The Art of Interior Decoration, Emily Burbank [big ebook reader txt] 📗

The backgrounds for these mounts were the woods finely inlaid with ivory shell and brass in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Oriental lacquer and painted furniture, at that time heavily gilded.

The legs of chairs, sofas and tables of the Louis XIV period were cabrioles (curved outward)—a development of the animal legs of carved wood, bronze or gold, used by the ancient Assyrians, Egyptians and Greeks as supports for tables and chairs. Square grooved legs also appeared in this type.

The same grooves are found on round tapering legs of Louis XVI's time. In fact that type of leg is far more typical of the Louis XVI period than the cabriole or square legs grooved, but one sees all three styles.

Other hallmarks of the Louis XVI period are the straight outlines, perfectly balanced proportions, the rosettes, ribbon and bow-knot with torch and arrows in chiselled bronze.

That all "painting and sculpture sang of love" is as true of Louis XVI as of Louis XV. In both reigns the colouring was that of spring-tender greens, pale blossoms, the grey of mists, sky-blues, and yellows of sunshine.

During Louis XV's time soft cushions fitted into the sinuous lines of the furniture, and as some Frenchman has put it, "a vague, discreet perfume pervaded the whole period, in contrast to the heavier odour of the First Empire."

The walls and ceilings of the three Louis were richly decorated in accordance with a scheme, surpassing in magnificence any other period.

An intricate system of mouldings (to master which, students at the École des Beaux Arts, Paris, must devote years) encrusted sidewalls and ceilings, forming panels and medallions, over-doors and chimney-pieces, into which were let paintings by the great masters of the time, whose subjects reflected the moods and interests of each period. The Louis XV and XVI paintings are tender and vague as to subject and the colours veiled in a greyish tone, full of sentiment.

That was the great period of tapestry weaving—Beauvais, Arras and Gobelin, and these filled panels or hung before doors.

It may be said that the period of Louis XVI profited by antiquity, but continued French traditions; it was a renaissance of line and decoration kept alive, while the First Empire was classic form inanimate, because an abrupt innovation rather than an influence and a development. One may go farther and quote the French claim that the colour scheme of Louis XVI was intensely suggestive and personal, while the Empire colouring was literal and impersonal.

Under Louis XVI furniture was all but lost in a crowd of other articles, tapestry, draperies of velvet, flowered silks, little objects of art in porcelain, more or less useless, silver and ormoulu, exquisitely decorated with a précieuse intricacy of chiselled designs.

The Louis XVI period was rigid in its aristocratic sobriety, for although torch and arrows figured, as did love-birds, in decoration—(souvenirs of the painter Boucher), everything was set and decorous, even the arrow was often the warrior's not cupid's; in the same way the torch was that of the ancients, and when a medallion showed a pastoral subject, its frame of straight lines linked it to the period. Even if Cupid appeared, he was decorously framed or pedestaled.

To be sure, Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court played at farming in the Park of the Petite Trainon, at Versailles; but they wore silk gowns and powdered wigs. To be rustic was the fad of the day (there was a cult for gardening in England); but shepherdesses were confined to tapestries, and, while the aristocracy held the stage, it played the game of life in gloves.

There was about the interior decoration of Louis XVI, as about the lives of aristocratic society of that time, a "penetrating perfume of love and gallantry," to which all admirers of the beautiful must ever return for refreshment and standards of beauty and grace.

Speaking generally of the three Louis one can say that on a background of a great variety of wonderful inlaid woods, ivory, shell, mother-of-pearl and brass, or woods painted and gilded, following the Italian Renaissance, or lacquered in the manner of the Orient, were ormoulu wrought and finely chiselled, showing Greek mythological subjects; gods, goddesses and their insignia, with garlands, wreaths, festoons, draperies, ribbons, bow-knots, rosettes and medallions of cameo, Sèvres porcelain, or Wedgwood paste. Among the lost arts of that time are inlaying as done by Boule and the finish known as Vernis Martin.

