rotation of the heavens, and having a certain mysterious significance,
perhaps, to others not fully aware of its original meaning, was used
as a mark or sign of good fortune, and this, too, (being capable
of repetition and pleasing recurrence) in course of time became
incorporated into systems of ornament. It is found widely scattered and
associated with many different types, being found in the art of both
eastern and western peoples, and constantly reappearing.
The Greek fret, a type of border ornament frequently associated with
the foregoing, and apparently surviving by sheer logical persistence,
as well, perhaps, as its perfect adaptability to simple textile
conditions, may have originally had the significance attached to
interlocked hands. We know that borders of joined hands or fingers are
still found upon oriental copper dishes, and in association with the
margin of the dish have an obvious significance, either as the laving
of hands before or after meat, or as in the sense of the text “he that
dippeth with me in the dish.”
[Illustration: Greek Cylix
Peleus and Thetis]
In regard to the fret, however, there is a well-known centre of a Greek
cylix painted with a design representing the wrestling of Peleus and
Thetis, where the interlocked hands take precisely the form, seen in
profile, of the fret border which encloses the (circular) design, the
unit of which may be discovered by anyone who will interlock right and
left hand and note the form expressed by the overlapped fingers.
Again, as I have elsewhere pointed out, the garland or swag so dear to
the heart of the classical architect and designer, was originally the
festive garland of leaves and flowers hung around the house or temple,
as may be seen in the beautiful Romano-Greek relief of the visit of
Bacchus to Icarius in the British Museum.
There appear to me to be two sources of derivation or meaning in
ornament; _the Symbolic_, which I have touched upon, and _the
Constructive_.
To the latter may be traced many of the forms in use as enrichments in
the various orders of classical architecture, which owe their origin to
primitive wooden structures, such as the dentil, the egg and tongue,
the guilloche, etc. The volute and meandering borders so frequent
in Greek pottery are traceable in their main lines to the primitive
structural art of wattling. While the banded patterns upon weapons
in the bronze age are, like enough, reminiscences of the tying and
thonging, by means of which primitive man dispensed with nails.
That universal and indispensable pattern-motive and pattern-basis,
the chequer, seems obviously to have been suggested by rush platting,
or primitive weaving; and the knotted and spreading strands of the
primitive mat, as it lay on the ground, may have, been the germ from
which a whole family of border patterns was developed which come to
us from the ancient Asiatic civilizations of the East; but the type
reached its richest and most graceful form in the hands of the Greeks
in their anthemion or honeysuckle borderings.
The anthemion itself, taken singly, as sculptured ornament or finial
upon a stele, I am inclined to think had a symbolic intention, and was
intended to suggest the flames of the funeral pyre. In general form it
is almost identical with the gilded metal flame haloes placed behind
the images of Indian and Burmese deities, and recalls also the rayed
flower so universal in Persian ornament, sometimes enclosing a fruit of
the pomegranate type. Here again there is symbolic intention--life and
the flame of life, with its flower and fruit.
Religious symbolism has, of course, played an important part in the
history of ornament, and especially enriches the ornament of the middle
ages, together with heraldic symbolism, which may be said to have been
almost exclusively _the_ ornament of the earlier middle ages--and very
splendid ornament it was. What would have been those beautiful Sicilian
silks, and the splendid thirteenth and fourteenth century textiles,
without those “strange beasts and birds” which form such valuable
ornamental units, and must have been reassuring and comforting upon the
hanging or the robe, filling the owner or the wearer with the pride of
ancestry, and the spirit of his fathers, as he recognized the family
totem, or the badge and motto that had served well in so many a fight.
