THE LONG-CASE CLOCK--THE PERIOD OF VENEER
AND MARQUETRY
What is veneer?--What is marquetry?--The use of veneer and
marquetry on long-case clocks--No common origin of design--Le
style réfugié--Derivative nature of marquetry clock-cases--The
wall-paper period--The incongruities of marquetry.
For some fifty years--that is, from about 1670, the date of the secret
treaty of Charles II with Louis XIV, to about the year 1720, the early
years of the reign of George I--there was a marked leaning towards
colour in furniture as distinct from form. The solid English oak of
early days and the later intricacies of walnut were dependent solely
on form, either in carving or in elaborate turning, as in the Charles
II and James II period, when the so-called "barley-sugar" pattern and
other elaborate "corkscrew" turned legs added grace and beauty to
furniture beginning to take its place beside the work of great European
craftsmen.
In flattering imitation of continental schools, but more particularly
the Dutch, English cabinet-makers commenced to inlay their furniture
with ivory and coloured woods, and designs embodying conventional birds
and flowers became of frequent use. A considerable amount of skill
was employed in adopting this new art, which necessitated the careful
laying of veneer. In comparison with the ordinary Dutch cabinet-work,
this derivative English furniture exhibits, in a measure, finished work
of a high degree in regard to the exactitude of cabinet-work which
surpassed the prototypes. The English craftsman was working in a new
medium, and he apparently was exceptionally careful in handling its
technique.
In the reign of William of Orange, as may be imagined, with his Dutch
retinue and the Dutch influences at Court, the style received a great
impetus and the country was flooded with Dutch art. This impress
of the House of Nassau is left upon Hampton Court, with its canal,
its avenues, and its formal gardens. What Charles II and his exiled
cavaliers brought in spirit from The Hague, William brought in reality
when he landed at Torbay in 1698.
It must be remembered that in 1685 and in the immediately succeeding
years, owing to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV,
fifty thousand Huguenot families fled from France to escape a horrible
fate at the hands of their Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen. In vain
the Archbishop of Canterbury directed the clergy not to dwell on the
sufferings of the French Protestants, and in spite of James II, whose
sympathies were with their persecutors, the sum of forty thousand
pounds was collected in the English churches and handed over to the
Chamber of London. This was a great sum in those days to be raised
thus voluntarily. Three years afterwards James ignominiously fled
to the Continent and a second Revolution ended the Stuart dynasty.
Thousands of skilled workmen settled in London. At Spitalfields they
erected silk-looms; they represented the best type of artist craftsmen,
silversmiths, woodworkers, glass-blowers, cabinet-makers, designers,
and other artistic industries. Their advent was an artistic asset to
this country. The Duke of Buckingham ten years earlier had procured
a number of expert glassworkers from Venice and had established the
manufacture of glass and mirrors at Vauxhall.
=What is Veneer?=--The art of veneering is of ancient origin. It has a
long record before it reaches what we now know as veneering. To make a
rapid survey we must commence with the art of inlay. This art may be in
metal upon metal, as in damascening; stone upon stone, as in _pietra
dura_; porcelain, terra-cotta, enamel, or coloured glass, as in mosaic
work; or wood upon wood, as in intarsia; which subsequently became
marquetry. The inlays in all these techniques are cut into cubes,
hexagons, triangles, or other forms, often of very minute size, to form
broad designs, as in marble pavements, or surfaces of great area such
as the dome of St. Mark's at Venice, the choicest home of mosaic work
in the world. From these grandeurs to the Tunbridge ware trinket-boxes
with their intricate patterns, or the nicely fitting lids of Scottish
snuff-boxes, is a far cry, but they embody the same principle.
Veneering may therefore be comprehensively described as overlaying or
inlaying one body with portions of another. A veneer may be plain,
without inlay or marquetry, such as a plain panel of mahogany affixed
or laid on to a body of oak or some other wood. But in practice it has
been so much used as a groundwork for the art of inlay and marquetry
that it is difficult to separate them.
