Love of the Artistic Life

The late loth century was a time when people were fascinated by the lives and lifestyles of artists. Many modelled their own homes on an artist’s studio and the relaxed atmosphere of an artist’s house with its comfortable chairs, collections of paintings and etchings hung in tiers from a picture rail or perhaps standing on an easel, a scattering of rugs and furs, potted plants and dried flowers, collections of interesting objects, including Oriental ceramics and furniture, and antiques.

A more contrived version of this came to be called the ‘Aesthetic movement‘. The Aesthetic room had a background of patterned wallpapers of the Morris kind and displayed a mass of items suggesting the owner’s connoisseur tastes. Bold figurative wallpaper, or rows of ceramics, around the frieze of the room added to the rather restless impression.

Furniture for such rooms was broadly based on Morris and Eastlake designs, but tended to be given their design features simply for effect. Display cabinets would incorporate panels of tiles, and curtains would disguise the shelves. Comfortable upholstered seat furniture might be decorated with rows of turned balusters — often stained black — beneath the arms.

Antique Collector MagazineRobert Edis, who wrote Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (1881), was an important influence in the Aesthetic style. The so-called progressive furniture designed by Edis and his imitators was generally advertised as ‘Art furniture‘. At first this meant handmade furniture but later manufacturers used it of any furniture, even if machine made, that was intended to appeal to buyers who claimed to have progressive tastes.

 

Following the Classic Thread to a Dead End

Today the Aesthetic house seems unbearably fussy and claustrophobic. By comparison, even the plush, cluttered look of mainstream Victorian taste seems relatively calm. To the unstylish middle-class majority, progressive taste, as represented by Morris and the Aesthetes, smacked of reform and socialism, and they wanted to have nothing to do with it. If they wanted a new style, they could choose from many acceptable Classical revivals. Renaissance, various French Louis styles, Grecian and Empire all reappeared — as did a version of Adam style combined somewhat incongruously with Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Not all revivals were pastiche, however. Publications such as Country Life and Architectural Review, both founded in the 189os, encouraged a greater respect and understanding for historical styles. Manufacturers made some high-quality responses to this interest. Royal Worcester, for example, produced beautiful urns and vases of Classical form. Minton executed Classical-style scenes precisely and laboriously in pate-sur-pate, painting layer upon layer of slip to give a cameo effect. The Stourbridge glass-makers also produced some exquisite Oriental and Classically inspired wares using techniques such as acid etching and cameo cutting.

 

Picturesque but Progressive Simplicity

For all its popularity, mainstream taste was in a cul-de-sac, and it was through progressive taste that 20th-century styles were to develop.

It was William Morris’s own Red House that anticipated a design of house that was to become popular in the 1880s. Its steep roof, asymmetrical arrangement of windows, and warm red brick gave it the antique charm of a small 17th-century manor house. Architects of the 1880s, notably Norman Shaw, evolved from it the ‘Queen Anne style‘ — a misnomer coined after Philip Webb designed such houses in Chelsea to fit in with surrounding Queen Anne architecture.

The picturesque, friendly style, a rejection of the Victorian, became the model for comparatively modest villas all over the country, especially in the new suburbs. The red-brick walls were dotted with varied white-painted windows — sashes, oriels and casements — and the steep roof was broken up by gables and dormer windows.

Inside, the house seemed to have been added onto over the centuries, with rooms of varying size, low ceilings, deep bays with window seats, inglenook fireplaces and other snug little corners, all combining to give a feeling of intimacy and relaxed comfort. The rooms were light and airy, with white or cream walls, or sometimes apple-greens and lemon- yellows, and plainly hung pale curtains. There was simple furniture of scrubbed oak, or old pieces with a comfortable used look, such as armchairs and sofas with fading upholstery.

A thriving antiques trade and reproduction industry developed around the Queen Anne style, and extended to reproduction furniture drawing upon Elizabethan, Queen Anne, Chippendale and Sheraton styles — and even to outright forgeries. Cretonne was the favourite upholstery and curtain material. This mixture of cotton and other fibres came into its own when cotton supplies faltered following the American Civil War (1861-5). Patterns printed onto its comparatively rough finish had the desired look of faded tapestry.

Birth of Arts and Crafts

Furniture designers looking to supply this market found ways of adapting the simpler styles of William Morris and Charles Eastlake. C. F. A.Voysey was a leader in the field. He created a beautifully crafted, if austere, look that reduced ornament utterly, concentrated on pure function and emphasised strong horizontal lines. Ernest Gimson also produced cabinets with simple straight lines but decorated with skilfully crafted veneers.

Many other pieces of this type were produced by guild-like groups such as Morris advocated. Use and beauty were their themes. The term ‘Arts and Crafts movement‘ was applied to the groups after the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was formed in 1888.

All the crafts, from pottery, metalwork and glass-making to jewellery and bookbinding, were influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement. It spread to the United States, where the furniture designer Gustav Stickley was a principal advocate of its style.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Mark of Craftsman, Love of Arts and Crafts, Victorian Style Rebellion part 2