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VICTORIAN FURNITURE
July 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment
ANY systematic charting of the history of Victorian furniture – at least after 1850 – must take constant account of the overlapping of styles, though necessarily giving prior attention to those pioneer, and indeed often rebel, designers upon whose inspiration the entire development ultimately depends. Collectors have the choice of furniture at every level of taste, though for obvious reasons it is usually only the more ‘advanced’ pieces, in so far as they survive, which can provide the additional interest of exact dating and documentation.
In the absence of an accepted body of doctrine on Victorian furniture, the opinions expressed in the survey which follows are necessarily personal and tentative. Moreover, they are unavoidably based as much on an examination of contemporary documents as of actual surviving furniture. The survey concentrates on cabinet-makers’ furniture, and excludes upholstered furniture and those sidelines, such as metal furniture, wicker, cane and bent-wood furniture and garden furniture, which require separate study.
Early Victorian Furniture:
The first fifteen years of Victoria’s reign mark the lowest ebb ever reached in the whole history of English furniture design. Indeed, the most severe strictures so often applied indiscriminately to Victorian taste as a whole are entirely justified if only directed against the products of this initial period. It would, however, be absurd to suggest that a sudden deterioration set in as soon as the new reign had begun; the most that can be said is that a debasement which was already evident as early as the late 1820S gained steady impetus during the 183os and 1840s. The Great Exhibition Of 1851 is always taken to mark the culmination of this debasement. In a sense this is true; although it is only right to remember that by stimulating competitive ostentation among manufacturers it tended to exaggerate the most vulgar elements in Early Victorian design, while the fact that, for the first time, the various illustrated catalogues of the exhibition provide a permanent record of its horrors, unfairly weighs the evidence against the Early Victorians. Had a similar exhibition been held in 1837 instead of 1851, it would hardly have demonstrated a higher average standard.
Two characteristics stand out in the general confusion: an emphasis on rich and elaborate carving, preferably with a narrative or anecdotal interest, and a delight in the numerous new substitute materials which technical progress was making available. Lacking any accepted architectural framework, the shape and outline of such items as cabinets and sideboards was frequently entirely subordinated to an overall covering of carving, often worked not by hand carving but by new methods such as the burning techniques of the Burnwood Carving Company’s ‘Xylopyrography’ and Harrison’s Wood Carving Company (Pimlico), or the machine stamping of Jordan’s Patent Wood Carving, or even produced from materials such as gutta-percha, Jackson’s `carton-pierre’, Bielefeld’s ‘Patent Siliceous Fibre’, White and Parlby’s ‘furniture composition’, or Leake’s sculptured leather.
Elaborate carving became so established as the hall-mark of fine furniture during this period that the furniture section of Wornum’s Report on the Great Exhibition is actually headed ‘Carving and Modelling’, and the only artists known to have been commissioned during the years 1837-51 to design furniture from outside the trade (with the exception of Pugin, to be mentioned below) were not architects as one would expect, but sculptors, such as Sir Francis Chantrey (1781-1841), John Thomas (1813-62) and Baron Maro-chetti (1805-67). Inevitably the most popular examples of English furniture at the Great Exhibition were the elaborately carved cradle presented to Queen Victoria by W. G. Rogers (1792-1875) — known as the ‘Victorian Grinling Gibbons’; the monstrous ‘Kenilworth’ buffet (now at Warwick Castle), the chef-d’oeuvre of the Warwick school of wood carvers which flourished throughout the 19th century; and Arthur J. Jones’s ludicrous patriotic carved furniture in Irish bog-oak.
The only one of the new materials which may be said to have produced something new and attractive was papier-mache, enriched after 1842 with Jennens’s and Bettridge’s patent jewelled effects. This plastic material, though suitable for trays, caskets and the like, is, however, basically unsuitable for load-bearing furniture, and has no real place in the development of Victorian furniture. Owing to the natural attraction of the smaller items for collectors, it has, nevertheless, received disproportionate attention, and has helped to spread the myth that Early Victorian furniture is lighter and less clumsy than mid-Victorian. In a few cases, of which the settle is a good example, the techniques for decorating papier-mAch6 (e.g. lacquer painting and encrustation with shell and mother-of-pearl) were applied to a normal wooden framework, thus producing a legitimate piece of furniture; but such examples are rare.
