before spoken, which Mr. Matthew Arnold half likes while he impales
its eccentricities, is constantly revealed in the contrasts between
the baronial halls of England and the majority of the homes of the
wealthy middle class. One may take as a specimen of the taste of the
latter any one of the fine club buildings on or near Pall Mall. Here
one feels that he is stepping on floors which the Pompeians would have
thought somewhat sombre, but would have enjoyed, and amid walls and
arches which they would have recognized as familiar, though strangely
gloomy. The halls are large and spacious, rather costly than rich,
built of purest granites and marbles of various hue; the reading,
dining, and smoking rooms are comparatively quiet, and built with a
view to comfort alone. The clubs represent the desire of gentlemen of
means to pass their hours of leisure in palaces, and these are secured
at an expenditure of less than a hundred pounds each per annum, even
in the best of such institutions. But when one visits the castles of
the nobility, such as are still inhabited, the fondness for color
and romance is at once manifest. They love their rooms now blue, now
green, and again rose-colored. They love classical frescoes--nude
Muses, Graces, and Cupids chiefly--on the ceilings, and gay tints on
the walls even of sleeping-rooms. In a word, my lords were sensational,
and in some cases descended to the most vulgar tricks, as in the case
which Wordsworth rebuked so sternly. On the occasion of a visit to
Dunkeld the poet was taken into a room lined with mirrors, and where
an artificial water-fall was set going by a spring being touched. The
water-fall was reflected one way in the mirrors, but another way in the
poet’s face, and soon after in his rebuke of such mimicry of Nature:
“Ever averse to pantomime,
Thee neither do they know, nor us
Thy servants, who can trifle so.”
[Illustration: SPANDREL PICTURE.]
But what could come of a generation trained by the royal standard which
thought it beautiful to tie oranges bought in Covent Garden Market on
the twigs of trees at Hampton Court for a garden party? The mansions
of the nobility are still really the most tawdry and inartistic in
their decorations of any class that have attempted decorations--mere
blazings of white-and-gold; but there is an increasing number of
exceptions, represented especially by some ancient families which have
manifested a laudable desire to have their halls painted with pictures
of legends or historical events connected with their neighborhood
or their ancestors. Mr. William B. Scott, artist and poet, who has
done excellent mural work of this character, has, I believe, fairly
persuaded both the aristocracy and the artists of England that they
cannot have Italian frescoes in this country, and must depend upon
mural painting. In exhibiting specimens of his own excellent mural
painting, before the Institute of British Architects, Mr. Scott made
some interesting remarks on fresco. “In Italy,” he said, “the reign
of fresco was a little more than a century in length. All the earlier
works remaining are in tempera. Not many years ago it was not unusual
to hear people talk of all early Italian wall paintings as fresco,
but it is quite certain no such thing exists; the earlier frescoes,
such as Mantegna’s works, in the Eremitani Chapel, in Milan, are
miserable ruins; while the tempera pictures of Giotto, a century and a
half older, in the Arena Chapel, in Padua, for example, are perfect.
How, then, did it come about that fresco, which died out in Italy
very shortly after Michael Angelo finished the Capella Sistini, had a
revival in this nineteenth century in Munich and London? A very short
narrative of the circumstances attending this revival will, I think, be
enough. The associated body of young German students assembled in Rome
in the beginning of this century aspired to better things than they
found existing in the lifeless art about them. They reverted to the
study of earlier art--to the actual reproduction of former art. They
were also pietists--at least the two leaders, Overbeck and Cornelius;
they found that their patron saint, Fra Angelico, painted in fresco;
they found also that all the mythological, anti-religious pictures of
the Bolognese school and later period were in oil: they determined on
the revival of fresco. King Ludwig seconded them, and furnished an
ample field for their success. The misfortune was, they did not go
back far enough; they were self-denying men, and even the hardships
and difficulties of fresco had attractions for them. It was like a
revival of Tudor in mistake for a revival of the best period of Pointed
architecture. Several English artists living in Rome, after the great
success of the first very able works of these revivalists--my brother,
David Scott, of Edinburgh, and William Dyce, for example--were smitten
with the same feeling.”