Apart, however, from both symbolic and structural origin and meaning,
an important element in ornament is _line_, and line, owing to
certain inseparable association of ideas according to its quality,
structure, or direction, must always carry definite meaning to the eye
and the mind: the association of restfulness with horizontal lines,
and ornament constructed upon such lines; the suggestion of fixity
and solidity by the use of horizontals with verticals; the stern and
logical character given to a design in which only angular forms are
used; the expression of movement by the waved or meandering line--the
line actually described by human action (even by simply walking, as
we may note by marking the recurring position of the head of a figure
so moving along); the lines of energy and resistance by the sharp
irregular zig-zag; the lines of grace and rhythmic sweetness by gently
flowing and recurring curves; or the lines of vigour, of structural
force, of life itself in the radiating group, or the upward spiral of
aspiration.
One cannot attempt to follow out all the suggestions, in a short paper,
which the thought of the meaning of ornament arouses, but it appears
to me, regarded as a whole, that we have in the world of ornament a
language not only of extraordinary beauty, but of deep symbolical,
historical, constructive, and racial meaning, and could we follow it
fully to its sources, we should probably get as complete a history of
the races which have used it as a means of expression, as we could do
from any other kind of human record.
To the modern designer, accustomed as he is to play with what were
once words and syllables of perhaps vital import, _meaning_, in the
ornament he may be called upon to fashion, apart from its own form or
technical purpose, seems, perhaps, a vain or an inessential thing. But,
while by no means confusing the purpose of art with that of poetry or
literature, and fully allowing that to attain beauty and fitness is as
much virtue as we ought to expect of any designer of ornament, or any
other artist--if it grows, as it were, naturally out of the structure
and necessities of the building, or of whatever it is the final
expression and flowering--I still think that there are some thoughts,
some suggestions, proper to design as a language of line and form, and
that an ultimate symbolical meaning, however veiled, gives an interest
and a dignity to any piece of ornament, as well as a certain vitality
which it could not otherwise possess.
THOUGHTS ON HOUSE-DECORATION
House-decoration, it would seem, is almost synonymous with
civilization, and certainly has been co-extensive with its development
in the world. The domestic interior, so far as we are able to realize
it, and all that it implies, affords the best visible evidence of the
standard of living and refinement, and sense of beauty existing among a
race or people of any age or country.
In proportion as the conditions of human life become more and more
artificial, and removed from nature, man seems to require the aid of
art.
Decoration, indeed, might be regarded as a sort of aesthetic
compensation for the increased artificiality, complexity, and restraint
of civilized life.
Sheltered from the storm in a rain-proof, well-drained house, by a
comfortable fireside, the comfort of a citizen who sits at home at
ease is perhaps increased by the contemplation of pictures of wild
landscape, perilous coasts, and even shipwrecks, upon his drawing-room
wall; but when the sun smiles and the long days come, something of
the instinct of primitive man moves him, and he wants to be off to the
woods and moors, seeking nature rather than art.
Thoreau, in his delightful book, “Walden,” describes his endeavours
to return to nature and reduce his life to the simplest conditions;
he found the woods of Walden and its denizens, and the pond with its
wild fowl, and the contemplation of the changeful drama of nature quite
sufficient, beyond a little rough wooden shanty, with a bed, a chair,
and a writing-desk in it. The only attempt at decoration he seems
to have made was when he introduced some curious stones, by way of
ornament, but quickly got rid of them again, as they needed dusting and
arranging. Here he seems to have reached the zero of house-decoration.
Decoration with primitive and pre-historic man may be considered
chiefly personal and possible. The taste for decorative pattern was
gratified upon his own skin in the form of tattoo or war-paint, or in
strings of beads, feather head-dresses, and the carved handles of his
weapons. Not that modern man--still less modern woman--has given up
personal decoration, in fact, I suppose feathers and beads were never
so much in demand, but it seems that modern painters and decorators
having provided so much more elaborate and becoming backgrounds they
have to be “lived up to.” One has heard of the man (in “Punch”) who was
looking for a wife “to suit his furniture.” Well, the background is an
important element of a picture, after all.