Mid-Victorian Furniture: x851-67
The furniture of the period 1851 to 1867 differed very markedly from that of the preceding period. In particular the wild eclecticism and confusion of styles was rapidly replaced after 1851 by a surprising uniformity, and a single consistent style soon imposed itself on the great bulk of fashionable productions. Victorians themselves gave no name to this style, but usually described examples of it with generalized phrases such ac ‘following the purest taste of the Italian Renaissance’. Twentieth-century writers have hitherto ignored its existence, although a careful analysis of, for example, the copious records which have survived from the vast Modern Furniture Court of the 1862 Exhibition makes
its existence perfectly clear.
Its main characteristics were the use of solid wood, usually walnut or mahogany, rather than veneers or inlay, a repudiation of baroque or rococo curves in favour of more severe outlines, and a continuing emphasis on carving. The latter, however, was now no longer allowed to sprawl over the whole surface with a profusion of unrelated motifs, as in the 184os, but was concentrated into carefully disposed and deeply cut masks, swags and trophies (usually of ‘appropriate’ objects, such as dead game birds on sideboards), and almost invariably incorporated human figures in the form of caryatids or brackets. Indeed, this emphasis on human figures became something of an obsession with designers during this period, so that no fashionable sideboard or cabinet was considered complete without them — as large as possible and preferably free-standing. Equally indispensable was an enormous mirror, backing, and usually dwarfing, the whole piece — a direct consequence of the technical developments in mirror making first displayed in the industrial section of the 1851 Exhibition.
It cannot be doubted that the best examples in this manner — however unacceptable to present-day taste — show a sense of style and consistency that had been completely lost in the i 840s, and certainly justify the enthusiasm with which all writers in the 186os refer to the great improvement in the stylistic purity of English furniture since the nadir of 1851. The improvement must be mainly attributed to the influx of French designers imported from Paris by all the leading firms after the 1851 Exhibition had so clearly exposed the general superiority of French design. Some, such as Eug6ne Prignot and Alfred Lormier, who acted as chief designers to Jackson and Graham throughout the 1850s and 186os, were brought over permanently, while in other cases designs were commissioned from artists in Paris, such as Ernest Vandale and Hugues Protat. In either case, the manufacturers always emphasized that ‘the piece has been entirely executed by English workers’.
Gothic Revival
The first conscious reformers of Victorian furniture design
— A. W. N. Pugin (1812-52) and William Burges (182′7-81)
— cannot be said to have had a direct or decisive influence on the general trend of trade design. Nevertheless, the developments of the late 186os cannot be explained without a reference to their role. Though they both worked within the orbit of the Gothic Revival, their actual designs differed very radically.
The influence of Pugin on English furniture design has usually been overrated. His general influence as a propagandist, his key position in the mid-century transition from a sentimental to a scientific medievalism and the significance of his teachings on church furnishings have tended to obscure the fact that his own domestic furniture had little influence and that his following among furniture designers was always small. He himself designed a good deal of furniture in an extremely plain and unromantic Gothic style for the numerous houses which he erected in the 1840s, but as this was never published, it had no effect on the trade.
By contrast, the much more ornate and monumental furniture which he designed for the Houses of Parliament, and in particular the elaborate display piece which lie designed for J. G. Grace for the Medieval Court of the 1851 Exhibition, and which was purchased by the Museum of Ornamental Art in 1852 were much publicized and copied. Consequently the trade furniture of the 1850s which was claimed by its manufacturers to be ‘in the purest Gothic taste, after recognized authorities’, and dismissed by its detractors as ‘Puginesque’, tended to repeat all those faults of over-elaboration with architectural conceits in the way of finials, crockets and the like, which Pugin himself had so trenchantly attacked in his Contrasts and which his own domestic work so skilfully avoided. In fact, this type of architectural Gothic furniture was far too closely associat -,d in the public mind with Pugin’s catholicism to have any
wide vogue.
