PERIODS IN FURNITURE
Periods in furniture are amazingly interesting if one plunges into the
story, not with tense nerves, but gaily, for mere amusement, and then
floats gently, in a drifting mood. One gathers in this way many
sparkling historical anecdotes, and much substantial data really not
so cumbersome as some imagine!
To know anything at all about a subject one must begin at the
beginning, and to make the long run seems a mere spin in an auto, let
us at once remind you that the whole fascinating tale lies between the
covers of one delightful book, the "Illustrated History of Furniture,"
by Frederick Litchfield, published by Truslove & Hanson, London, and
by John Lane, New York. There are other books--many of them--but first
exhaust Litchfield and apply what he tells you as you wander through
public and private collections of furniture.
If you care for furniture at all, this book, which tells all that is
known of its history, will prove highly instructive.
One cannot speak of the gradual development of furniture and
furnishing; it is more a case of _waves of types_, and the story
begins on the crest of a wave in Assyria, about 3000 years before
Christ! Yes, seriously, interior decoration was an art back in that
period and can be traced without any lost links in the chain of
evidence.
From Assyria we turn to Egypt and learn from the frescoes and
bas-reliefs on walls of ruined tombs, that about that same time, 3000
B.C., rooms on the banks of the Nile were decorated more or less as
they are to-day. The cultured classes had beautiful ceilings, gilded
furniture, cushions and mattresses of dyed linen and wools, stuffed
with downy feathers taken from water fowl, curtains that were
suspended between columns, and, what is still more interesting to the
lover of furniture, we find that the style known as Empire when
revived by Napoleon I was at that time in vogue. Even more remarkable
is the fact that parts of legs and rails of furniture were turned as
perfectly (I quote Litchfield) as if by a modern lathe. The variety
of beautiful woods used by the Egyptians for furniture included ebony,
cedar, sycamore and acacia. Marquetry was employed as well as
wonderful inlaying with ivory, from both the elephant and
hippopotamus. Footstools had little feet made like lion's claws or
bull's hoofs. According to Austin Leyard, the very earliest Assyrian
chairs, as well as those of Egypt, had the legs terminating in the
same lion's feet or bull's hoofs, which reappear in the Greek, Roman,
Empire and even Sheraton furniture of England (eighteenth century).
The first Assyrian chairs were made without backs and of beautifully
wrought gold and bronze, an art highly developed at that time. In
Egypt we find the heads of animals capping the backs of chairs in the
way that we now see done on Spanish chairs.
The pilasters shown on the Empire furniture, Plate XVI, capped by
women's heads with little gold feet at base, and caryatides of a kind,
were souvenirs of the Egyptian throne seats which rested on the backs
of slaves--possibly prisoners of war. These chairs were wonderful
works of art in gold or bronze. We fancy we can see those interiors,
the chairs and beds covered with woven materials in rich colours and
leopard skins thrown over chairs, the carpets of a woven palm-fibre
and mats of the same, which were used as seats.
Early Egyptian rooms were beautiful in line because simple; never
crowded with superfluous furnishings. It is amusing to see on the very
earliest bas-reliefs Egyptian belles and beaux reclining against what
we know to-day as Empire rolls,--seen also on beds in old French
prints of the fourteenth century. Who knows, even with the Egyptians
this may have been a revived style!
One talks of new notes in colour scheme. The Bakst thing was being
done in Assyria, 700 B.C.! Sir George Green proved it when he opened
up six rooms of a king's palace and found the walls all done in
horizontal stripes of red, yellow and green! Also, he states that each
entrance had the same number of pilasters. Oh wise Assyrian King and
truly neutral, if as is supposed, those rooms were for his six wives!
In furniture, the epoch-making styles have been those showing _line_,
and if decorated, then only with such decorations as were subservient
to line; pure Greek and purest Roman, Gothic and early Renaissance,
the best of the Louis, Directoire and First Empire, Chippendale, Adam,
Sheraton and Heppelwhite.
The bad styles are those where ornamentations envelop and conceal line
as in late Renaissance, the Italian Rococo, the Portuguese Barrocco
(baroque), the curving and contorted degenerate forms of Louis XIV and
XV and the Victorian--all examples of the same thing, _i.e._: perfect
line achieved, acclaimed, flattered, losing its head and going to the
bad in extravagant exuberance of over-ornamentation.
There is a psychic connection between the _outline_ of furniture and
the _inline_ of man.
Perfect line, chaste ornamentation, the elimination of the superfluous
was the result of the Greek idea of restraint--self-control in all
things and in all expression. The immense authority of the law-makers
enforced simple austerity as the right and only setting for the daily
life of an Athenian, worthy of the name. There were exceptions, but as
a rule all citizens, regardless of their wealth and station, had
impressed upon them the civic obligation to express their taste for
the beautiful, in the erecting of public buildings in their city of
Athens, monuments of perfect art, by God-like artists, Phidias,
Apelles, and Praxiteles.