There is a prevalent idea that veneer has a sinister meaning. The
comparison has been made between solid and veneer, as though the former
were true and the latter something false, parallel with the distinction
Pope made--
Worth makes the man, the want of it, the fellow;
The rest is all but leather or prunello.
There is every reason why such a notion should be held as true. It is
true of modern cabinet-work of the shoddy type, where pine is veneered
with mahogany and walnut and passed off as solid. But the collector
is dealing with a period when veneering was an art adopted for sound
decorative and technical reasons and not solely for purposes of gain.
The old craftsman found it impossible to make cabinets and other
pieces of furniture of rare wood, such as ebony, tulip-wood, rosewood,
satinwood, and others. It was not always workable in such fashion;
its weight was one factor against its employment in the solid. But
in introducing panels and fronts of these richly decorative woods
the cabinet-maker of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
brought colour into his work and employed the highest artistry. The
sound construction of these old veneered cabinets was before the days
of machinery; veneers or slices of the wood to be laid on were cut by
hand, and were one-eighth of an inch thick, hence their stability.
Nowadays sheets of veneer are saw-cut and knife-cut, and with modern
machinery the former vary from twelve to fifteen to the inch, and the
latter average about forty sheets to the inch, although sheets can be
cut, incredible as it may seem, of the thinness of a cigarette paper.
=What is Marquetry?=--Marquetry is the inlaying of wood into wood. We
have already seen that other inlays have their respective techniques
and names. But there is the question as to the application of the old
word "tarsia," which apparently in the early days included both wood
and metal inlays. "Intarsia" is the term applied to that particular
early type of marquetry which brought inlaying coloured woods to such
perfection in two great schools, the Italian and the German. By means
of woods, either of their natural colour or stained, woodworkers
produced pictures in wood. Great Italian masters drew for the Italian
school of artist craftsmen. Just as the dome of St. Mark's at Venice
shows the successive styles of mosaic work executed during several
centuries from Byzantine to Italian, so the choir stalls show the work
of the cloistered _intarsiatori_ at the cathedral at Siena, at the
cathedral and at S. Maria Novella, Florence, at Perugia, at Lucca, at
Pavia, at Genoa, and at Savona.
Small pieces of carefully selected wood were inserted into darker wood
panels to produce fanciful devices or pictures, with perspective and
even tone. This intricate art resembled that of the mosaic-worker,
whose more ambitious works have taken from fifteen to twenty years to
execute. Some of the tesseræ in this technique are hardly larger than a
pin's head. Day by day they were patiently laid on the cement to form
the design. Similarly in the old intarsia days the workers did not heed
time. They selected their delicate little pieces of coloured wood and
proceeded to lay their panels and stalls for posterity.
The German school of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attracted
considerable attention, at Nuremberg, at Augsburg, at Dresden, and at
Munich. In North Germany intarsia was principally employed on smaller
articles, such as cabinets, chairs, coffers, although Lübeck and Danzig
furnish fine examples in the panelling of the town-halls. In South
Germany, in closer touch with Italian influence, the practice was more
diverse; sideboards, doors, bedsteads, panelling, friezes, and even
gables to châteaus, received this ornamentation.
Augsburg and Nuremberg developed an industry and exported their
marquetry. This suggests the first attempt at duplication. Black on
white and white on black, male and female as they are termed in the
trade, or later, in France, Boulle and counter-Boulle, were exported.
The slicing of design and the manipulation of the knife, and later the
saw, came into operation to fret out the pattern. In its subsequent
development marquetry left the inlaying, piece by piece, and as tools
became more perfect easier methods were employed. Whether André
Boulle, in his _atelier_ under Louis XIV, invented the process or
whether he got it from Germany through Holland is immaterial to the
present argument. His brass and tortoiseshell marquetry set a fashion
to all succeeding craftsmen. He has given his name to his particular
style; though it has been "defamed by every charlatan and soiled with
all ignoble use" and corrupted to "Buhl," but there is no reason why
_Boulle_ should not stand, although Webster's Dictionary knows him not.