Some eight years ago I had the pleasure of seeing the mural paintings
with which Mr. W. B. Scott has decorated Sir Walter Trevelyan’s
house, at Wallington, in Northumberland. No person could have been
more appropriately selected for the work than Mr. Scott, who passed
much of his early life in that region, and has written such beautiful
poems upon its ancient legends. The first (ground-floor) series of
paintings is on panels, enclosed between pilasters supporting arches;
and a second is on the spandrels above the arches, in a corridor
leading to the bedrooms, on the upper floor. The mansion is near the
ancient Scottish Border, so haunted by romance, and near it may still
be seen the remains of the ancient Roman Wall. In four of the panels
the subjects are (1) the building of the Roman Wall; (2) King Egfrid
offering the bishopric of Hexham to Cuthbert, hermit on Farne Island;
(3) a descent of the Danes on the coast; (4) death of the Venerable
Bede. On the opposite side are later subjects, but equally related to
the same region of country: (1) “The Spur in the Dish”--the sign to the
moss-trooper that the larder is empty; (2) Bernard Gilpin taking down
the gage of battle in Rothbury Church; (3) Grace Darling and her father
saving the shipwrecked crew; (4) “Iron and Coal”--the industry of the
Tyne. The pilasters and the arcaded ends are also slightly decorated
with foliage. The pictures on the spandrels are a series of eighteen on
the old Border ballad of _Chevy Chase_. They are full of spirit, and
their rich colors are like bursts of sunset along the ancient corridor.
So much, indeed, depends on this color that it is impossible to convey
the artist’s idea of mural painting by a woodcut. Nevertheless, I must
confide to the imagination of my reader one characteristic design (page
147), “Women looking out for their Husbands and Brothers after the
Battle of Chevy Chase.”
For his decoration of Penkill Castle, Ayrshire, Mr. Scott appropriately
selected the old Scottish poem of _The King’s Quair_, or book
(_cahier_, or quire, of paper), said to have been written by James of
Scotland when a prisoner at Windsor, in 1420, on his love for Jane,
granddaughter of John of Gaunt. The first picture shows the king in
prison, turning from his reading for his pen. According to the canto
in which the king describes his rising with the matin bell, there is
pictured the bell, the warder, the night-watch going home, etc. In
the second picture he looks from his window, and sees the fairest
of womankind listening to the birds in the terraced garden. She has
with her two maids and a little dog. Cupid--the Cupid of early art,
a sort of pretty page--shoots at the king from behind a hedge. The
third picture represents the royal poet’s dream, in which Master
Cupid descends from the starry sphere to carry him away to the court
of Venus, to obtain her assistance. These three pictures run along a
flight of stairs, and the series is taken up with the next flight. In
the fourth picture the poet finds all the lovers of history at the
shrine of Venus. James prays on his knees to her, but she sends him to
Dame Minerva’s court of wisdom for advice. Then we have the poet at the
court of Minerva; next Lady Jane sending off the carrier-pigeon; and
finally the royal poet receiving it. It requires but little reflection
for any one to realize that to an ancient baronial castle such a series
of paintings as this would be as the breathing of a soul beneath its
gray ribs of rock. It must be mainly for the want of such pictures in
them that servant-maids and children so often imagine ghosts rustling
along old corridors and haunting antique stairways.
The castle of the Earl of Durham is graced by a fine stained window,
illustrating the legend belonging to it of the slaying of the great
worm, or dragon, by the Knight of Lambton; and the similar legend of
Moore Hall is finely told in that mansion by the art of Professor
Poynter. The last, however, is simply on canvas, and appeared as a
large framed painting at the Royal Academy. It is, of course, necessary
that a house should be very large and stately to bear mural paintings.
