the first place, a remarkably interesting house architecturally, and
shows plainly that Mr. George Aitchison has not only been in classic
regions, but imbibed their spirit. In this house, which he has built
for the artist who beyond all Academicians displays the most sensitive
sympathies with various styles, there is nothing foreign, and yet the
whole feeling about it is classic. The little balcony would have done
for the sweet lady of Verona, and yet there is as much of Shakspeare’s
England in the substantial arches at the base of the wall. It is rare,
indeed, that any house built in England in recent times has about
it as much elegance and simplicity as this. Entering the house, the
impression conveyed at once is that it is the residence of an artist.
He has employed decorators, indeed, but he has watched over them, and
he has secured thereby this--that there is nothing ugly in his house.
A great merit! Many rooms upon which large sums have been lavished
have something lugged in that makes all the rest appear vulgar or
pretentious. It is a large part of the art of decoration to know what
not to have in a house. In this house is also realized the truth of
the old French saying, “Peu de moyens, beaucoup d’effet.” For example,
the doors are of deal, painted with a rich black paint; on each jamb
there is at the bottom a spreading golden root, from which runs a stem
with leaves; half-way up the stem ends in the profile of a sunflower
in gold; another stem then passes up, ending in the full face of the
sunflower, which at once crowns the foliation of the jambs, and makes
a noble ornament for the capping of the door, which also has a central
golden ornament. This black door, with its black jambs and its golden
flowers, varied on other doors to other conventional forms, has an
exceedingly rich effect. The hall also bears witness, notwithstanding
its mosaic floors, marquet chairs, and the grand old stairway that
runs with it to the top of the house, that the wealth of knowledge and
experience has done more for it than riches of a more prosaic kind,
though there has been no stint of the latter. One thing in the hall
struck me as especially ingenious, and at the same time beautiful.
Just opposite to the entrance from the vestibule into the hall the
stair begins to ascend beyond large white pillars. Now, between the
first and second of these pillars there is a little balcony, about
as high above the floor as one’s head. On examination it is found
that this balcony is made out of an inlaid cabinet chest, the top and
farther side of which have been removed to make way for cushions. These
cushions have been finely embroidered with various delicate tints upon
a lustrous olive satin by Miss Jekyl, and the little balcony, with
pretty ornaments on it here and there, becomes a main feature of the
hall. There are several other pieces of Miss Jekyl’s work in the house,
one of the most beautiful being a red table-cloth in the dining-room,
upon which she has worked four figures of pots, whose flowers converge
toward the centre. This cover is appropriate to the red color which
prevails in the dining-room--a color which I do not much like in a
dining-room, though here it well sets off the large ebonized and
inlaid sideboard, which is adorned with a great deal of the finest
Rhodian porcelain. Sir Frederick Leighton on returning from a visit
to the East brought back a whole treasury of china and tiles; and he
has also brought a large number of beautiful Persian tiles, with which
he has made a little interior rotunda and dome which is a marvel of
beauty. A sentence of the Koran runs along the cornice; stained glass
throws a rich light through the room; a fountain plays in the centre.
Mr. Dillon, an artist, has for some time had a studio in which every
article came from Egypt, even to the inscription from the Koran (Sura
91) which makes its frieze--
“By the brightness of the sun when he shineth,
By the moon when she followeth him,” etc.
Sir Frederick Leighton’s chief room is his studio; it covers more
than half of the whole area of the top floor of the house. The walls
are hung with stuffs from many countries--tapestries, rugs, ancient
Japanese silks--which fall from the cornice to the floor. There are
some fine ebonized bookcases and cabinets, designed by Mr. Aitchison
and Sir Frederick together. The roof is arranged with sky-lights and
sliding curtains of various descriptions, so that there is no kind of
light or shade whatever that the artist is not able to bring upon his
work. The drawing-room has a white coffered and tinted ceiling, and
neat mouldings above the bay-window gather round a fine oil-picture, by
Eugene Delacroix, fixed in the ceiling. It is beautiful, but I could
not help feeling that some mural painting by another artist might
well be substituted, and the Delacroix placed “on the line.” There is
suspended a very rich central candelabrum of Venetian glass in many
colors. The walls are hung with cigar-tinted cloth, with modified
_fleur-de-lis_ spots, beneath which a floor of ash-blue is disclosed
for the width of a yard between the wall and the bright Persian carpet.
