution, history, and romance; the origin of this piece of ornament, the reason of that previously unconsidered shape, its beauties as well as its defects. The latter is the vitalising, interesting method, and my aim and hope will be to infuse its spirit into our book of furniture modes; by its aid we see that the furniture of bygone days often significantly mirrors the political, social, and ethical ideas of its time.

There are pieces of furniture so fine as to convey a sense of almost human personality. Some remind one of Haydn's simple melodies, some of the bravuras of the old Italian school, whilst the austere formal beauty of fugues or church music, seems to emanate from others.

How often in a room does one feel that some fine piece of old work stands solitary and disdainful of its modern companions; or, if the odds be with the old nobility of woodwork, that a coalition has been formed by them, to overawe an incongruous novelty of present- day woodwork thrust among them.

Every change in the forms of woodwork, from the crude stool of the semi-barbarian to the stately throne of a Lorenzo il Magnifico, from the rough dug-out trunk to the Boule Goffret de Manage, has been dictated by some requirement of use or beauty.

Furniture, then, has its story for us. If we will but learn its language, and care to decipher its message, we may at least catch somewhat of the spirit which inspired Balzac when he gaily decorated the walls of his garret with charcoal inscriptions, "Rosewood panelling and Commode" here, "Gobelins Tapestry and Venetian Mirror" there, and a "Picture by Raffaelle" in the place of honour over the fireless grate !

The story of the genesis and development of Decorative Furniture will be unfolded with sufficient fulness, aided by the diagram of British Woodwork Styles, the auxiliary chart of Accessories and Decoration, and the time-table of Architectural Periods, to make evident that, though decorative styles arise and sink like bubbles on the waters, each has its characteristic note and leaves some legacy to progress. The significance of the art relations between races, their cross-fertilisations, attractions, and repulsions will also be suggested, and an attempt be made to trace the manner in which national temperaments have expressed themselves in form and color, so that in their furniture the Italians have usually been architectural and refined, the Spaniards grandiose, the French picturesque and colour - loving, the Dutch cumbrous and stolid, and the English, homely, useful, and varied; whilst the rugged virility of the German, until tamed by professor and drill sergeant, has been as noticeable as the manner in which the stereotyped habit of thought induced by the ancestor- worship of the Celestial, has stamped itself on his household appointments.

The Book of Decorative Furniture aims in particular at depicting the essential characteristics of:

1. British Domestic Woodwork, from the period of the introduction of the printing-press into England and the building up of the English home-life, to the commencement of the nineteenth century. It embraces, therefore, the woodwork eras of Oak, Walnut, and Mahogany, the late Gothic, Tudor, Stuart, Queen Anne, William and Mary, and Georgian periods, giving due prominence to the productions of the great eighteenth-century designers, Chippendale, Adam, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and their contemporaries. Many of the examples are chosen from collections of colonial furniture in America.

2. French Woodwork, of the same period, with special preference to the masterpieces of the famous ehenistes and ciseleurs, who produced the sumptuous modes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

3. Italian, Flemish, German, Spanish, and Oriental Interior Woodwork.

Mother Earth originally sufficed for bed, chair, table, and side- board; only after man had reached a stage in which his faculties were not exclusively required for self-preservation in its crudest aspect, when "Nature red in tooth and claw" no longer obsessed him, could the idea of making articles for his service and pleasure have occurred to him.

To what extent man derives his liking for wood from the arboreal habits of his alleged ancestors it is outside the sufficiently wide field of Decorative Furniture to inquire ; but that, from the remotest ages to the present day, of all the materials applicable to the interior construction and adornment of the home, wood has been his first favorite and proven friend, admits of little doubt. Its study is consequently interwoven with that of the habits and beliefs of the past in a fascinating chapter of human history. Commencing with some unboasted of, though pre-Norman, forefather of ours, Carlyle's polysyllabic friend, the aboriginal anthropophagus, who, in the leisured ease of his cavern, first made rough incisions on club or stick to record his "bag," we may assume that the first artist was a carver, and that the birth of the technical, the mathematical, and the artistic faculties were due to the one impulse. Gradually becoming interested in his work as the tally became longer and the rudiments of order unfolded, our prehistoric ancestor arranged his notches in parallel lines. Next, as the sense of balance awoke, he placed his incisions diagonally and opposite to one another; from the straight to the curve was an easy transition, and so step by step the elements of order and design were awakened within his mind and made visible. If this surmise be accurate, the A first craftsman was a woodworker, and the seats, tables, and receptacles first constructed were dug, carved, or burnt out of the solid log, after the fashion of the canoes of primitive races. The crude pieces of furniture thus made were the forerunners of the innumerable assemblage of articles which man has since constructed for his use in the home.