Practically, nowadays marquetry is the cutting of thin sheets of wood
which have been superimposed upon each other, and when taken apart,
after the desired pattern has been cut away, fit into each other to
produce the desired colour effect. For instance, a sheet of walnut,
dark brown, placed over a sheet of sycamore, light yellow, has a
pattern pasted on it in paper. The delicate fret-saw traces this
pattern and cuts through both light and dark woods. The result is that
the light-wood surface is left with a perforation ready to receive
the piece cut from its fellow, the dark wood, and _vice versa_. That
is just what the marquetry-worker does. He transposes the piece of
sycamore to the walnut surface and fits it in, showing a yellow design
on dark brown, and similarly the walnut piece, fitted in place or the
sycamore ground, shows a brown design on a yellow surface. This is only
a simple outline of the process, as more than two sheets are placed
together. In its intricacies it represents one of the most delicate and
highly skilled crafts in connection with cabinet-making. The adept at
jig-saw puzzles may draw a seemly parallel between his pastime and the
patient artistry of the artist-craftsman.
=The Use of Veneer and Marquetry.=--In its decoration and in its
form the long-case or "grandfather" clock is as Dutch as the tiles
of Haarlem. Derivative as is English art, the sharp line of a new
introduction is rarely so clearly defined as in the instance of the
late seventeenth-century long-case clock. As a long wooden case it was
itself an innovation. Being new, it was never at any previous time
English, and it started its history under Dutch auspices, as in similar
manner the pendulum was introduced into England by Fromanteel. There is
no mistaking its origin. It comes straight from the placid canals and
waterways, the prim and well-ordered farmsteads, or the richly loaded
burghers' houses of the Low Countries. It has become as thoroughly
English as the Keppels and the Bentincks.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
With fine marquetry decoration.
Maker, Jas. Leicester (Drury Lane). 1710.
Height, 8 ft. 2 in. Width, 1 ft. 7-1/2 in. Depth, 10 in.
(_By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq._)]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, J. Windmills (London).
Date, about 1705.
Decorated in marquetry.]
[Illustration: ENLARGEMENT OF DIAL.
Showing cherub's head with floriated design in spandrel and broken
frieze. Marquetry in hood indicates coarser style than in rest of clock.
(_By courtesy of H. Wingate, Esq., Rochester._)]
In regard to clock-cases, it is mostly found that the veneer has been
laid upon an oak body. Usually the main surface is of walnut, into
which the design has been inlaid by the use of other woods of suitable
colours. At first the marquetry was in reserves or panels, as
though the worker were warily picking his way and timidly mastering the
technique. At this period clock-cases were, on account of the small
space to be inlaid, very fit subjects for experiment. Doubtless some
of the more ambitious work of the early years of this half-century
(1670-1720) was actually produced by Dutch and also by French workmen
settled in this country, and doubtless the clock-cases were largely
imported. In either instance this would account for the early adoption
of small articles such as clock-cases, after which followed chairs
and tables, and finally larger pieces of furniture such as bureaus,
when the cabinet-maker was master of the new art of laying veneer and
marquetry, or when the public taste had advanced sufficiently to induce
him to embark on more elaborate work.
It is not easy to lay down any exact rules as to the priority of
certain styles of marquetry. Many of them overlap in regard to date.
It all depends on the point of view. Huguenot craftsmen or Dutch
marquetry-workers could, and possibly did, make in London many such an
example as the fine case with panels (illustrated p. 75) containing
the movement by James Leicester, in date 1710, or the other example,
in date about 1690 (illustrated p. 237), with the movement by Joseph
Knibb, of Oxford, placed in the chapter on provincial makers as
a glorious tribute to those great makers who worked outside the
metropolis. In this earlier case of the Knibb clock it will be seen
that there are only two panels, and they exhibit, in comparison with
the James Leicester clock, a finer sense of proportion in relation to
the surface to be decorated. It may not unreasonably be advanced, where
the nicety of balance is well sustained, that the maker set out to make
a clock-case with the dimensions fully before him as a marquetry-worker
and not merely as a mechanical layer of imported panels. There is the
suggestion in cut panels that they were not thought out in accord with
the English clock-case, with its hole showing the pendulum.