Morris Furniture
Several pieces exhibited by William Morris and his associates in 1862 have survived, and all are solidly constructed, supposedly Gothic, carcases, used as surfaces for painting. They belong by rights to the history of painting rather than of furniture. However, the Morris firm also produced several other types of non-Gothic furniture each of which had an influence on the general trend of furniture design. So many misconceptions are current about Morris furniture that it is necessary to examine these in some detail.
Morris himself (despite frequent statements to the contrary) never designed any furniture, nor do his writings indicate much interest in it. All the furniture produced by the firm was the work of his various collaborators. Four different types were manufactured in these early years. Firstly, Philip Webb (1831-1915), the architect, designed a number of large tables depending for their effect entirely on the use of unstained oak and on the interest of their unconcealed joinery construction, thus marking a conscious revolt against the debasement of mid-Victorian cabinet making. Though they were exaggeratedly massive and monumental, their proportions and their simple chamfered decoration reveal the hand of a sensitive architect. Their importance lies not in any immediate influence on the trade but in their delayed influence on the Arts and Crafts furniture designers of the 18gos, and they can be legitimately regarded as the original prototypes of the whole Cotswold school of joinery.
Secondly, Ford Madox Brown designed a set of cheap bedroom furniture, produced by the Morris firm in large quantities, usually in a green-stained version, of which a few examples have survived. These appealed particularly to those mid-Victorians who felt that the introduction of examples of good plain design into servants’ bedrooms could not but help raise the taste, and even the morals, of the lower classes. Their success led to plagiarism by many firms in the
1880S.
Thirdly, the firm produced and sold right up to the 1920S a set of cheap rush-bottomed chairs and settle in turned ebonized wood, including seven alternative shapes, which quickly became immensely popular with middle-class families anxious to escape from the general philistinism of contemporary decoration. These also were copied with minor modifications by numerous other firms. This set was not originally designed by the firm, but was adapted from a traditional-type country chair seen by William Morris in Sussex.
Fourthly, the firm produced with equal success a drawing-room easy chair with an adjustable bar at the back, which became so popular that in the United States the type is still known as a ‘Morris chair’. Though often spoken of as designed by Morris himself, it was in fact copied directly from a chair seen in 1866 by Warington Taylor, the young manager of the firm, at the workshop of a Herstmonceux furniture maker named Ephraim Coleman.
Later in the century the firm evolved several entirely different types of furniture, which are referred to below in connexion with the Arts and Crafts movement.
Bruce J. Talbert and C. L. Eastlake
Although neither the architectural Gothic of Pugin nor the painted-plank Gothic of William Burgos and the Morris firm had much direct influence on trade design, they were nevertheless responsible for providing the point of departure for the development of what ultimately became the most widespread and original of all Victorian styles — a development that was so rapid that in the decade 1868 to 1878 it transformed the whole course of Victorian furniture design. Two stages — or rather two overlapping strands — can be traced in it: the first associated with Bruce J. Talbert (1838-81) and C. L. Eastlake (1836-1906), the second with T. E. Collcutt (1840-1924)- Once again the usual Victorian confusion about labels has served to obscure the significance of these changes and the originality of the furniture which developed from them, for contemporary writers gave the style no name and referred to its products as simply Gothic, Early English, Old English or even Jacobean.
The first stage dates from 1867, when Talbert, a prolific and neglected designer, won a silver medal for Holland and Sons at the Paris Exhibition with a so-called ‘Gothic dressoir’ and several smaller cabinets. The influence of this success was consolidated by the publication in the same year of Talbert’s Gothic Forms, applied to Furniture, Metalwork, etc. for Interior Purposes, and in 1868 of Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste, a book which exerted an enormous influence in sophisticated middle-class circles – especially in America, where it gave rise to a so-called ‘Eastlake style’.