It would be too fanciful to pursue this theory of the prehistoric stages of the woodworker's art through the ages which intervene until the civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria dimly loom upon the horizon of history, at a period at least 4700 years before Christ. More than average imagination is required to project

I i oneself sympathetically into the life of an alien people at so remote a period; and to allow not only for the differences caused by modes of religious and other government, but for the equally powerful influence of temperature upon temperament. There is consequently some difficulty, increasing the more one travels eastward, in understanding and appreciating the fittings of the homes of the ancient world.

The series of color plates, showing the characteristic grain markings of thirty-six varieties of constructional and decorative woods, has been photographed from the actual woods, without manipulation or exaggeration of the distinctive features of the grain.

The plates over-leaf show the principal woods used in early times: succeeding plates in Part V. show woods used for inlaying, etc., during the Stuart period mainly; in Part XII., some of the woods more especially in vogue during the eighteenth century ; and in Part XVI., some richly marked woods now at the disposal of the furniture designer. These plates manifest the versatility of Nature's own designs in fibres; and how little, after all, man has yet availed himself of her resources.

In Parts XV. and XVI. will be found a Chapter on Woods, and a Chart tabulating the principal characteristics of thirty of the principal trees used in the production of decorative furniture.

The few surviving examples of furniture used in the home prior to the fourteenth century are either too fragmentary in condition, too unimportant in character, or not sufficiently decorative, to justify inclusion in this series of one hundred color plates, each of which has been taken from an actually existing piece. Equal care has been taken to ensure accuracy in the contemporary accessories shown upon each plate.


EGYPT, BABYLON, AND ASSYRIA

Renan's description of Egypt as "a kind of lighthouse in the dark night of profound antiquity," appears especially apt when tracing the history of furniture ere Europe had emerged from savagery. Whilst the very name of Greece was unknown, the sun-baked fertile valley annually bathed by the Nile was peopled by communities, not only able to raise time-defying Sphinx and Pyramids, but also to express, in solid form and vivid color, their native force, severity, and dignity in the furniture of the homes of their upper classes.


EGYPTIAN DECORATIVE WOODWORK

The climate of the land of the Pharaohs is so dry that a feminine wig some six thousand years old was discovered at Thebes, within the last century, little the worse for time. The absence of humidity, coupled with the faith of the people in the persistence of personality after death, and the return of the spirit to the body (which led to burying models or actual pieces of furniture with the body), has preserved more records and specimens of this, the oldest civilization, than we possess of others many centuries later.

The throne of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsu, in the British Museum, is probably the most ancient piece of furniture in the world.

Bas-reliefs, papyri, and mural paintings almost invariably include representations of stools and couches, which, although shown in elevation, enable us to reconstruct the design.

The woodworking tools, which were placed among other votive offerings of implements in the foundations of Babylonian temples, that the spirits resident therein might actively assist the craftsmen, afford further insight into the methods and appliances of Egyptian carving and other crafts. Folding stools, chairs, and couches having seats of leather, plaited rushes or linen cord (upon which at times were thrown cushions or the skins of panthers and other wild animals), footstools, flower-stands, tables and cabinets, cushions of woven cloth and mattresses, are all evidences that the homes of Egypt and Nineveh possessed more than the rudiments of material comfort and refinement, even when judged by the standard of to-day. The craftsman of Egypt stamped his stern, positive personality on all he touched. He possessed knowledge of carving, turning, painting, inlaying, veneering, and canework. Upon the solid wood blocks, scarcely a foot high, which formed his bench he fashioned works in ebony, ivory, cedar, acacia (sont) or sycamore, enriched with precious stones, gold, silver, or baser metals, and carved with the symbols of his race; the legs of his pieces ending usually with lions' paws or the hoofs of bulls.