THE LONG-CASE CLOCK--THE PERIOD OF LACQUER
What is lac?--Its early introduction into this country--"The
Chinese taste"--Colour versus form--Peculiarities of the lacquered
clock-case--The English school--English amateur imitators--Painted
furniture not lacquered work--The inn clock.
Lacquered work is the most un-English style of decoration that has
ever been employed by the cabinet-maker in the embellishment of his
furniture. It came from the East and was introduced into this country
about the same period as tea-drinking. At first tea was drunk by
fashionable folk from cups without handles, now it is the national
beverage. Lac is a natural product of China, the sap of a tree in
appearance resembling our ash-tree. It is not an artificial compound
of resin and oils, worked down by turpentine. This natural gum is
refined and coloured red, black, golden yellow, green, or grey. The
surface of the wood is carefully prepared, and a ground is laid on by
degrees, care being taken that each is of the right temperature and
perfectly hard and dry before any layer is applied. Never less than
three and sometimes as many as eighteen thin layers are thus applied
to the surface of the wood before the actual decoration of this ground
by the artist commences. In regard to the use of lac in this country,
practical experts have questioned as to whether it is possible in a
climate like this to effect the clean drying so necessary to attain
perfection. London and other cities, on account of their dust-charged
atmosphere, are unsuited for lacquer work.
The artist draws his design of landscape or figures or birds or
flowers, filling his details with gold or silver and superimposed
colours built up with mastic, of those parts which are intended to be
in slight relief.
The Japanese brought the art of lacquer to the highest perfection. To
those readers who desire to see the art of lacquer shown in its various
stages, there is in the Botanical Museum at Kew Gardens a collection of
specimens in various stages, including sections of the lacquer-tree,
from which the lac exudes, and of various coloured lacs, and examples
illustrating no less than fifty different methods of lacquering
sword-sheaths.
An examination of lacquer work is to be found in _Chinese Art_, vol. i,
by Dr. Stephen W. Bushell, formerly physician to His Majesty's Legation
at Peking. In the print-room of the Imperial Library at Paris is an
album with drawings of the processes and explanatory notes.
The Lacquer Industry in Japan forms a Report of His Majesty's
Acting-Consul at Hakodate (Mr. J. J. Quin), printed as a Parliamentary
Paper in 1882.
=Its Early Introduction into this Country.=--At first the Portuguese
had the monopoly of trade with the Far East. When Philip of Spain
annexed Portugal in 1598, he sought to shut out the Dutch traders from
participation in this trade. By this act he laid the foundation of the
Dutch East India Company. It was only when Cornelius Houtman procured
some Portuguese charts that the Dutch navigators first rounded the Cape
_en route_ for India and China and Japan. The great Dutch East India
Company was established in 1602.
Porcelain and lacquered cabinets and boxes were thus at an early date
distributed as rare articles of curious art at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Drake and Raleigh had captured Spanish galleons
with such treasure, and the Portuguese possession of Goa in India had
brought the wealth of the Far East to Western Europe. Evelyn tells
us in his _Diary_, in 1681, of the richness of the apartments of the
Duchess of Portsmouth at Whitehall. "The very furniture of the chimney
was massy silver. The sideboards were piled with richly wrought
plate. In the niches stood cabinets, the masterpieces of Japanese
art." The dowry of Queen Catherine of Braganza did not come up to the
expectations of the spendthrift Charles, although she came loaded with
"japanned" boxes and rare artistic treasures from the East. Memoirs of
this time furnish abundant proof that lacquered work was, in pieces of
imported furniture, known in this country. But it is little likely
that anything of that nature was manufactured here at that date. As
a nation we had not developed on those lines; it is a fact worth
remembering that as late as the reign of Charles II the greater part of
the iron used in this country was imported from abroad.
="The Chinese Taste."=--This is a term which finds itself repeated like
a parrot-cry from the late years of the seventeenth century. The vogue
reached its height in 1750 as a fashion for the wealthy and a pastime
for the dilettanti, and disturbed the steady growth of national spirit
in art. There was a Chinese Festival at Drury Lane Theatre in 1755.
Chippendale snatched his fretwork in his brackets and the angles of
his chairs from the Chinese worker in ebony. He erected pagoda-like
structures on his cabinets. The Bow china factory termed itself "New
Canton," Worcester copied Chinese models, Bristol carried on the story.
Staffordshire with her earthenware brought out the "willow-pattern,"
and a hundred other designs were acclimatized as reflections of the
blue and white Canton porcelain.
"Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world and the world
of letters, and, indeed, seems to be considered as the quintessence of
almost all the arts and sciences. The fine ladies and gentlemen dress
with taste, the architects, whether Gothic or Chinese, build with
taste." So writes the essayist in the _Connoisseur_ journal in 1756,
and he continues ironically, "Whoever makes a pagoda of his parlour
fits up his house entirely in taste."
This "Chinese taste" had seized France and Holland. The French
artist-craftsmen readily saw that the great influx of Chinese and
Japanese furniture would stifle their national artistic impulses. Louis
Quatorze had to issue a decree at the end of the seventeenth century
to prohibit the import of Oriental wares. The craze reached England
later and developed later. But early in the eighteenth century the
cabinet-makers of London petitioned Parliament against the importation
of manufactured articles from the East Indies to this country. But
nothing much seems to have come of their protest. The East India
Company had become too powerful to brook interference with its trade by
interested artisans. Thousands of lac panels were brought over in the
company's ships, even in spite of the deep-rooted belief that lacquer
work had at that time become an English art. It is to be presumed that
some of the contentions of the old European lacquer-workers may be
said to be parallel with the assertions of old potters who asseverated
that they had discovered the true porcelain of China. In 1709 Böttger,
at Meissen, had for the first time succeeded in producing white hard,
paste porcelain, not in imitation of the Chinese, but actually a
reproduction of the Oriental technique. But the secret was well kept,
and Böttger and his workmen were imprisoned in a fortress. Since Father
Du Halde, the Jesuit, had published in Paris in 1725 his _Description
de l'Empire de la Chine_, other European potters had endeavoured to
find the natural earths of the Chinese, kaolin and petuntse. When
William Cookworthy, the chemist and potter of Plymouth, wrote of his
discovery of the china clays, Josiah Wedgwood journeyed to Cornwall on
a wild-goose chase.
It may be imagined, with data such as these to guide us--first, the
growing intensity of the "Chinese taste"; second, the demand for
furniture and porcelain on the part of the wealthy classes--that as a
consequence an attempt was made to supply the demand.
There were various sources of supply for lacquered furniture,
especially lacquered clock-cases. There was the Dutch market, from
which was obtained, as in the case of marquetry, panels of lacquered
work. At first, without doubt, these came from the East through
Holland. The next stage was the Dutch lacquered panel actually produced
in Holland. Later there was again the Oriental panel coming straight
from the East through our own East India Company. Contemporaneously
with these importations, which served as models, there was the
lacquered work produced in this country. We shall later attempt to
differentiate between these styles.
=Colour versus Form.=--In various epochs the struggle has gone on in
the applied arts in regard to the use and abuse of colour in decoration
as an adjunct. In furniture the pendulum has swung to and fro. Colour
follows form in the process of evolution. In England there is the oak
period and the walnut period, where the beauty is solely dependent upon
form. The conception of the cabinet-maker has usually been confined
to form, eschewing colour, or to colour more or less ignoring the
beauty of form, or as a compromise, when form has been subservient to
colour. When form and colour are in exact harmony the highest ideals
are reached in furniture. The Chinese have reached these ideals. The
Italian school of the fifteenth century in the marriage coffer, where
painting or coloured intarsia is of parallel beauty with the rich
carving, achieved like success. With similar judgment, in holding the
balance evenly between form and colour, André Charles Boulle conceived
his wonderful work in tortoiseshell and brass and ebony and silver,
forming a brilliant marquetry of colour, the colour effect being
further heightened with a reddish-brown and sometimes a bluish-green
ground beneath the semi-transparent tortoiseshell. Riesener and David
Roentgen, in equally masterful technique, produced marquetry of
tulip-wood, holly, rosewood, purple wood, and laburnum. With the style
embodying the enrichment of the plain surface with colour came the use,
and later the abuse, of lacquered panels.
A Dutch cabinet-maker, Huygens, had won renown by reproducing
remarkable imitations of the Japanese lacquered panel. In Holland,
Chinese prototypes had served as models for delft ware. The Dutch
potter had simulated the appearance of blue and white Chinese
porcelain, but his results were obtained by a white enamel covering a
brown body. Dutch lacquer work is similarly imitative of the results
rather than a duplication of the Oriental processes. Chintzes and
printed "callicoes" equally are surprising efforts at simulation, if
not dissimulation.
As a supreme effort of the successful attempt of the European to
reproduce the wonderful limpid transparency of the old Chinese and
Japanese work, the secret of Sieur Simon Etienne Martin, a French
carriage painter, stands supreme. His varnish, called after him
_Vernis-Martin_, has become the term, as in the case of Boulle, for
a certain class of technique. In 1744 he obtained the monopoly in
France for the manufacture of lacquered work in the Oriental style. He
obtained the ground of wavy golden network, such as in rare Japanese
panels, and on this Boucher and other artists painted Arcadian subjects.