[Illustration: A GRATE OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.]
In all the houses which are carefully decorated in London great use is
made of tiles. The tiles which are unrivalled in the esteem of artists
are the old Dutch, which consequently have been nearly all bought
up. A single old Dutch tile, which when made hardly cost more than a
sixpence, now finds eager purchasers at a pound. It is a singular fact
that our manufacturers can imitate Persian and Egyptian tiles, but have
still to send to Holland to get anything resembling the old Dutch,
and even there they can obtain but an approach to the rich coloring
and quaint designs of old times. Mr. Stevenson, the architect whose
book has been referred to on a previous page, obtained a large number
of these old tiles, which when put together formed large pictures;
but several of them were wanting, and he had to make designs of what
those he possessed appeared to imply were on the others. He had tiles
made which, at any rate, completed the pictures; and though the new
ones were carefully made, they may be easily picked out from the old.
These tile pictures have been placed by Mr. Stevenson on the side of
a sheltered entrance that leads from the street across the front-yard
to his beautiful residence in Bayswater. Inside of this house there
are many beautiful things, but it is chiefly remarkable for the
admirable mantel-pieces on the ground-floor and that above it--in the
hall common to both--which show rich old carvings set with tiles,
chiefly Persian and Dutch, which are built from floor to ceiling. In
the children’s school-room there is a chimney-piece covered with Dutch
tiles representing most quaintly all the most notable scenes in the
Bible, which must be a source of endless amusement to the little ones.
The finest designs for tiles which I have seen in London are those of
Messrs. Morris & Co., whose pictures, however, are often so beautiful
that one dislikes to see them ornamenting fireplaces. Nevertheless, the
grate and its arrangements are becoming matters of serious importance
in every room, and a walk through the establishment of Messrs. Boyd,
in Oxford Street, will show that the “warming engineers” have not
been behindhand in providing stoves, tiles, and grates that may be
adapted to many varieties of decoration. These gentlemen tell me that
they are continually on the watch to get hold of old grates, fenders,
fire-dogs, and so forth, that were made a hundred years ago, on account
of the great demand for them, and that they reproduce them continually;
nevertheless they believe that they can produce a prettier grate now
than could have been made in the last century. The engraving on page
198 represents a grate found in an English mansion about one hundred
years ago. The one on this page represents a grate recently made for
the late Baron Rothschild. The one on page 200 represents a grate and
fireplace designed and made by Messrs. Boyd, which appears to me one of
the most beautiful I have yet seen.
[Illustration: GRATE MADE FOR BARON ROTHSCHILD.]
In the houses thus far described I have mentioned several which have
been decorated in whole or in part by Messrs. Morris & Co., but
have reserved until now a special treatment of their style. Their
decorations, apart from their undeniable beauty, derive importance from
the fact that they can be adapted to the requirements of persons with
moderate incomes, or to the needs of those who are prepared to pay
large sums. The firm in question--as befits a company whose head is one
of the most graceful of living poets--has mastered the Wordsworthian
secret of
“The eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony.”
[Illustration: BOYD’S GRATE.]
Of the many different papers with which they hang rooms, only a few
have appeared to me unsuited for the purposes of a refined decoration
of almost any room. One, an imitation of square trellis-work, with a
bird sitting in each opening, I have seen on the walls of a bedroom
(which, I suspected, might have been originally intended for a
nursery; in which case I am not prepared to say that it might not have
appeared in place), where it was not pleasing, and it has appeared
to my eye frivolous in sitting-rooms. Nor do I altogether like their
lemon-yellows, which are so well placed in corridors, to find their
way (as they sometimes do) into drawing-rooms; that color, however
adapted for daylight, suffers bleaching by candle or gas light. But
generally their wall-papers are of beautiful grays--pearl, sage, or
even darker--and, while full of repose and dignity by day, light up
well under any artificial light. This firm also does the finest wall
mouldings in relief that I have met with. A remarkable instance of this
may be found in the Grill Room at the South Kensington Museum, to which
reference has already been made. And a somewhat similar moulding is
still more effectively used in the drawing-room of the Hon. Mr. Howard,
in his house at Palace Gardens--a willow pattern, with buds, on a
cream-colored background, which rises to a deep frieze of green. In two
rooms of the same mansion the light pomegranate paper, with shut and
open flowers, is used with good effect. In the dining-room the general
hue is faint pink, and this is also pleasing. In the nursery there is
an exceedingly beautiful paper of wild daisies on a mottled ground. Mr.