Cave-walls, though not neglected in primitive times, no doubt had
rather severe limitations, regarded as fields for decoration, and until
the art of constructing dwellings had been developed to a certain
extent, it is obvious that mural decoration could hardly exist in any
ordered form.
Tent-dwellers, like the Tartars and the Arabs, developed the mat
and rug, the carpet and cover, and thus, on the textile side, made
their historic contribution to an important element in modern
house-decoration, as well as to certain typical forms of pattern well
known to decorators; but the ancient Egyptian, with his plastered
surface over the sun-baked bricks which formed the wall of his dwelling
was, so far as we know, the initiator of painted mural decoration.
The definite but abstract forms, the primary colours cleared by black
outlines, and the resulting flat decorative effect of early Egyptian
art, have set the abstract type for mural painting for all ages.
With the Egyptians, however, as with the ancients generally, the
buildings most regarded for decorative purposes, owing, of course to
their social and religious customs, were the temple, the palace, and
the tomb. The Greeks and Romans, and the nations of mediaeval Europe,
broadly speaking, followed the same order, inspired by very different
ideas, and under the influence of very different habits of life and
climatic differences. The classic temple and the mediaeval cathedral
became alike the depositories of the most beautiful decorative art.
They are the great representative monuments of the art of the age and
of the races that produced them, truly collective and typical.
The individual citizen under Greek, Roman, and especially Christian
ideas, and the development of commerce becoming of more and more
importance, we find the private house considered more and more as a
field for the decorator’s art, and for the expression of individual
feeling and taste.
As regards walls, fresco and tempera painting appear to have been the
chief and most general methods of decoration from classical times to
the middle ages, and it is still to those methods we look for the
higher forms of mural work.
The remains of Pompeii, disclosed from beneath their pall of volcanic
ashes, have furnished a mine of examples to the mural painter, and,
indeed, the influence of the Roman and Pompeian taste and methods of
treatment seems to have remained almost traditional with the Italian
decorator, who has never lost his skill as a workman in tempera
painting, though one may not always be able to admire his taste.
Yet, in regard to such a marked and distinct type of decoration as
the Pompeian, one cannot but feel that in the endeavour (which has
often been made) to adapt such types of decoration to modern domestic
interiors there is an uncomfortable feeling of anachronism and
incongruity. The style, the fancy, the colour, the treatment, the
motives, all belong so essentially to another race, and to a different
climate. To live surrounded by such imported decorations would be like
masquerading in classical costume, and, indeed, to be consistent, the
dwellers in a Pompeian room ought to pose in classical draperies, and
endeavour to emulate an Alma-Tadema picture in the aspects of their
everyday life.
Every race and every age, however, acted upon by all sorts of
influences, climatic, social, economic, commercial, political,
historic, evolves its own ideas of home and comfort--and appropriate
decorative surroundings as a necessary part of home and comfort. These,
in the long run, are the _fittest_ to the circumstances and conditions,
but by no means always ideally the _best_, in fact, but rarely so,
being the result, as a rule, of certain compromises; but the forces
which fashion our lives and characters, which determine our habits and
pursuits, also determine the character of our surroundings.
The very ideas of home and comfort which one might consider more fixed
and permanent--more traditional--than most human notions, seem, with
the increased complexity of modern life, especially on the lines of
the present development of large cities, or commercial centres, liable
to change. The practice of living in flats and residential hotels
must surely tend to displace or modify in the mind of the ordinary
citizen the older ideas of what constitutes the completeness and
organic relation proper to an independently constructed dwelling. The
contraction of space, and sometimes of light, commonly associated with
flats, cannot have a favourable physical effect, and the impossibility
of any garden setting--beyond a window box--must again, one would
think, affect both the general health as well as a healthy sense of
decoration.