Although Talbert’s Paris Exhibition pieces were still in a heavy semi-Gothic style, not so far removed from the `Puginesque’, the more unpretentious examples in both his book and in Eastlake’s, which were of course, those which had most influence on trade production, marked a definite step away from the Gothic of both Pugin and Burges towards a style more practical and three-dimensional. Its main characteristics were a rigid avoidance of curves or florid carving, a concentration on straight lines and an elaboration of surface colour and texture (but always in the lowest possible relief) by the use of a great variety of different techniques and materials, including the insertion of painted and stained panels, tiles, stamped leather, embroidery, enamels and chased metal. Talbert produced large quantities of this furniture, not only for Hollands, but also for Gillow, and for Marsh, Jones and Cribb of Leeds. However, only two authenticated examples of his work have so far been traced (both are now in the Victoria & Albert Museum). They are both in this modified Gothic style, and demonstrate the particular flavour of rich sobriety which characterized his work. Other examples must certainly survive, along with pieces by Eastlake himself (he designed for Heaton, Butler and Bayne), and those designers who closely followed this style in the 1870s, such as E. J. Tarver (working for Morant Boyd) and Owen Davis, the eclectic assistant of Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt and author of Art and Life (1885).
Despite the acclaim with which Talbert’s book was received and the designs in it copied, he himself quickly abandoned the style, and already in the early 18705 turned towards a dull and unoriginal rehash of Jacobean motifs, with a tedious elaboration of carved strap-work and a generally baronial air. This change can be clearly traced in the designs which he exhibited at the Royal Academy over these years, and in his second book of designs, Examples of Ancient and Modern Furniture, published in 1876. Its influence was slight, for it merely provided additional models for the large firms of traditionalist decorators, such as Gillow and Trollope, who had in any case always found in late Elizabethan and early 17th-century oak carving a ready-made source of inspiration for their more pretentious schemes.
T. E. Collcutt
The second stage in these developments, though it stemmed directly from the first and rapidly followed on its heels, was due neither to Talbert nor Eastlake, but to Thomas Edward Collcutt. Though remembered as the architect of the Imperial Institute, his role as a furniture designer has been entirely forgotten. It opens in 1871, when Collcutt exhibited at the South Kensington International Exhibition a cabinet designed for Collinson and Lock, which was bought by the Commissioners of the Great Exhibition and finally found its way into the South Kensington Museum. The publication in 1872 of a large catalogue of designs by Collinson and Lock (mostly the work of Collcutt, although ,J. Moyr Smith, the author of Ornamental Interiors (1887) later claimed some credit for them) gave the style a wide currency in the trade, so that already by the time of the Paris Exhibition of 1878 firms such as Cooper and Holt, and Bell and Roper of London, and Henry Ogden of Manchester were copying it precisely. By 188o its influence appears in the catalogues of mass-production firms such as Hewetson and Milner, Smee, and Lucraft.
In Collcutt’s hands the style, though following Talbert in the emphasis on straight lines and the use of coved cornices and painted panels, was elaborated in a far more fanciful and light-hearted spirit, which marked a further stage in the evolution away from the medieval. A simultaneous emphasis on both verticals and horizontals, and a proliferation of shelves and divisions, diversifies the facade and provides variety by giving space for the display of knick-knacks. As always, the rapid spread of the style was accompanied by an equally rapid debasement, so that by the early 1880s it was responsible for a mass of elaborate but gimcrack cabinets, what-nots, corner-cupboards (a particular favourite) and the like, with spindly supports, a profusion of small pigeonholes, often divided off by little railings of turned balusters or embroidered curtains, and panels painted with floral sprays or willowy female figures, usually on a gold ground. A persistent cliche which became almost a trade-mark for the style was a double panel in which an inner oblong or hexagon is joined to an outer frame by ties at the four cardinal points.
At its best, the style must be regarded as the Victorian era’s most individual contribution in the whole field of furniture design. Quantities of its cheaper manifestations have survived, particularly in country rectories. Over-mantels, usually backed with numerous small mirrors, have tended to survive as being fixtures, and examples of a drawing-room version of the style, decorated in black and gold, can also be found. Authentic pieces from the Collinson and Lock 1872 catalogue are, however, very difficult to come by.