Of exceptional interest is the fine clock by J. Windmills. The
marquetry case of this clock has been untouched, and its condition,
as shown by the illustration (p. 77), helps to prove a point. It is
clear that the panel of marquetry was not intended by the craftsman
who laid it to have a hole to show the pendulum. The design shows the
disturbance caused by this unexpected innovation. The enlarged hood
shows the broken frieze, an accident frequently attending old examples.
But the frame in hood around glass has been laid in marquetry by a
coarser hand in an attempt to be in keeping with the panel of the door
in case below. The somewhat clumsy joinery of the door frame, shown
clearer in the enlargement, indicates the amalgamation of the English
case-maker and the more finished marquetry-panel worker.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Henry Harper (Cornhill). 1690-95.
Height, 8 ft. 6 in. Width, 1 ft. 7-1/2 in. Depth, 10 in.
(_In the possession of Mr. John Girdwood, Edinburgh._)]
Frequently cases offer curious obstacles to preconceived ideas. Take,
for example, the fine case with the movement by Henry Harper of the
period from 1690 to 1695 illustrated (p. 81). As far as it is possible
to determine, it would seem that this specimen of marquetry belongs
to a later period, certainly more advanced than the panel period.
With so fine a field of design to select from, no marquetry-worker
would take this design from a Persian carpet at the beginning of the
style. This case represents the highest Dutch feeling and technique as
assimilated in this country, and the carved brackets have a distinctly
Marot character. It stands as a superlative example of marquetry
decoration.
It sometimes happens that a clockmaker, as the differences in sizes
of many of these clocks are not great, found an earlier case ready to
his hand, or a client desired a particular style of decoration, and
he accordingly put his new clock of 1710 into a case twenty or thirty
years earlier. Or it may be that some marquetry-worker reproduced the
former style. Whichever may have happened we cannot say--these are
the conundrums left as a heritage to the collector, who now comes two
hundred years later.
The fine example of a clock by Martin, London (1710), illustrated (p.
85), is well balanced, and typifies the marquetry in an early period.
The turned pillar has not yet disappeared, and is reminiscent of the
fine Tompion cases with turned pillars. It exhibits the transitional
stage before marquetry entirely supplanted the older style. In this
specimen the marquetry is under fine artistic control.
In what for convenience of expression we term the "all-over" period the
marquetry-worker ran riot. Not only in colour, for he had to compete
with the richly coloured lacquered cases, but in form. But he had as a
craftsman learned the art of laying his imported marquetry sheets where
he willed. He was not deterred from rounded surfaces, and the cramped
pattern of the panel was discarded, to make way for the style where the
pattern, like chintz or wall-paper, conveniently repeated itself.
There is no mistaking such an example, splendid though it is, as
exemplifying this period illustrated (p. 87), for the quieter and more
reticent style of panel-work with design in due subjection.
The student will desire to take cognizance of country-made marquetry
cases. Marquetry was practised in England before this outburst
of colour and form on the clock-case. Occasionally settles and
buffets--very occasionally--had stringing in a thin pattern of black
and white intarsia work. Provincial makers are therefore a delight as
well as a confoundment to the collector. A cabinet-maker in Devonshire
or a would-be marquetry-worker in Cumberland may, between his
intervals of making the coffins for his deceased neighbours or turning
their wagon shafts, essay to try his hand at imitating the squire's
clock-case of fifty years' previous date. He usually puts a label to
his handiwork which renders it easily recognizable. There is no _style
réfugié_ about his craftsmanship. His design is crudely "chopped in,"
that is, the solid wood has been cut out to receive the pieces of the
design, usually, as found now, very badly glued, and severely handled
by time. This is interesting as showing 'prentice work--that is,
'prentice work coming many years after the finished art had been
established in this country. It is remarkable that no such apprentice
work appears in London-made examples. The conclusion to which one must
come is that there was no such apprenticeship. Foreign refugees made
the clock-cases or they were imported from Holland.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Martin (London). 1710.
