at the museum, the institution is indebted for many instructive
experiments and designs in the way of decoration. No one should fail
to observe the very remarkable exterior wall decoration covering one
entire side of the new School of Science, which is a most complete
revival of the _sgraffito_ work of the fifteenth century. This
experiment by Mr. Moody of the high Renaissance in Italy has been
placed on a wall of the building not visible from the streets, but
only from the windows of the museum. It is analogous to the _niello_,
which was graven in silver and the lines filled in with carbon, making
a black picture on a white ground. (There is a good account of this
ornamentation, said to be the origin of all engraving for printed work,
in W. B. Scott’s _Half-hour Lectures_.) Mr. Moody’s experiment is made
by filling in the hollows of the cement, presenting a multiplicity of
scrolls, symbols, allegorical figures--Natura, Scientia, etc.--and
portraits of scientific men. The stairway from which this vast
work--covering the wall for four or five stories--can best be seen is
another interesting experiment of Mr. Moody’s. As befits a stairway
leading to the Ceramic Gallery, its ornaments are made of Minton
porcelain. The steps and facings of the steps are a kind of mosaic
made of hexagon pellets painted; the walls are panelled with white
porcelain; and their effect under the light falling through large
figured windows, toned rather than colored, is very good indeed.
Entering now the Ceramic Gallery, we find its contents illustrated by
a very ingeniously devised series of window etchings (as they may be
called), which are probably unique in the history of work on glass.
The windows on one side of this room, fifteen in number, each double,
were intrusted to Mr. William B. Scott, who as an archaeologist in
art has few superiors. Mr. Scott designed no fewer than forty-eight
large pictures, representing the history of ceramic art from the most
ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, and Persian down to Wedgwood; and
these he has placed in the fifteen windows, where, unhappily, they are
little observed, being without mention, much less description, in any
work except that now before the reader. They are for the most part in
black and white, colors being introduced only once or twice, and then
but slightly. The first and second windows are devoted to the Chinese,
their work being, if not the earliest, the most ancient in porcelain,
and that which has most influenced the European art. Here is shown
their whole method, from the preparation of the clay, the half-naked
natives bringing the kaolin from caves in panniers, others steeping
it in water, refining it in large mortars, and kneading it on tables.
The potter is seen before his rude wheel, and forming the vessel by
hand-pressure. And after this we trace his work to the furnace, and on
to its place in the shop. This work implies the most patient study of
original Chinese models. One window represents characteristic Chinese
ornamentation--such as the royal dragon and the bird of paradise, and
a bazar at Pekin. The third window represents early Egyptian art. The
upper part shows the casting of brick by packing in boxes, and then
turning it out, all under the whip of the taskmaster, the work and
the whip being but little different to-day from what they were in the
ancient days whose relics have been so diligently studied by Mr. Scott
on the papyri of the British Museum. Beneath, a skilled workman is
painting a large Canopus: he is on his knees, with his feet doubled
behind him. One page, so to speak, of this window represents Assyrian
art by a triumphal procession, in which immense vases are carried on
ox trucks, and smaller ones on the heads of prisoners--a design based
upon discoveries in Nineveh which show the great importance that people
ascribed to earthenware. The fourth window is Greek and Etruscan. The
Greek legend of the origin of painting--the daughter of the potter of
Sicyon tracing on the wall the shadow of her lover on his leaving her
for a journey--is exquisitely done. Next we see the girl applying her
plan to her father’s vases. We have also depicted with learning the
honorary uses of pottery among the Greeks, the vases given as prizes
in public games, or as votive offerings for the dead, by which custom
the finest examples we have were transmitted; and, finally, there is
the genius of Death holding in her hand the cinerary urn. The fifth
window is Hispano-Moresque. The earliest ware in Europe after the
Samian of which we have any examples was that made by the Moors, who
brought the art of making it from east of the Mediterranean. This was
the famous “lustre-ware” which was supplied from Spain, which is now
so eagerly sought by collectors, both on account of its beauty and as
the origin of the Italian majolica. Specimens of this kind of pottery
have been found by Layard at Nineveh and at Ephesus. There appears
to be little doubt that it is of Persian origin. It must have been
always very difficult to make; in the modern manufacture about fifty
per cent. of the pieces come out of the furnace dull and worthless.