This large studio is a marked example of comfort and interest where the laws of appropriateness, practicableness, proportion and balance are so observed as to communicate at once a sense of restfulness.

Here the comfortable antiques and beautifully proportioned modern furniture make an ideal combination of living-room and painter's studio.

Combination of Studio and Living Room in a New York Duplex Apartment

Tapestries and mural paintings were framed by a marvellous system of mouldings which covered ceilings and sidewalls.

The colour scheme was such as would naturally be dictated by the general mood of artificiality in an age when dreams were lived and the ruling classes obsessed by a passion for amusements, invented to divert the mind from actualities. This colour scheme was beautifully light in tone and harmoniously gay, whether in tapestries, draperies and upholstery of velvets, or flowered silks, frescoes or painted furniture. It had the appearance of being intended to act as a soporific upon society, whose aim it was to ignore those jarring contrasts which lay beneath the surface of every age.

CHAPTER XX CHARTS SHOWING HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF FURNITURE

LOUIS XIV,
   1643 to 1715
Key-note
   The Grand
   Audience Rooms Compressed regularity giving way in reaction to a ponderous ugliness. Straight, square, grooved and very squat cabriole legs. THE REGENCY AND LOUIS XV,
   1715 to 1774
Key-note
   The Boudoir The Reign of Woman. Cabriole legs of a perfect lightness and grace. LOUIS XVI,
   1774 to 1793
Key-note
   The Salon Intime The transition style between the Bourbon Interior Decoration and that of the "Directorate" and "Empire," characterised by a return to the classic line which reflects a more serious turn of mind on part of the Nation in an age of great mental activity. Legs tapering straight, rounded and grooved. A few square-grooved legs and a few graceful, slender cabriole legs. THE FIRST EMPIRE,
   NAPOLEON I,
   1804 to 1814 Classic lines.
Classic decorations with subjects taken from Greek mythologies.
     Winged figures, emblems of liberty; antique heads of helmeted warriors, made like medallions, wreaths, lyres, torches, rosettes, etc.
     Besides the wonderful mounts of Ormoulu, designed by the great sculptors and painters of the period, there was a great deal of fine brass inlaying.
     Antique vases taken from ancient tombs were placed in recesses in the walls of rooms after the style of the ancient "Columbaria."
     Every effort was made to surround Napoleon I with the dignity and austere sumptuousness of a great Roman Emperor. As we have said, he had been in Rome and he had been in Egypt; the art of the French Empire was reminiscent of both. Napoleon would outstrip the other conquerors of the world.
     Some Empire furniture shows the same fine turning which characterizes Jacobean furniture of both oak and walnut periods. We refer to the round, not spiral, turning. See legs of Empire sofa on which Madame Récamier reclines in the well-known portrait by David (Louvre).

ENGLISH FURNITURE THE OAK PERIOD
   (including early
   Jacobean) Gothic, through 14th Century.
Renaissance, 16th Century
Elizabethan, 16th Century.
Jacobean or Stuart, 17th Century; James I,
   Charles I and II, and James II, 1603-1688. THE WALNUT PERIOD Late Jacobean.
William and Mary, 1688.
Queen Anne, 1702.
"MAHOGANY" PERIOD
   (and other imported woods),
   or, CHIPPENDALE PERIOD. Chippendale.
HEPPELWHITE.
SHERATON
THE ADAM BROTHERS. 18th Century. GOTHIC PERIOD,
   Through 14th Century. Almost no furniture exists of the 13th Century. We get the majority of our ideas from illustrated manuscripts of that time. The furniture was carved oak or plain oak ornamented with iron scroll work, intended both for strength and decoration. RENAISSANCE OR
   ELIZABETHAN,
   16th Century. The characteristic, heavy, wide mouldings and small panels, and heavy round carving. JACOBEAN OR
   STUART PERIOD,
   17th Century.