Howard is not only an artist himself, but a collector of pictures and
other objects of art. His walls have in a great measure been decorated
with the idea of adapting them to the purpose of displaying to the
best advantage the quaint old cabinets which he possesses, and the
many fine pictures of pre-Raphaelist art which adorn his walls. On one
of the landings of the stairway there is a fine organ, upon which Dr.
Burne Jones has painted a charming picture of St. Cecilia playing on
her keys. This picture sheds light and beauty around, and shows how
much may be done in a house by having such objects brought into the
general system of ornamentation adopted in the house. It is hardly
enough to bring into the house furniture of a color which is vaguely
harmonious with the wall-paper; by a little decoration even the piano,
the cabinet, the book-case, may be made to repeat the theme to which
the walls have risen.
Dr. Burne Jones--for Oxford has bestowed on him its D.C.L., to its own
honor as much as his--has decorated a grand piano with finest art.
Around its bands is told the fable of Orpheus, the potency of music,
in scenes of classical, but not conventional, treatment. On the lid
is a Muse leaning from an oriel of the blue sky; beneath stands a
poet musing; and between them is a scroll inscribed with a bit of old
French, “N’oublié pas”--motto of the family for whom the piano was
made. At another end of the lid is painted amid bay-leaves the page
of a book, with illuminated letters here and there, the lines being
those of one of Dante’s minor poems, beginning, “Fresca rosa novella.”
But all these beauties are surpassed when the lid is lifted. Amid the
strings, which are exposed, there is a drift of roses, as if blown into
little heaps at the corners by the breath of music. On the interior
surface is painted a picture to be gazed on with silent admiration,
for few can be the strains from those keys which will interpret the
subtle sense of the picture. The only name given is _Terra Omniparens_.
Between the thorns and the roses sits this most beautiful Mother, naked
and not ashamed, with many babes around her. Above, beneath, around,
amid the foliations they are seen--impish, cherubic, some engaged in
ingenuities of mischief, others in deeds of kindliness and love. Greed,
avarice, cruelty, affection, prayer, and all the varieties of these are
represented by these little faces and forms. Some nestle around the
Mother; one has fallen asleep on her lap. The fair Mother is serene;
she is impartial as the all-nourishing, patient Earth she typifies; all
the discords turn to harmonies in her eternal generation. Her impartial
love waits on the good and the evil; she is one with the art that
“shares with great creating Nature.”
Although the hangings of Morris & Co. do not imply a lavish, but
only a liberal, expenditure, they do not readily adapt themselves to
a commonplace house inhabited by commonplace people. There must be
thousands of these square-block houses with square boxes for rooms
which would only be shamed by the individualities of their work. The
majority of houses attain the final cause of their existence when the
placard inscribed “To Let” may be taken down from their windows. No
doubt the decorative artist might do a great deal toward breathing a
soul even into such a house, if it were inhabited by a family willing
to pay the price. But there are houses built with other objects than
“to let,” built by or for persons of taste and culture, and to such
the decorations of Messrs. Morris & Co. come as a natural drapery. Mr.