The fine specimens seem to the workmen happy accidents rather than the
steady results of any normal process upon which they can depend. The
first design in this window of Mr. Scott’s represents the master-potter
amidst his swarthy workmen watching the hour-glass beside the fire.
This wonderful lustre was the result of some utilization of smoke in
modifying the copper glaze, and was probably discovered by accident,
as so many fine effects in the ceramic art have been. This beautiful
ware has lately attracted especial attention in England because of
the experiments which Mr. De Morgan, son of the late mathematician
of University College, is making. He has tried nearly every kind of
smoke influence upon copper and silver pigments, in contact with glaze
and his success has been remarkable. These lustre-wares are still, I
believe, made in some parts of Spain in a small way; also at Gubbio, in
Italy; but the furnace of Mr. De Morgan at Chelsea is the most active
and successful in bringing out such wares in all their varieties.
[Illustration: ITALIAN MAJOLICA (URBINO). SIXTEENTH CENTURY.]
[Illustration: LAMP FROM AN ARABIAN MOSQUE--FOURTEENTH CENTURY.]
It adds greatly to the charm of these windows that they are as a frame
around the objects whose history they tell. Fine examples of the
“lustre-ware” from the earliest ages are in this gallery. And we have
only to turn round from admiring another part of this fifth window,
showing the building of the Alhambra, and its wonderful vase, to see
the finest copy of that unparalleled piece of lustre-ware. The vase
is four feet five and a half inches high, by eight feet two and a
half inches in circumference; it is decorated with two antelopes, and
foliations covering the body of the vase, intermingled with which are
African characters whose sense is “Felicity and Fortune,” “Permanent
Prosperity;” and the colors are brown and blue on a yellow ground,
the lustre being of a mother-of-pearl tint. From rich specimens of
ancient Italian majolica we in turn refer to the sixth window, which
shows us the embryonic and later phases of this beautiful art. The
Italians imitated the Hispano-Moresque lustre as well as they could,
but not being able to attain it exactly, they secured new tints of
their own, especially a very fine ruby lustre. Afterward they painted
their wares without trying to get lustres, to obtain which was perhaps
a work too slow and precarious to be profitable. The vast development
of ceramic art in Italy has required three windows--sixth, seventh, and
eighth--for its representation. First we have bird’s-eye views of the
localities with which it was chiefly associated: Urbino, the seat of
the finest ware made in the time of Raphael, wherein is portrayed their
process of softening and refining the clay by putting it in square pits
in the ground; Duranto, with its method of grinding the clay in a sort
of water-mill; Gubbio, with its own ingenious processes. Then we have
other Italian methods--foot-mill, hand-mill, horse-mill. An artist
is seen in his studio, receiving as sitters ladies whose portraits he
paints on plates that are to be their marriage gifts--a design taken
from a plate in the gallery painted by Maestro Giorgio--while other
details have been taken from a MS. by Piccolpasso, also preserved
in the museum. And, finally, we have a representation of Luca della
Robbia, of the fifteenth century, who used earthenware medallions,
admirably modelled and fired with white glaze, which were fixed on the
outside of buildings, and may be seen to-day on the Foundling Hospital
and several churches at Florence. The very word “majolica” (Majorca)
shows that the Italians found their art where the Moors left it. But
if they could not equal the moresque lustres, they certainly developed
and enriched their designs. Such decorations as that encircling the
figure of St. George on the Urbino plate (see engraving) may be called
“arabesque,” but they are equally Italian. It is curious to compare
such arabesques with the ornament on a piece of real Arabian work,
such as the accompanying ancient lamp. (This lamp, singularly enough,
is of a form represented in very early Italian bronze carvings of
sacred subjects.) Window ninth is devoted to Dutch tiles and pots and
Flanders-ware, which were once imported in such vast quantities to this
country: here they may be traced from their manufacture in Holland
to their sale in the Thames docks. Window tenth relates the curious
story of the Dresden-ware. Here it was that the famous material of
the best porcelain (kaolin), which was so long the secret of China,
was discovered by a happy accident--Böttcher, the alchemist, having
taken a notion to analyze the white dust which his barber had used to
powder his wig in a year of dear flour. The two men are represented,
and also the château of Meissen, where the first Dresden porcelain
was secretly made. Window eleventh tells the story of Palissy, who,
instructing himself, ruined his family: one leaf of the window shows
him feeding his furnace with his broken furniture, while his wife with
her babe stands beseechingly by; the other shows his triumph, as he
builds and decorates the grottoes in the Tuilleries garden. The story
recalls that of Benvenuto Cellini, who, having been seized with a fever
while casting his Perseus and Medusa, heard that his work was ruined.