The decorative designer certainly depends largely for freshness of
inspiration and suggestion in design and colour upon growing plants
and flowers, upon the sight of birds and animals, of the ever-changing
sea and sky, and the colours of the landscape. If the sense from which
is produced the very elements of decoration thus requires to be kept
alive and in health, surely the sense which appreciates the product,
which selects and uses, needs also similar access to nature to preserve
a healthy tone. But having provided small brick boxes with slate lids
as homes for our people, and packed them together in straight rows all
alike on the eligible building land of our towns, we next proceed to
economize space (and secure more unearned increment to the square foot)
by packing such boxes one on the top of the other and calling them
“mansions” or “residential flats.”
[Illustration: Sketch for Collective Dwelling containing Sixteen
Cottages with Common Dining-hall, Kitchen, etc. 1/32″ Scale
By Lionel F. Crane]
[Illustration: Sketch for Collective Dwelling containing Sixteen
Cottages with Common Dining-hall, Kitchen, etc. 1/32″ Scale]
On the other hand the collective dwelling, of which perhaps we see
the germ in the better type of modern flats, with a common kitchen
and dining-hall, may have an important future, and there is no reason
why, given favourable conditions, good sites, and ample ground and
careful planning with due regard to light, air, and aspect, dwellings
on the plan of collective living, or collective homes, should not
have dignity and beauty, as well as the comforts of a home combining
provision for the necessity of privacy, with the social advantages of
a common room, and the economic and continuous advantages of a common
kitchen.
It should mean that the administration, the housework, and the cooking
would be done by trained hands, and one would suppose that the load of
care to devise the recurring scheme of the daily dinner, etc., now so
generally pressing on the poor housewife, might thus be lifted, and a
great waste of individual effort saved.
The old plan of the quadrangle would be an excellent one for a
co-operative dwelling: one side of the square or wing opposite the
entrance gate might be occupied by the dining-hall and public rooms,
the other sides might contain the private rooms or be divided into
separate dwellings with separate private entrances on the outer sides:
on the inner side connected by a cloister which would enable the
occupants of the private rooms or separate dwellings to pass to the
public rooms at the head of the quad. A formal garden might occupy the
centre of the quadrangle with a fountain in the centre. Such a scheme
has, I believe, already been proposed to be tried in one of the London
suburbs.
[Illustration: Frescoes by Ford Madox Brown
Town Hall, Manchester]
[Illustration: Frescoes by Ford Madox Brown
Town Hall, Manchester]
From the decorator’s point of view the plan and scale of such
collective dwellings might afford fine scope for art: the large public
rooms such as the hall and the common dining-room, might be simple and
dignified with panelled walls, leaving space above for a continuous
frieze of figures, or divided into separate subjects illustrating local
history or legend, poetry, romance, or symbolism of life and nature.
The true place, however, for the decorative perpetuation of local
history and legend is the Town Hall, and it is satisfactory to know
that this principle has been thoroughly recognized in at least one
important city of England and in a modern Town Hall. I allude to the
frescoes of Ford Madox Brown which vividly and dramatically illustrate
the history of Manchester and her worthies, and appropriately decorate
the walls of the City Hall.
In Birmingham, also, I believe a scheme of painted panels has been
devised to illustrate local history, and students of the Municipal
School of Art have competed for the design of these. This seems an
excellent idea which might be generally adopted. Every town which has
municipal buildings and a municipal school of art might do much not
only to stimulate public spirit and local feeling, but also materially
to help young students and designers by giving them an opportunity of
doing public work and thus getting practice in the highest kind of
decorative art--mural painting.
Surely if we have any pride of place, if we regard our towns and cities
as something more than mere mills for money-making we must feel how
greatly their interest and beauty might be added to in such ways as
these, as well as public parks and gardens, fountains, trees along the
streets, and seats and shelters. Indeed, having regard to the future of
our race, and the importance of space and open air and surroundings of
some beauty to the healthy growth and upraising of children, it becomes
a public question of pressing importance, this of the conditions
of life in our cities, housing, and house and school building and
decoration.