Finely decorated in marquetry, with turned pillars in hood. Showing
transitional period.
(_In the possession of Mr. John Girdwood, Edinburgh._)]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Decorated in marquetry in the "all-over" style.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons._)]
=No Common Origin of Design.=--All art is derivative. It is not a crime
for the craftsman to assimilate the best of all the great artists who
have preceded him. This was the insanity of _L'Art Nouveau_. It wanted
to commence again at elementary principles and to use poor forms that
had long been discarded by great artificers. It wished us deliberately
to ignore the past. An anvil has arrived by a process of evolution
through long centuries of metal-workers, since man first smelted ore
and fashioned metal, to its present form. It would be idle to equip the
blacksmith with a square anvil.
From China to Japan, from India to Armenia, from Bagdad to Cairo,
from Alexandria to Venice, from Canton to Goa and thence to Lisbon,
backwards and forwards across the world's trade routes art impulses
have throbbed to the tune of the monsoons. Pulsating with life, they
carried, and still carry, Eastern ideas to the West, and Western
inventions to the East. Behind modernity and man's latest devices
somnolently lies the great dead past--China and the Far East, Persia
and Babylon, Egypt and Greece and Rome. Aztec gods and Ashanti gold
ornaments, Peruvian Inca clay vessels and Malayan idols, surprise and
bewilder the ethnologist with the similarity of rudimentary forms or
with the marvellously pure ornament that comes out of the so-conceived
dark corners of the earth to suggest older civilizations as artistic as
those of the modern world.
=Le Style Réfugié.=--The history of art is not hidden. Holbein and
Hollar and Vandyck, Lely and Kneller worked in this country. The number
of foreign artists and artist-craftsmen working in this country as
acclimatized or as "naturalized" was stupendous. The beautiful swags
and delicately carved woodwork embellishing so many English houses and
proudly held as heirlooms are by a Dutchman's hand--Grinling Gibbons.
The list could be extended. It is natural that the gold of England
should have a hypnotic attraction to artistic temperaments. It is the
law of supply and demand. Like bananas and pineapples, oranges and
dates, foreign talent comes to a great emporium.
The _style réfugié_ was something definite. It was a term employed
in Holland just at the time when a similar immigration was occurring
in this country. The French Protestant refugees fleeing from the
insane fury of Roman Catholic bigots naturally fled to Protestant
countries--to England, to Holland, and to Germany. It is admitted
on the Continent that these highly skilled artist craftsmen had
an influence on the art of the country of their adoption. It is
acknowledged as _le style réfugié_. In England, writers on furniture
have half-heartedly alluded to this influence, but it was very real.
Daniel Marot, a descendant from an eminent family of French artists,
a pupil of Lepautre, formerly at the Gobelins factory, and one of the
creators of the Louis Quatorze style, took refuge in Holland, where
William of Orange appointed him as Minister of Works. From The Hague
he followed his patron to England at the "Glorious Revolution." It was
his genius in design that made our William and Mary and Queen Anne
styles. At Hampton Court his personality predominates. Sir Christopher
Wren occupied himself with the architecture, but the decorations are
by Daniel Marot. Marot died in 1718. He stands in the forefront of the
exponents of _le style réfugié_, and behind him are hundreds of his
compatriots. It is idle to ignore this influence.
Chippendale owed more than most people imagine to Marot. _Le style
chinois_ is to be found, so to speak, in embryo, in Marot's design
books, and suggestions of it appear in some of his executed work.
The un-English marquetry became acclimatized, and later, as we shall
show, the equally un-English lac became a fashion.
=Derivative Nature of Marquetry Clock-cases.=--The laying of marquetry
as a craft is one thing, the conception of marquetry as a creative art
is another. We may admire the dexterity of the inlay but deplore the
design. At the Mortlake tapestry works Vandyck and Rubens made drawings
for the craftsmen. In England, whenever the craftsman has been allied
with the artist he has produced great results; whenever he has run
alone he has rapidly run downhill. Josiah Wedgwood had on the one
side Bentley the classical scholar, on the other Flaxman the artist
and modeller with a perfect continental training. Chippendale, great
craftsman that he was, would have been better advised to prune his
Chinese taste and discard his worthless Gothic style. An artistic brain
behind him would have saved him from such atrocities. Sheraton, more
the artist than the craftsman, made no such blunders.