Leaping from his bed, he found the furnace burst, but he saw the metal
was partly fused; he cast in two hundred pieces of his table-service,
and the mould was filled. The great work was saved, and so was the
artist; he ate a hearty meal with his workman, slept soundly, and was
himself again. Window twelfth is devoted to Sèvres, where porcelain
was carried to its highest perfection. The famous “Rose du Barry” and
“Bleu du Roi” are represented--and here exquisite colors are used--by
Louis XV. and Madame Du Barry exchanging vases of those colors. The old
manufactory is pictured, and some of its finest designs, in the lower
panes of the window. Near by is the beautiful specimen of Sèvres which
France contributed to the first International Exhibition in London. In
window thirteenth we are introduced to English wares, at present the
most excellent in the world. The processes described are--preparing
the clay, making different colored clays, stamping tiles, filling
color into moulds, “throwing,” “turning,” applying printed patterns.
It takes two of the double windows to display this, which brings us to
the fifteenth and last, in which there are four designs of the greatest
historical interest: Dr. Doddridge’s mother teaching her child Bible
history from the tiles in the fireplace; Dr. Samuel Johnson trying
experiments; figures of Josiah Wedgwood and Bentley, his partner;
Flaxman and Stothard, the painter. The two artists last named both
worked in decorating earthenware for Wedgwood. Flaxman was underpaid by
Wedgwood for the numerous models he supplied--models still used by the
firm. The poor artist has made the fortunes of three generations of his
employer’s family, whose present representatives are so liberal that
one must suppose their ancestor to have hardly realized the value of
the artist’s work until it was too late to reward him.
[Illustration: PALISSY, THE POTTER--WINDOW IN THE CERAMIC GALLERY.]
[Illustration: SÈVRES PORCELAIN VASE.--MODERN.]
[Illustration: HENRI DEUX CANDLESTICK.]
The visitor to the Ceramic Gallery in this museum will be apt to admit
that there were never windows that shed more light than these of the
kind required by a student. He will see lustres on the lustre-wares
beyond what mere sunlight can give, and the huge dragons, deer, and
horned birds on the Moresque-Spanish dishes will link the culture of
1882 with the barbaric mediæval mythology. He will, indeed, find at
every step that he is really exploring in this gallery of pots and
dishes strata marked all over with the vestiges of human and ethnical
development. Nothing can be more complete than the arrangement of the
gallery. Not only is it chronological, but beneath each particular
specimen a card tells when and where it was made, and the price paid
for it by the museum. If it has gone off with the floating collection,
the card reports that also. One may learn what changes have occurred
in the prices of such wares by finding Sèvres vases, for instance,
marked at £100 or £200, of a like character with those six for which
Lord Dudley recently paid £17,500. These are articles which, when first
collected, incited the first cabinet minister who inspected them to
ask, “What’s the use of all this trash?” There is a single candlestick
in this room now worth all the “trash” in that noble lord’s mansion. It
is a specimen of that famous “Henri Deux ware” of which only fifty-five
pieces exist, so far as is known. This elegant ware has been such a
puzzle to antiquarians that no fewer than thirteen different works
have been written about it. It was finally ascertained by M. Riocreux,