Ionides, who has just entered a new house in Holland Park Villas, has
shown, by adopting in it decorations similar to those of the smaller
house he has left, that, after many years, the hangings of Morris &
Co. still appear to him the most beautiful; and it is significant of
the spirit in which he has carried out his own feeling in both cases
that he has steadily refused to let the house his family had outgrown
to all applicants who proposed to pull down its papers and dados, and
convert the house into the normal commonplace suite of interiors. He
preferred to retain for some time, at a loss, that which he and his
artistic friends built up with so much pains, rather than have it pass
into inappreciative hands. In the new residence of Mr. Ionides he
has found a beautiful hanging for his drawing-room in a Morris paper
of willow pattern, with two kinds of star-shaped blossoms, white and
yellow, which harmonizes well with the outlook of the room into a
conservatory. The curtains of the bay-window in the spring season are
of Oriental cream-colored linen, with flowers embroidered in outline
(light gold), and at wide intervals, upon them. The paper in the
large dining-room is the small floral square (sage-gray) pattern of
Messrs. Morris & Co., which harmonizes well with the red carpet, the
pictures, and the green-golden lustres of the velvet curtains. Mr. E.
Danreuther, in whose brilliant successes as interpreter of the “Music
of the Future” America as well as Germany has reason for pride, has his
residence in Orme Square decorated mainly with the Morris patterns.
The house is quaint and old, and nothing can exceed the sympathetic
feeling with which these designs harmonize with the style of the halls
and rooms. It is a picture for the imagination to think of Carlyle and
Sterling (who once resided here) conversing on great themes amid these
quietly rich, these even poetical designs and colors. Nearest to that
imaginary picture is the real one which I have seen a little way from
Orme Square, namely, in the villa of the late Mr. Edward Sterling, son
of the poet John Sterling, himself an artist, who had used his own
excellent taste, and that of his wife (a sister of Marcus Stone), in
adorning his house at Kensington. An especially fine appearance has
been given to a high wall which stretches through two stories beside
the stairway by changing the style and color of the (Morris) paper
midway, and thus breaking the monotony. The hangings of the lower
hall are dark, and the light shed down from the higher wall is thus
heightened. In this, as in the majority of beautiful houses, the first
effect at the entrance is that of shade. The visitor who has come from
the blaze of daylight is at once invited to a kindly seclusion. Beyond
the vestibule the light is reached again, but now blended with tints
and forms of artistic beauty. He is no longer in the hands of brute
Nature, but is being ministered to by humane thought and feeling, and
gently won into that mood
“In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.”
That mood, my reader will easily understand, cannot be secured by
the papers of Morris & Co.; but where a true artist is able to find
such artistic materials as theirs to work with, he is able, as in the
case of Mr. Sterling, to weave them on the warp of his own mind and
sentiment into a home which shall not fail to distribute its refining
and happy influences to all who enter or depart.
Among the younger artists of high position and achieved fame in the
fine arts who have aimed to include house decoration within their
poetic domain, the most successful has been Mr. Walter Crane, who is
fortunate in having a firm of skilful paper-stainers (Jeffrey & Co.,
of Islington) to embody his beautiful and quaint designs. Mr. Crane’s
“Chaucer,” or “La Margarete,” paper received a special medal and
diploma at the Philadelphia Exhibition, and his more recent designs are
not inferior. The “Margarete” paper, which takes almost any color that
is not garish, has become a prime favorite among the lovers of chaste
decoration in London, and the light olive tint is preferred. The daisy
is the motive, taken from Chaucer:
“As she that is of allë floures flour,
Fulfilled of all virtue and honour,
And ever alike fair and fresh of hue.”
The burden of the daisy-song (in the “Legend of Good Women”)
“Si douce est la Margarete,”
is exquisitely blended with the pattern. The superb frieze shows, on
a background of gold, the youthful God of Love holding Alcestis, the
ideal wife, by the hand; next Diligence, with her spindle; Order, with
hour-glass; Providence, with well-filled basket; and Hospitality, with
her jar and extended cup. These figures support the roof as caryatides.
Plants of alternate leaf and flower, in pots, stand between the figures
and beneath the Chaucerian text: “To whom do ye owe your service? Which
will you honour, tell me, I pray, this yere? The Leaf or the Flower?”
In the dado are the types of purity and innocence--lilies and doves.