Evidently the making of clock-cases became an industry. Personally
we incline to the belief that seventy-five per cent. of them were of
foreign manufacture, either in Holland and imported here, or made by
Dutch immigrants or French refugees in this country. The derivative
nature of their design tells its own story. It has nothing English
about it. Take the early geometric star pattern or the early coloured
birds and flowers, what else are they but Dutch? Is there anything
in English art like them? The conclusion to which one must arrive
is that the marquetry clock-case panel is Dutch or Anglo-Dutch. The
derivative character runs through the whole gamut from the reticent and
well-balanced panel period to the "all over" phase, when every inch
was covered with marquetry, to the arabesque and intricate mosaic work
reminiscent of Persia, and finally to the decadent period when Eastern
carpets found themselves reproduced in marquetry on the clock-case.
[Illustration: WILLIAM AND MARY CHEST OF DRAWERS.
On original stand. Decorated in marquetry. Side showing panel in common
use by cabinet-makers and clock-case makers.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. Hampton & Son._)]
[Illustration: CHEST OF DRAWERS DECORATED IN MARQUETRY.
Side showing panel in common use by cabinet-makers and clock-case
makers.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons._)]
When the hood of the clock-case became arched and the dial
correspondingly had a lunette, the decorative marquetry panel
in the case below followed the same form. It is possible, indeed
very probable, that many such shaped panels were imported and were
especially intended to meet the demand for use on clock-cases. It
is always possible to a trained eye to see whether a panel has been
made to fit the place in which one finds it. Is it part of a sanely
conceived decorative scheme, or was it used because it happened to be
handy as part of a cabinet-maker's stock-in-trade? We illustrate two
examples of marquetry chests of drawers of the William and Mary period
which offer many interesting features. In regard to the example with
the oval panels (illustrated p. 93), the side of the piece exhibits
a panel that is incongruous where it is. It is a clock-case panel.
Similarly in the "all-over" marquetry chest of drawers of the same
period (illustrated p. 95), the panel at the side is undoubtedly a
clock-case panel. To examine both these chests of drawers in detail is
to discover that the former shows that the panels of the drawers were
carefully thought out before execution. The metal drop-handles in the
centre were each intended to be there. They were in the cabinet-maker's
mind when he made his design and laid his marquetry. He has
accommodated his pattern to receive these handles. In the other example
it is seen that no such care was taken. The escutcheon of the locks
covers a portion of the marquetry. The cabinet-maker in London had his
Dutch-imported panels ready to hand and he used them as he found them.
If some collector or expert were to come along and determine that
all the green and purple and flecked glass of the Early Victorian
period, bottles with long necks and gilded stoppers, in English leather
cases, vases of inimitable colour but execrable form, were typically
English as representing early nineteenth century glass, we should put
his theories aside as nonsense. Partly because we happen to know what
Bohemia was exporting and partly because we know what the English
glassworkers were doing in the same period. But in regard to 1650 to
1700 it is less easy to determine whether a wonderful school of expert
marquetry-workers existed in London as a secret industry. One must
assume that they had quietly assimilated all the technique of the Dutch
craftsmen, and descended on the town, just at the right moment, with
a new art, quite un-English, just at that moment when Dutch fashions
were in the ascendant and when Mary, the consort of William of Orange,
was employing Marot, the late Surveyor of The Hague, to convert Hampton
Court from a Tudor into an Anglo-Orange palace.