In England it cannot be said that these great foreign styles have
been emulated in the grand manner or even attempted. When colour came
to England it came straight from Holland, and _le style réfugié_ is
responsible for the intermingling of the Dutch and French styles,
though the former were at first greatly predominant. The important
bureaus and splendid lacquered cabinets produced in the period when
colour was employed so lavishly as to disregard form, are attributable,
not for the least part of their excellent technique in the skilful
employment of lacquer, to the great number of French and other foreign
workmen who had settled in this country.
=Peculiarities of the Lacquered Clock-case.=--The use of the lacquered
panel in the long case of the clock cannot be said to have a definite
period of its own. We cannot mark an exact date when marquetry panels
or marquetry "all-over" cases were no longer the vogue, and when
lacquered cases succeeded them. The two styles were comparatively
contemporaneous. Marquetry cases, as we have seen, are as early as
1680, and they continued till about 1725, and later in the provinces.
The lacquered case may be said to have run its day from about 1700
to 1755. On the whole they seemed to have had a longer vogue, mainly
on account of the prevalence of the "Chinese taste," which demanded
colour. Lacquered decoration jumped the experimental stage of reserves
or panels that apparently were not quite in exact proportions to the
case, but had to be fitted in and sometimes trimmed. It came at a
juncture when this difficulty had been mastered. Accordingly, we find
the whole of the lacquered case has been regarded as a rectangular
surface to be decorated, and we have not met with any instance of more
than one lacquered panel being employed on the case. The marquetry
case offered other features which indicated the struggle of colour
for supremacy. In the early marquetry specimens the turned walnut
pillars of the hood belong to an earlier style. They indicate that
that form had not been completely ousted. The marquetry worker in the
end overcame this and drove these pillars out. In the lacquered case
no such struggle is visible. The case is entirely a scheme in colour.
It is red, or green, it is black and gold, but the design is never so
strong as to tempt one to examine its form. It is simply decorative,
but much in the manner that, in textile art, tapestry is pleasing, not
challenging a critical examination of form, but suggesting a somnolent
restfulness.
Touches of incongruity appear in later examples of the lacquered
clock-case when the arched hood came into fashion and the panel
followed suit. It is a shape unsuited to an Oriental design. Such a
Western architectural style used in combination with so Eastern a
technique as lacquered work is like putting a Corinthian pillar on a
Japanese bronze.
The lacquered cases illustrated in this chapter indicate the style. The
example with the movement by Joseph Dudds (1766-82), (illustrated p.
115), shows the early attempt to simulate the Eastern style. It is poor
and thin, and has not stood the ravages of time and a damp climate.
The specimen (illustrated p. 117), with the movement by Kenneth
Maclellan (1760-80), is of more grandiose character. The panelled door
was probably an importation, and the other decorations in lacquer done
in this country.
Among the Scottish clocks, the Patrick Gordon example (1705-15),
(illustrated p. 263), proves this usage of imported Oriental panel with
added decoration in as near a style as could be done on the spot. In
this example the remainder of the so-called lacquered decoration is
stencilled.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK WITH LACQUER DECORATION.
Brass dial with circular medallion with maker's name, "Joseph Dudds,
London" (1766-82).]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Kenneth Maclennan (London).
Finely decorated in green lacquer.
Date, 1760-80. Height, 8 ft. Width, 1 ft. 8 in. Depth, 10 in.
(_By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq._)]
=The English School.=--Dutch lacquered work was as prevalent
between 1680 and 1725 as was Dutch marquetry. The rivalry between
"John Company" and the Dutch traders was one factor that has to be
considered. Lacquered work was coming straight from the East to
Amsterdam and to English ports. What was not absorbed by the Dutch
burghers came to England. Apart from this competitive Oriental
trade, there was the lacquered work actually made in Holland.
In examining the state of that country at this time one meets with a
surprise. It was a land teeming with colour. Dutch painters have taught
us to think otherwise. The Rijks Museum exhibits the prevalent styles
of the seventeenth century. Here we find leather decorations derivative
from Spain in rich gilding, Louis Quatorze boudoirs with classic gods
and goddesses. The "Chinese Boudoir" from the palace of the Stadtholder
at Leeuwarden shows the intense love of colour that had conquered
Holland in the late seventeenth century. Here we find the Chinese
prototypes in porcelain which provided the potters at Delft with
problems to solve, and lacquered work which suggested patient imitation
by Dutch cabinet-makers, but the colour and advanced technique of such
Oriental originals must have confounded the old craftsmen.