The painting of panels is, indeed, becoming common in old houses which
are well wainscoted, but as a general thing it is confined to the doors
of more modern dwellings. However, a very fine effect has been produced
in the dining-room of Mr. Birket Foster, at Witley, in Surrey, by
inserting in the wall around the room a continuous painting by Burne
Jones representing the legend of St. George and the Dragon. The stained
glass which Morris & Co. have placed in the landing of the staircase,
in the same beautiful residence, shows also that even a cottage-mansion
of moderate size admits of a great deal more decorative color than is
ordinarily supposed.
In passing from the consideration of works of a public and semi-public
character I cannot refrain from paying some tribute to the most
influential decorative artist whom England has produced, and whose
death in April, 1874, all lovers of beauty are still mourning. Mr.
Owen Jones carried into decorative art that spirit of archæological
accuracy--one might almost say that profound scholarship--which was
brought into pictorial art by Delaroche in France, Baron Wappers in
Belgium, and Maclise in England. It is said that there was but one
thing in England which the Shah of Persia wished to carry back with
him to his palace--the Alhambra rooms, at the Crystal Palace; but of
all their possessions, in the way of art, there is hardly one that
the London people would so unwillingly part with. Yet it is probable
that as little as the Shah the thousands who every week find in those
rooms their _châteaux en Espagne_ realize what it really cost to put
them there. Mr. Owen Jones had passed his youth and his early manhood
journeying, both personally and mentally, on the track of the race to
which his fine culture belonged: he had studied the mystical figures
and lines of Egyptian temples; he had pondered the principles by which
reason and truth find expression in stone amid the ruins of Greece; he
had learned the secrets of simplicity and grandeur in Rome, where were
poured the converging streams of beauty from many tribes, each bearing
its freight of faith and aspiration, to be deposited in marbles and
monuments which are the gospels and bibles of a primitive world. By
this path, which meant for him a growing culture, he came to dwell on
the heights of Granada, as the recluse and devotee of Beauty, and when
he thence returned to his native land he brought with him a new era.
He expended a fortune on the grand folio of colored drawings of the
Alhambra, which brought him no return, but a single copy of which is
now a collector’s treasure. When proposals were being received for the
decoration of the glass palace of the International Exhibition of 1851,
Mr. Owen Jones offered to Prince Albert and the Royal Commissioners
his plans. The Prince held out against them for some time; but the
fascination was on him, and again and again he returned to the
exquisite designs, until he surrendered to their charm. He selected
Owen Jones with some tremor, but every year since the Palace has been
transferred to Sydenham has shown that it was a felicitous incident of
his life to have encountered the right man for a task which was to be
of far more permanent importance than he supposed. Since then Mr. Owen
Jones has not only given the large interiors of various great business
establishments that beauty which makes many of them worthy of study
and admiration, but he has won for himself and his country the highest
honors of the three great Continental Exhibitions. It was with some
amazement that the world found itself pointed to England as the leader
in decorative art by the French Exposition of 1867. “It requires,”
said the official catalogue of that exposition, “but a slight insight
into modern domestic life in England to perceive how great a change
has taken place within the last ten or fifteen years in the internal
embellishment of the dwelling-houses of the upper and middle classes
of society; and there can be little doubt that the extension of art
education will lead still farther to the production and appreciation
of articles which combine the three requisites of fitness of purpose,
beauty of design and ornament, and excellence of workmanship.” It
might be supposed by those who have not seen this master’s work that
it consisted merely in clever imitations of the Moorish and other
designs with which his name is associated; but, on the contrary, his
chief excellence was, that he showed how the ideas and principles which
underlie the great works of the past were capable of being led out into
new forms and adaptations. In taking the chair at the Society of Arts,
in 1851, on the occasion of a lecture on the arts and manufactures of
India, by Professor Royle, Mr. Owen Jones, having accorded superiority
to the Indian and Tunisian articles in the Exhibition of that year over
all contributed by Europe, added: “Many of these specimens have been
purchased by government for the use of the School of Design, and will,
no doubt, be extensively circulated throughout the country. But it is
to be hoped that they will do more than merely teach us to copy the
Indian style. If they only led to the origination of an Indian style,
I should think their influence only hurtful. The time has arrived when
it is generally felt that a change must take place, and we must get rid
of the causes of obstruction to the art of design which exist in this
country.”