WALNUT PERIOD,
   late 17th Century. Panels large and mouldings very narrow and flat, or no mouldings at all, and flat carving. The classic influence shown during the period of the Commonwealth in designs, pilastars and pediments was the result of a classic reaction, all elaboration being resented. The Restoration brought in elaborate carving. Dutch influence is exemplified in the fashion for inlaying imported from Holland, as well as the tulip design. Turned legs, stretchers, borders and spiral turnings, characterized Jacobean style.

In the GOTHIC PERIOD (extending through 14th Century), as the delightful irregularity in line and decoration shows, there was NO SET TYPE; each piece was an individual creation and showed the personality of maker. Tables, chests, presses (wardrobes), chairs and benches or settles. During RENAISSANCE OR ELIZABETHAN PERIOD (16th Century) types begin to establish and repeat themselves. Table chests, presses, chairs, benches, settles, and small chests of drawers. In the JACOBEAN (17th Century) there was already a set type, pieces made all alike, turned out by the hundreds.      Inlaying in ebony, ivory, mother-of-pearl, and ebonised oblong bosses of the jewel type (last half of 17th Century). The tulip design introduced from Holland as decoration.
     Turned and carved frames and stretchers; caned seats and backs to chairs, velvet cushions, velvet satin damask and needlework upholstery, the seats stuffed.

Henry VIII made England Protestant, it having been Roman Catholic for several hundred years before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons and for a thousand years after.

PROTESTANT. QUEEN ELIZABETH.
"The Elizabethan Period." STUART.
ROMAN CATHOLIC.
"JACOBEAN." JAMES I. 1603.
CHARLES I. (Puritan Revolution), 1628.
PURITAN. Oliver Cromwell. 1649.
Commonwealth. STUART.
ROMAN CATHOLIC.
"JACOBEAN." {Charles II. (1660), Restoration.
James II. (1686), Deposition and Flight. PROTESTANT. William—Prince of Orange (Holland), 1688.
Who had married the English Princess Mary and was the only available Protestant (1688). PROTESTANT. Queen Anne (1702-1714).

CHAPTER XXI THE MAHOGANY PERIOD

It is interesting to note that the Great Fire of London started the importation of foreign woods from across the Baltic, as great quantities were needed at once for the purpose of rebuilding. These soft woods aroused the invention of the cabinet-makers, and were especially useful for inlaying; so we find in addition to oak, that mahogany, pear and lime woods were used in fine furniture, it being lime-wood that Grinling Gibbons carved when working with Sir Christopher Wren, the famous architect (seventeenth century).

During the early Georgian period the oak carvings were merely poor imitations of Elizabethan and Stuart designs. There seemed to have been no artist wood-carvers with originality, which may have been partly due to a lack of stimulus, as the fashion in the decoration of furniture turned toward inlaying.

THE PERIOD OF WILLIAM III AND QUEEN MARY AND EARLY GEORGIAN

are characterised by turned work, giving way to flattened forms, and the disappearance of the elaborate front stretcher on Charles II chairs.

The coming of mahogany into England and its great popularity there gives its name to that period when Chippendale, Heppelwhite, Sheraton and the Adam Brothers were the great creative cabinet-makers. The entire period is often called CHIPPENDALE, because Chippendale's books on furniture, written to stimulate trade by arousing good taste and educating his public, are considered the best of that time. There were three editions: 1754, 1759, and 1762.

The work was entitled "The Gentleman and Cabinet-maker's Director and Useful Designs of Household Furniture in the Gothic, Chinese and Modern Taste" (and there was still more to the title!).

Chippendale's genius lay in taking the best wherever he found it and blending the whole into a type so graceful, beautiful, perfectly proportioned, light in weight and appearance, and so singularly suited to the uses for which it was intended, that it amounted to creation.

The "Chinese Craze" in England was partly due to a book so called, written by Sir William Chambers, architect, who went