The potter simulated the porcelain with his enamelled earthenware, the
cabinet-maker produced lacquered work which passed muster in Holland
and England. Take the house of the rich burgher. The table was covered
with an Eastern rug, called a "table carpet." The linen cupboards so
beloved by the Dutch were surmounted by Chinese and Japanese porcelain.
Often a Japanese lac cabinet gave another touch of colour to the
interior. Rich damask curtains, Spanish leather hangings, Oriental
rugs, finely inlaid cabinets of ebony and silver, and a glowing array
of copper and brass, filled the heart of the Dutch _vrouw_ with pride.
Such rooms were regarded as a "holy of holies," and the family had
their meals in the kitchen or living room and were warned off the show
room. The seventeenth-century Dutchwoman, according to all accounts,
seems to have been a shrew. But enough is extant to prove that Holland
was artistically, in regard to the home-life of Stadtholder and
burgher, resplendent with colour, in spite of the low tones of the
canvases of Dutch painters.
In England, too, the love of colour was becoming predominant. Fifty
thousand Huguenot families, with their Latin blood and love of colour,
scattered in the Protestant countries had no inconsiderable influence.
Spitalfields silk is as English as the dark and tortuous lanes from
which it emanates. But every weaver had a French name, and although
the industry has come to an end, tomorrow, if the demand arose, the
descendants of these French Huguenots would again stand at the looms to
produce English silk.
The sudden outburst of colour in the now rarely prized English
lacquered cabinets and bureaus must be attributed to the foreign
workmen in our midst at the close of the seventeenth century. It is
English perforce, because it was made in England. The followers of
Huygens the Dutchman and the disciples of Martin the Frenchman were
capable of producing something new and something surprising in English
cabinet work. The foreign quarters of London have always been the
centre of art industry. Armenians sit on the roofs of fashionable
West End emporiums and restore carpets and rugs. Polish and Russian
furriers travel by the Tube from Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, from
the Commercial Road and Shoreditch to Regent Street and Bond Street
with their handiwork. What is now, was two hundred and fifty years ago.
Alien craftsmen, more skilled than the English workmen, worked for less
wages and produced better work.
The English style, therefore, of the late seventeenth century in
lacquered work was as English as the work of Daniel Marot the Frenchman
and of Grinling Gibbons the Dutch woodcarver at Hampton Court.
The English style is praised as something fine and original as a
European replica of the Oriental. So it is. It is the French grafted
on to the Dutch and acclimatized here. It holds the same place in
lacquered work as the Dutch delft ware does in ceramics. It is a
splendid imitation of a technique not grasped by the imitator. Lovers
of lacquered rarities and collectors of the so-called English style,
so rare and so much extolled, can take it to heart that it is really
English--as English as the canvases of Vandyck or the painted panels of
pergolesi.
=English Amateur Imitators.=--There are records enough to show
that the art of lacquer had appealed to the amateur on account of
its apparent simplicity. It is ludicrous to read of the attempts
of seventeenth-century teachers of the art of "japanning" to young
ladies. The seventeenth-century "miss," according to old memoirs,
left her Stuart stump needlework, with its quaint costume and crude
figures, to simulate the subtle art of the Chinese or Japanese
lacquer-worker. At that time the greatest coach-panel painter could
not have approached the finesse of the lacquered work coming from the
East. In spite of Stalker and Parker in 1688, with their treatise how
to produce lacquered "japanning" in the Oriental style--a guide for
amateurs and the standard work for all the academies that taught this
new accomplishment--we cannot believe much of this amateur work found
its way on clock-cases, which in point of time heralded the oncoming
burst of colour. It is incredible that all of a sudden, following
the clock-case and the chair-back, fine red and green and black and
gold lac decoration, as exhibited by rich cabinets and gorgeous
bureaus scintillating with colour, could have succeeded the stump-work
amateurs. Stalker and company must go by the board as caterers for a
very amateur taste. Their book possibly never reached the trade, or if
it did, it could have had very little influence upon adept refugees
practising a subtle art.
=Painted Furniture not Lacquered Work.=--Whatever may be determined as
to the merits of _Vernis-Martin_ or of the creations of Huygens the
Dutchman in regard to comparison with Chinese and Japanese prototypes,
it is certain that English amateur work, which is often dull gold
design on a black ground, is not only an echo but a feeble echo of the
original. They are splendid examples of dulness. Pepys complains that
women wore feathers in his day. The feminine instinct is difficult to
reckon with. Some years ago very up-to-date young wives "aspinalled"
everything pea-green or peacock-blue. They did a lot of damage.