One remarkable demonstration or object lesson has been given, owing
to the initiative energy and philanthropy of Mr. George Cadbury at
Bournville near Birmingham, which I was afforded the opportunity
of seeing the other day. He has proved, at least (even as William
Morris did), that factory work may be carried on amid pleasant
surroundings and means of recreation for body and mind, and that a
working population can be housed in close proximity to their work in
picturesque and cheap healthy dwellings, surrounded with ample gardens
and pleasant trees.
The Garden City Association is also in the field with Mr. Ebenezer
Howard’s scheme for uniting agriculture, horticulture and manufactures,
with beautiful and healthy dwellings in garden cities which will, it
is hoped, relieve the overcrowding of our great towns, and bring back
the people to the country with all the conveniences and advantages of
well-organized city life, and moreover enable the inhabitants to become
the collective owners thereof.
The rapid means of escape from towns which modern invention and
commercial interest and enterprise have placed within reach of the town
dweller--while they suggest that modern cities are not meant to dwell
in--by those who can get out of them--may to some extent counteract
the ill effects of an artificial existence, at least among some classes
of the population, but I think a certain restlessness is induced which
has its effects--even upon decorative art. The modern mind seems more
easily fatigued, and to require more constant and rapid change. This
restlessness, no doubt accelerated by the effects of grime and smoke,
leads to the desire for more frequent change of colour and pattern in
the living rooms, than formerly. This, it may be said, is healthy,
because it is “good for trade”--for the painters’ and decorators’
trade, that is. One of the drawbacks of modern life, however, is the
existence of trade organizations that are prepared to supply (on the
shortest notice) any atrocity which may be in demand--indeed, I am not
sure that supply does not in some cases create demand, and I suppose
he is but a poor salesman who cannot persuade people to buy what they
do not want--it may be some passing whim or phase of public taste, or
want of taste; but the circumstances which are good for such trade
cannot be expected to evoke much _artistic_ enthusiasm. What is “good
for trade” is not always good for human beings, either in the making or
the using, of which we have often had evidence, but trade, or profit,
is the modern fetish to which, apparently, all other considerations are
expected to bow.
[Illustration: View in Bournville]
[Illustration: Cottages at Bournville
Designed by Alex. W. Harvey]
Now, I take it, a painter or a decorator must be primarily concerned
with producing something of beauty, even if, owing to circumstances
over which he has no control, it cannot be “a joy for ever.” Let his
problem be of the simplest--the choice of a flat tint for a wall, for
instance--the important element of individual taste comes in. This,
again, must be checked by considerations of adaptability and utility,
such as aspect and conditions of lighting in the room, the kind of
room, its proportions and purpose.
We all know what a different effect the same tint has in full or in
half-light, in sunlight or in shadow, and what transformations are
effected in rooms by simply changing the tint or the wall-paper.
The effect, too, of the same tint upon different surfaces should be
noted. Any texture or granulation of surface improves the quality of a
flat tint, and for this reason wall coverings with a texture in them;
such as are known under the name of Burlaps, are excellent, providing
a variety of plain tints of pleasant texture for wall coverings, or
admirable grounds for the decorator to work upon.
A good sense of colour, therefore, is of the first importance. A
knowledge of how to produce certain tints; the effect of one tint
upon, or in juxtaposition to, another; the effect of one tint and of
different tints in the same light; the best grounds for different
tints; all these things, in addition to the workman’s skill of hand
in laying on paint evenly, are essential parts of a painter’s and
decorator’s training and equipment.
The complex elements out of which have been evolved our ideas of
harmonious decoration are not more complex than those out of which
the varieties of the modern house have been produced. True taste,
as well as common sense, would say, “cut your coat according to
your cloth”--build your house and decorate it according to what you
can spend upon it: let it represent your own ideas of taste and
comfort, after due thought, and not be an imitation of another’s, or
of something in the mode which you think you ought to like, neither
something costly because of the cost, or a cheap imitation of something
costly.