of the Imperial Ceramic Museum at Sèvres, that the pottery was made
at Oiron, in France; that two artists made it in the earlier part of
the sixteenth century for Henry II. and his queen, whose initials or
monograms are on several of the pieces; and the artists were François
Cherpentier and Jean Bernard. Cherpentier, the chief maker, had been
an architect, and when he set about working in earthen-ware he was
fond of moulding it in little monumental shapes, and filling in the
hollows with different colors. The candlestick has a pale yellow
ground, with arabesques, etc., in reddish-brown. The base is circular,
with projecting brackets, on which stand three boys holding shields
inscribed with the arms and cipher of Henri Deux. Above are three
terminal figures of satyrs. This work (which it is to be hoped will
some day be called by the artist’s name instead of the king’s) is less
than a foot high; it cost £750, and is one of the cheapest purchases
ever made. Seven of the fifty-five specimens of this ware are in the
collection of Sir Anthony de Rothschild, two in that of Baron Lionel
de Rothschild, two in that of Baron Gustave de Rothschild, three in
that of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, while the Louvre has the same
number as the South Kensington Museum--five. Three very beautiful
specimens (candlestick, ewer, and large salt-cellar) were found some
years ago, very carefully wrapped in a blanket, placed in a wicker
clothes-basket, under a bed in a garret of Narford Hall. Our engraving
(p. 56) represents the candlestick so found. The pieces were no doubt
collected by Sir Andrew Fountaine in France, in the last century, and,
put away perhaps by some provident house-keeper, now turn up as a more
valuable bequest to the old connoisseur’s descendants than he could
have imagined, but which is rightly appreciated by the present owner
of the pieces, Mr. Andrew Fountaine. The other specimens of this Henri
Deux ware in this gallery are two tazzas, a plateau, and a wonderful
salt-cellar, of which last the skill of a pupil at South Kensington
enables me to give the linear design.
[Illustration: HENRI DEUX SALT-CELLAR.]
But it must not be supposed that this is merely an antiquarian
collection: the best work now going on all over the world is
represented, and one may see by the superb examples of modern
Berlin work and of Minton that England and Germany are engaged in a
competition for excellence which bids fair to distance anything done
in the past. What admirable work Minton can do may be estimated by the
embossed and tinted tiles surrounding the ten columns which support
the roof of this gallery. They reproduce the finest colors of the
Celadon porcelain of Sèvres. Around each column are letters forming
the names of the ten greatest potters--Vitalis (whose name was found
on a red vase of Samian-ware discovered in London in 1845), Giorgio
Andreoli, Luca della Robbia, Veit Hirschvogel of Nuremberg (1441-1525),
Xanto of Urbino (1547), Palissy (1510-89), François Cherpentier (maker
of the Henri Deux ware, otherwise called faïence d’Oiron), Böttcher
(1681-1719), Wedgwood (1730-95), and last, not least, Pousa, with
whom began the list of wondrous accidents with which the history and
traditions of pottery abound. Pousa is said to have been a workman in
the imperial porcelain factory of China. On one occasion the emperor
had ordered some great work, and Pousa tried long to produce it--in
vain. Finally, driven to despair, he plunged into the furnace. His
self-immolation caused such an effect upon the ware in the furnace
that it came out the most beautiful piece of porcelain ever known.