Similarly, in the seventeenth century, when the boudoir escaped from
needlework into lacquer, much otherwise harmless furniture must have
been spoilt. Hundreds of fine pieces of furniture were brought up to
date by the simple process of painting them and simulating the Chinese
lacquered work. In the Early Victorian age of graining, sapient workmen
painted solid oak panels and grained them to resemble the oak that
they had painted. Folly is not the monopoly of any age. It is eternal.
To-day the framer, if he is not watched and carefully instructed, glues
a fine engraving to a sheet of cardboard and rubs a wet cloth over the
surface of the print, destroying its beauty for ever with his clod-like
smudge. Fools are ever present to confound the conservation of art
treasures.
Painting a surface, however Oriental it may be in design, is _not_
lacquer work. Half the so-called lacquered work is merely painting
with a coat of varnish put on it. When Sheraton and his school brought
French painted panels into fashion in this country, they brought a
true art. But it was not lacquer. Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, and
Pergolesi, who used their brushes on cabinet work, and Zoffany, who did
not disdain to paint clock-cases for Rimbault, brought a new style to
this country. It was the age of colour-prints in the French taste; the
Wards, the George Morlands, and the Bartolozzis demanded colour as a
suitable environment. Satinwood and coloured marquetry and the painted
panel accordingly found a place at this moment.
The amateur attempts of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
up to the _furore_ of the "Chinese taste" in 1750, must be disregarded
as something outside the field of the collector--that is, if he is
desirous of selecting lacquered work of excellent character. As a
phase of fashionable caprice it is no doubt interesting, but it is
to be hoped that most of these amateur efforts have succumbed to the
influence of time and have been destroyed. They represent nothing
in particular except a sham imitation of a great art, as stupidly
offensive as was Strawberry Hill, the Gothic toy of Horace Walpole.
=The Inn Clock.=--We interpolate here a short outline of a class of
clocks which appeals to collectors. In America they are termed "banjo
clocks." A good deal has been written about them, connecting them
with Pitt's tax on clocks and watches in 1797 of five shillings on
each clock per annum, which Act was repealed in the next year. It is
supposed that these clocks suddenly came into being when private clocks
were taxed, and were used in inns. Owing to such a deep-seated belief
they are always known throughout the country as "Act of Parliament"
clocks. But they were used earlier than the Act of 1797, and were
probably ordinary inn clocks in common use about that time. They were
wall clocks varnished with black lacquer, mostly plain, but sometimes
decorated in gold. Often the figures were in white and they had no
protective glass.
[Illustration: INN CLOCK.
Decorated in black and gold lacquer.
Maker, John Grant (Fleet Street). About 1785.
Formerly in possession of Sir Augustus Harris.
(_By courtesy of John R. Southworth, Esq._)]
The example illustrated (p. 125) is decorated in black and gold
lacquer, and the name on the dial is John Grant, Fleet Street, about
1785. This is rather an elaborate specimen, as most of the ordinary
inn clocks of this shape are innocent of these rather elaborate lacquer
enrichments. They are to be found all over the country; we have seen
one in an inn at Evesham. They are in Kent and the south, but do not
appear to have been in common use in the northern counties, unless
imported there later. Ale-house jests are frequent on old earthenware
mugs--"Drink faire, don't swear"--and broad hints as to credit. This is
similarly found as a standing pointed jest in an "Act of Parliament"
clock in a Kentish inn, minus the works, with the inscription "No
Tick"--a jest which the most seasoned toper could readily understand.
Oliver Goldsmith, when he wrote his _Deserted Village_ in 1770, is said
to have described in "Sweet Auburn" a typical Irish village in regard
to its desertion, but he introduced touches reminiscent of his town
habits. When he wrote of the village ale-house:--
The whitewash'd wall, the nicely sanded floor,
The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door,
he may have been thinking of inn clocks he had seen in Fleet Street. By
his use of the word "varnished" it would appear that Goldsmith had in
mind the ale-house clock of which we are speaking. There was no other
that was "varnished," that is, lacquered. The term "Act of Parliament"
clocks must therefore be discarded; these clocks were common inn
clocks, and had nothing to do with the Act levying the tax in 1797.
As a rule, elaborately lacquered examples of such clocks should be
regarded with caution by the collector. The inn clock was "varnished,"
but it had no panelled lacquer and lattice-work gold ornament. It was a
simple hanging wall clock _sans_ artistic embellishment.