The _Daily News_, in an editorial article on the death of Owen
Jones, said: “It was to bring the beautiful in form and color home
to the household, and to mingle its subtle influences with the whole
frame-work of social and family life, that the great designer we are
lamenting labored all his life with the patient, unselfish enthusiasm
of one to whom, though full of the keenest sympathy with all the great
historic movements and events of his time, his art was his life.”
[Illustration: OWEN JONES.]
The devotion of such a scholar and refined gentleman as Owen Jones
to decorative art has helped to make an era in that kind of work.
Before that it suffered in England from being regarded as a sort of
upholstery, implying neither talent nor culture. Some gentlemen of
culture and wealth recognized the genius of Mr. Owen Jones at a time
when the Prince Consort was still inclined to regard him as a superior
kind of upholsterer or house-painter, among whom must be especially
mentioned Mr. Alfred Morrison, well known for his antiquarian and
numismatical accomplishments. His residence in Carlton House Terrace is
the truest monument of the genius of Owen Jones, and it is a work which
need fear no comparison with any other, of whatever age or country. It
makes the chief palaces of Northern Europe vulgar. Sádi tells us of one
recovering from an ecstasy, who said he had been in a divine garden,
where he had gathered flowers to bring to his friends; the odor of the
flowers so overcame him that he let fall the skirt of his dress, and
the flowers were lost. Some such account one must needs give of a visit
to Mr. Morrison’s house. A thousand of the touches, the felicities,
which combine to produce the happiest effects in this mansion, can by
no means be conveyed from the place where they would appear to have
grown. I will only mention a few suggestive features of this system of
decoration.
The house is one of those large, square, lead-colored buildings, of
which so many thousands exist in London, that any one passing by would
pronounce characteristically characterless. It repeats the apparent
determination of ages that there shall be no external architectural
beauty in London. Height, breadth, massiveness of portal, all declare
that he who resides here has not dispensed with architecture because
he could not command it. In other climes this gentleman is dwelling
behind carved porticos of marble and pillars of porphyry; but here
the cloud and sky have commanded him to build a blank fortress, and
find his marble and porphyry inside of it. Pass through this heavy
door-way, and in an instant every fair clime surrounds you, every
region lavishes its sentiment; you are the heir of all the ages.
Entering a room for reading and writing, near the door, we are
conscious of a certain warmth of reception even from the walls. They
are of silk, made in Lyons, after a design by Owen Jones. The shade
and lustre are changeable, but the prevailing color dark red. The
design is as if an endless series of the most graceful amphoræ had
suddenly outlined themselves, and the lines had taken to budding off
into little branches. The surface is Persian, and the whole sentiment
of the room is Oriental, without having in it a single instance where
Oriental work has been copied. The carpet is Persian, but the design is
by Owen Jones, the most noticeable figure being the crossed squares,
making a star-shape to match a similar one on the coffered ceiling.
This tapestry of silk starts a theme, so to say, which is carried, with
harmonious variations, throughout the building, expanding in the larger
rooms, until it recalls every variety of Etruscan shape, and taking on
the most beautiful colors. There is a Blue Room, a Pink Room, a Yellow
Room; yet in no case is there anything “loud” or garish in the tints.
The ceiling of the reading-room is somewhat after the fashion of the
best Italian work of four centuries ago--a kind of moulding in deep
relief, which probably ceased to be much used because it was found
difficult to make it without incurring the danger of its falling, so
great would be the weight. But Owen Jones invented something which he
called “fibrous plaster,” by which the most heavily coffered ceilings
can be made with perfect security. It consists in first making the
shapes to be used in wood; the wood is then covered with canvas, and
this canvas is covered with repeated coats of the finest plaster,
which is rubbed down into any mouldings required, and painted. The
coffers here are star-shaped, and in each an inverted convoluted shell
of gold. It is an indication of how finely the decorator has blended
Oriental lustres and classic designs that the various antique objects
and fine metal-work, done by the best Spanish, Italian, and Viennese
workmen, after classic models, everywhere set about the rooms, have an
easily recognizable relationship with the scrolls and forms on carpets,
ceilings, and walls.