Pousa is now the patron saint of porcelain-workers in China, and is
kept near them in a little corpulent figure (porcelain), which is
familiar to many parts of the world where its story and sanctity are
unknown. The South Kensington Museum has carried out in its own case
this tradition of happy accidents, having been remarkable for its
good-luck. Some instances of it are in the Ceramic Gallery. Some years
ago a terrible explosion of gas occurred in the house of the famous art
collector and dealer, Mr. Gambart, at St. John’s Wood, by which the
house-maid was killed. M. Alma Tadema was a guest in the house, and
he had the presence of mind to open a window when he first perceived
that gas was escaping, by which means the disaster was mainly limited
to the dining-room. In this room were two large cabinets filled with
splendid specimens of Flemish “graybeards,” beakers, and similar wares,
and some of the best were smashed. As the fragments were about to be
cleared away, a friend of Mr. Gambart’s, who was also connected with
this museum, brought him an offer from the institution of £800 (as I
have heard; at any rate, a sum that was generous) for the collection,
broken and unbroken, and it was gratefully accepted. The skilled
workmen at the museum have put the bits together with such adroitness
that it requires a practised eye to distinguish the wares that
suffered. The magnificent reproduction of the Alhambra Vase by Baron
Davillier, elsewhere described, was exhibited at the Paris Exposition
of 1867, and an agent of the museum found it “going a-begging;” he
purchased it for far less than its actual value. And, indeed, I might
instance a vast number of similar cases not only in this particular
gallery--which we must now leave--but throughout the museum. The truth
is, the South Kensington Museum has shown that the present is the great
opportunity of museums, while it has done much to turn that tide on
whose flood it floated to fortune, by awakening nations to the value
of their treasures. The Oriental world, and, indeed, some portions
of Southern Europe, have hitherto been unconscious of the value of
their monuments, because only culture can prevent familiarity breeding
contempt. Miss Frances Power Cobbe once expressed in my hearing the
shock she received when, on first arriving at Old Alexandria, in Egypt,
she found her luggage set down on an ancient monument resembling
those treasured in the British Museum. How much the South Kensington
Museum has reaped from the indifference to objects whose value is not
intrinsic, and which for that reason are unique and inestimable, may
appear incidentally as I proceed to describe some of them, adding what
particulars I have been able to learn concerning their acquisition.
The little sixpenny guide-book sold at the door is necessarily
provisional; the historical and descriptive volume which such an
institution requires must remain a desideratum so long as the museum
itself is changing and growing daily before our eyes. But the materials
for that work exist; specialists have studied well the various
departments; there exist nearly twenty large Blue-books recording the
origin and growth of the museum; and when all these are sifted and
their connected story told--enriched, as we may hope it will be, from
the memories of those men who have founded and conducted the work to
its present condition--the history so told will be in itself a sort
of literary museum, replete with curiosities, picturesque incidents,
and romance. In this scattered condition of the facts I have had to
depend mainly on information given by the gentlemen just referred to,
and what scraps I could pick up in old newspaper files and Blue-books.
This it has appeared to me right to mention here, in explanation of any
slightness and unsatisfactoriness that may be found in the details, or
of the motley way in which they are put together.
If the history of this museum of civilization would record strange
instances of popular neglect for great works of art, it must at the
same time show that works of genius, in whatever perishable material
embodied, have a strange vitality. The Milonian Venus, twice buried
in the earth that she might not be harmed by the wrath of her Mars,
has had experiences hardly more significant than those through which
the sacred forms designed by Raphael--preserved by aid alike of king
and regicide, by aid, too, of the neglect which left them hidden for a
hundred years in lumber-rooms--have become the glorious inheritance of
South Kensington.
The seven cartoons--what would not now be paid for the three that are
lost![A]--were designed and drawn by the great artist and his scholars
at the request of Pope Leo X. (1513) as copies for tapestry, and the
tapestries made from them are now in the Vatican. They were made at
Arras, and the cartoons--so called because drawn on card-board--were
thrown into the warehouse there. Here they remained neglected until
they were seen by Rubens, who advised Charles I. to purchase them
for a tapestry establishment at Mortlake, near London. On the death
of the king, Oliver Cromwell paid £300 for them, intending that the
tapestry-works should be continued. On the fall of Cromwell they
were confiscated, and, for a second time, were thrust away into a
lumber-room, this time at Whitehall. Fortunately the designs were on
strips of paper twelve feet long, which could roll up, and so they
were able to survive such usage. The next time they attracted notice
was in the reign of William III., by whose order Sir Christopher Wren
prepared a room for them at Hampton Court. They were then carefully
lined with cloth. They were never removed again until placed in the
gallery prepared for them here, with the sometimes criticised and
certainly remarkable inscription beneath each, “Lent by the Queen.” The
last individual who clearly owned them was Oliver Cromwell, who paid
what was supposed a large sum (£300) for works which no amount could
purchase from the Protector’s true heir--the English Nation.
[Illustration: MICHAEL ANGELO’S EROS.]