On an examination of delft earthenware of the period and Dutch
decorative art in general, it is fairly obvious that the art impulses
coincide with the various phases of ornament as found on the marquetry
panel, whether they were the floriated designs of Italy with the
vase and the symmetrical flowers in conventional form, further
conventionalized by the Dutch, who clung to tulips and carnations, or
the arabesque designs derived from the Dutch traffic with the East
Indies, the pseudo-Persian sherbet tray as a panel, the prayer rug
as a full design. With his black delft to imitate lacquered work of
Japan and his blue delft to imitate the Kang-he Chinese porcelain, the
Dutchman proved himself a superlative translator. The Dutch East India
Company, till it was supplanted, was the conduit-pipe through which the
arts of the East were allowed to pass into Europe.
In another portion of this volume we show how apparently obscure
ornament has a long lineage, and that craftsmen in minor details were
producing something of which possibly they knew not the origin nor the
significance; but it behoves the intelligent collector, who, after all,
is in possession of more facts, spread over a wider area, to arrive
at sane conclusions in regard to workers who wrought better than they
thought.
=The Wall-paper Period.=--It was a sad time when the idea originated
to make wall-paper simulate marble or tapestry or leather, or anything
else. Wall-hangings made of paper by the Chinese came into England in
the early seventeenth century. But European wall-paper is a modern
abomination. Chintz has a better excuse to imitate satin. "Callicoes"
were tabooed at first, but they had and have a legitimate place.
Wall-paper is an affectation which cannot be defended. It always
pretends to be what it is not. It is really wonderful that amateurs did
not paste it over clock-cases. Perhaps they did, and other persons,
wiser in their generation, removed it.
But if wall-paper of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries was not affixed to the clock-case, it was there in spirit,
as it was on strident bureaus and other equally offensive articles of
the period. The "all-over" style exhibits marquetry run mad. Artisans
could apply the thin veneer, ten sheets to the inch, like paper, and
they did. They had borders as common as modern factory-made imitation
lace at a few pence per yard, and they laid them beside the pilasters
and around the already well covered case. There was no square inch
that could be said to be free from the attentions of the gluer of
marquetry sheets. He began to dominate decoration till happily he was
extinguished.
=The Incongruities of Marquetry.=--To those who have handled a good
many examples of marquetry furniture in which panelling is predominant,
such as clock-cases, there is one feature which always strikes the
practised eye. The question arises, How did the marquetry panel come
there? It is another way of expressing the view that the proportion is
radically wrong. A glance at a poor panel of a clock-case, or a faked
panel, or a stupidly wrought panel, is enough. To the collector of old
books nothing is more annoying than to find that the binder with all
his fine tooling has trimmed off the margins of the printed matter and
the illustrations. It is an edition with the space expurgated. It is
the binder _versus_ the printer, and similarly in the clock-case it
is too often the cabinet-maker _versus_ the designer of the marquetry
panel. This is the sentiment one has on looking at many of the
marquetry clock-cases. The persons who received them from Holland did
not always know how to use them correctly. They either cut off their
edges or left so little space as to convey the idea of a curtailed
edition of the original. In the case of the panelled period, when
there were three panels, two of them had more often than not to be cut
off in the middle to make room for the circular aperture in the door
showing the swinging pendulum. When the case-maker received his panels
according to order from the Continent, one would have thought he would
have done away with the hole in the case. But perhaps the clockmaker
insisted otherwise. At any rate, it is a point showing the absence of
intimate relationship between clockmaker and case-maker. Holland seems
to be the answer, in spite of all experts to the contrary.
On the "all-over" marquetry clock-cases there is a decided inclination
to follow the designs found on contemporary delft ware. As to
repetition, however well joined they are, the glue and the wax cannot
hide the poverty of design. Twice or thrice in one case are patterns
repeated. It is the wall-paper artist at work in a smaller area. In
this connection one recalls the decadence of the wood-engravers,
where three or four artists worked on portions of one picture cut
into sections and screwed together as one block. The old journals,
the _Illustrated London News_, and the _Graphic_ and others of the
early 'eighties, tell of this decadence. The thin white lines, as long
as ink and paper last, record this subterfuge. It was the last note
of wood-engraving. Similarly, in marquetry, when we find the almost
invisible lines denoting several hands, or the piecing together of the
same design cunningly to deceive the persons at the period, we at a
later stage read this as the note determining the end, and the end soon
came.