But neither the Lyons silk nor the Persian carpets can be pronounced
unique in the same sense as the wonderful use made of various woods
in this house. In the dado, jambs, chairboarding, we find no carved
work, but simply the most exquisite combinations of ebonized and
many-colored woods. Some of these, as the Indian holly, are so fine
that the grain is invisible to the closest inspection. Other woods
are so soft and beautiful that they have the surface of petals. Trees
belonging to every land and clime of the earth have sent here their
hearts, and, without a particle of pigment being used on any one of
them, they gather to form rosettes on the chimney-pieces, cappings for
the dados, and finest featherings around the doors--white, golden, red,
cream-colored, brown, and these of every shade. The tables and chairs
of several rooms are of this tarsia-work of forms untouched by staining
or by metal.
In the library the book-shelves, which do the duty of a dado around
the room, have alternate doors of glass and wood, and the latter are
adorned with a foliation, over two feet high, growing from the bottom
of the panel and leafing out at the top, which cannot be surpassed by
any ancient marquetry. Above these shelves the green and gold lustres
of the wall rise to a cone, which has the appearance of a blue and
gold enamel, above which is an early Tudor ceiling of checker pattern,
between reliefs of a large star with four shadings of different colors,
or star within star, golden, dark, and white. The chimney-piece here
may be regarded as a large arched cabinet, with fire-grate beneath,
having two wings, in which are contained specimens of porcelain from
Persia and Cashmere, which, old as they are, have an appearance of
having been designed by the decorator of the room, who certainly never
saw them until they came into the harmony he had prepared for them.
The drawing-room, whose windows overlook St. James’s Park, is a very
large apartment, whose division, if it ever had any, has disappeared,
giving an unbroken range to the eye, which, whether it takes in the
whole effect or pauses to examine a detail, is simply satisfied.
The fretted ceiling; the frieze of damask picked out with gold; the
tarsia dado, a necklace surrounding the room; the chimney-pieces,
one of which Lepec of Paris was two years in making--they are all
fine without frivolity, cheerful without fussiness. One mantel-piece
reminded me of what Baron Rothschild is said to have remarked once,
when a fop was displaying his malachite shirt-studs, “Very pretty: I
have a mantel-piece of it at home.” Some of the incised ornaments here
are gems indeed, but in no case have they the appearance of being set
there for their costliness; they are all parts of the general artistic
work. One of the best features of this drawing-room is, that it is
not “stuffed” with things. The objects in it are comparatively few,
yet they are sufficient in number and variety; and being beautiful
and interesting, one can look at each without being bewildered, as
in some houses, where an idea seems to prevail that the model for a
reception-room is a museum.
Mr. Morrison is a strenuous opponent of the general belief that the
arts are deteriorating. He believes that as good work of any kind
whatsoever can be done now as in any other age of the world, if one
will only look carefully after the men who can do it. His experience
has certainly been fortunate in discovering those who are able
to make entirely original designs, and yet conceived in a purely
artistic spirit; but then he has had all Europe at his command. The
best metal-workers he has found in Spain and Vienna. In the former
country he found out Zouloaga, a workman residing in the little town
of Eybar, and from him has obtained chased and engraved metal-work
such as almost any of our connoisseurs would be apt to date before the
Renaissance on a cursory glance. One piece of work by Zouloaga is in
the drawing-room--a large coffer, nine feet by three, covered with all
manner of figures and scrolls in iron, wrought in relief, and with a
finish which would have made Andre Buhl himself rejoice that his own
fine cabinet (of which Mr. Morrison is the fortunate possessor) should
have found a place under the same roof with that of the Spaniard. Mr.
Morrison told me that he felt sure the man could do a fine piece of
work, if encouraged, so he advanced him a thousand pounds, and told
him to begin something on that. Zouloaga worked at the coffer for four
years, and its owner saw at once that he had but paid an instalment of
the real value of this marvellous work.