Mr. Walter Crane’s services to decorative art are well appreciated
by the little folk in some households, for he has designed papers
representing the most fascinating of Cinderellas and Boy Blues, and
as I write is bringing out an apotheosis of Humpty Dumpty and cognate
classicisms. That this artist is ambitious of canonization among the
young is farther suggested by the fact that he has actually turned
his hand to designing valentines, thus tempting staid persons to
indulge in that kind of thing--or, at any rate, to condone it--who
have long eschewed such pinky frivolities. He has designed three or
four valentines only, but they have been endlessly imitated. I must
not omit to mention that a great deal of the best needle-work done
in London has been after Mr. Crane’s designs, and also that he is at
present engaged in making tiles which promise to surpass all other
recent designs. These represent generally each some simple, graceful
figure--classic, allegorical, or antique--with flowers surrounding
them; but the charm is in the very pleasing expression this artist
conveys in a few lines by his careful drawing, and also by his delicate
sense of color. Whatever he does, however conventional the accessories
may have to be (and they must often be such with the real artist, who
will never dignify incidents with the same work as his main designs,
any more than he will paint his picture-frame like his canvas), no one
acquainted with his work can ever mistake the touch. When I first saw
Walter Crane’s papers I felt a certain heaviness of heart that one
could not have them all on the walls of some favorite room--all at the
same time!
[Illustration: L. ALMA TADEMA.--[FROM A BUST BY J. DALOU.]]
Perhaps the most complete rendering of the effects at which William
Morris and Burne Jones have aimed in their efforts at beautifying
London households is to be found at Townsend House, to which I have
before alluded. Mr. L. Alma Tadema, the finest colorist, has of course
been as one of the partners of the firm so far as his own home is
concerned, and the touches of his art are met with at every step in
it. Passing beneath the cheery “Salve” written over the front-door,
we at once meet with a significant piece of art. On each side of the
rather narrow hall is a door; one leads into a parlor, the other into a
library, and, as they are just opposite each other, the doors are made
to open outward, and, when open, meet. Now, when it is desirable, the
two doors when open make a wall across the hall; this extemporized wall
has its panels painted, and thus a pretty passage is made to connect
the separate rooms. One thing in Townsend House is very peculiar: the
ceilings are generally covered with the same paper as the walls. There
is a dado of matting with touches of color in it, or else painted in
some color related to the paper but of deeper shade, and above this
a uniform paper, with but slight frieze (most of the rooms being
comparatively small, a deep frieze would be out of place). I confess
that I have some misgivings about this continuance upon the ceiling
of the wall-paper. It would certainly answer very well in rooms that
were of very high pitch, for the heavier the color on a ceiling the
more it is depressed to the eye. But here the sense of comfort and
snugness secured--important as they are in this moist, chill climate,
which often makes one willing to be folded up in a warmly lined box--is
paid for by a sense of confinement. A ceiling ought not to be white
nor blue, which, not to speak of the quickness with which they become
black from the chandeliers, convey the feeling of exposure to the
open air, but there should be above one a lighter tint and shade,
lest the effect should be that of being in a cellar. The underground
effect nowhere occurs in Townsend House, because therein true artists
have been at work, but one might not be so secure if the papering had
been left to less judicious decorators. The corridors have the creamy
pomegranate paper, which carries a cool light through them. A small
back-room on the first floor has been Orientalized into a charming
place by a skilful use of rugs, skins, etc., on the floor, and on
the Persian divans fixed against the wall, which is covered with a
silvery and pinkish paper. The chief bedroom in the house presents the
novelty of walls entirely hung with a rich dark and reddish chintz,
with wide stripes flowing from ceiling to floor, the effect being a
grave Persian. The bed is hung and covered with the same stuff, and the
lower part of each window is made into a cushioned seat of the same.
The ceiling in this case is of a pearl-white, and there is plenty of
light. This room appeared to me, though at first a surprise, one that
was suggestive of every kind of warmth and comfort; it was, indeed, an
entire room made into the appropriate environment of a bed. In another
bedroom I observed how beautifully the light may be regulated by the
use of double curtains, one of dark green, when darkness is desired,
the other of a fine tracing-cloth, which is more snowy than the glass
of an astral lamp, while it similarly softens and diffuses light.
[Illustration: CANDELABRA, TOWNSEND HOUSE.]