The surprisingly rapid spread of Talbert’s original style, and Collcutt’s later version of it, can only be explained if account is taken of the way in which Eastlake and the many publicists who followed him supported their influence with arguments which seemed to provide would-be connoisseurs and purchasers with certain easily remembered maxims for judging furniture, and which buttressed their own uncertain taste with apparently authoritative criteria. These all derived ultimately from the teachings of Pugin, Owen Jones and Ruskin on ‘honesty in design’. The most telling was the proposition that because wood has a straight grain it should always be used in the plank and never debased by being carved or curved into twisted shapes more appropriate to plastic or ductile materials. This argument was strengthened by simultaneous appeal to economic and nationalist considerations, for the carving or curving of wood obviously involves the cutting-to-waste of good timber, while ‘wanton curves’ and ‘meaningless scrolls’ could be condemned as symbolizing the decadent extravagances which had so recently brought the French Second Empire to the ground.
During this period a parallel movement in favour of straight lines, a lighter and more varied colouring and texture and a shunning of the deep carving of the 186os can be traced even in the luxury productions of firms such as Jackson and Graham, and Wright and Mansfield. At its best it produced some very handsome pieces, such as the cabinet by Wright and Mansfield, which won the highest awards at the Paris Exhibition of 1867 and was purchased for the South Kensington Museum for C800. Judging from contemporary descriptions, the elaborate inlaid furniture produced by Jackson and Graham in the early 187os for Alfred Morrison’s palace at 16, Carlton House Terrace, to the designs of Owen Jones (1809-74), must have reflected the same trend. The 187os also saw the production of furniture designed by Norman Shaw for Lascelles and Co. Unfortunately, in the absence of surviving photographs or specimens, the wildly conflicting opinions of contemporary critics provide no clear picture of its style.Anglo-Japanese Style
Owing to the absence of furniture in the European sense in the traditional Japanese home, the revolutionary influence on Victorian design of the displays of Japanese craftsmanship at the International Exhibitions of 1862 (London) and 1867 (Paris), following the opening-up ofJapan by the West, had rather less effect in the field of furniture design than in those, for example, of wallpapers, textiles or book illustration. Nevertheless, the impact of the new culture - providing, as it did, a heaven-sent stimulus to jaded designers in search of some authentic historical style that had not already been copied ad nauseam - was sufficient to inspire a vogue for so-called ‘Anglo-japanese’ furniture in the i87os and Mos.
The first enthusiast was E. W. Godwin (1833-86), the architect and stage designer and associate of Whistler and Ellen Terry. He is said to have decorated his own house in the Japanese manner as early as 1862, and was certainly designing furniture showing a strong Japanese influence by the late 186os. An illustrated catalogue issued by William Watt in 1877 contained many examples of his work and did much to familiarize the general public and the trade with his particular style.
Inevitably the trade version of Godwin’s style, worked out in the i88os by hack designers, produced some deplorable furniture, in which the Japanese inspiration was limited to such obvious tricks as imitation bamboo legs, and asymmetrical fretwork panels, However, a few of the better professional designers managed to design some quite pleasing pieces by grafting certain Japanese motifs on to the Talbert-Collcutt style. The most successful of these was H. W. Batley, who designed some very elaborate furniture for James Shoolbred and for Henry Ogden of Manchester. It is possible, also, that some of the ‘Anglo-Japanese’ furniture produced by the short-lived ‘Art Furnishers’ Alliance’, founded in 1880 by Christopher Dresser (1834-1904), the indefatigable but eccentric designer and publicist (he was for a time Art Editor of the Furniture Gazette in the 188os), may have been of interest, for Dresser had a real understanding of Japan, which he visited officially in 1876; but the only two surviving examples are too unimportant to justify an
opinion.
This Anglo-Japanese vogue was accompanied in the 188os by a revival of interest in other exotic styles, such as the Indian, Persian and Moorish, as a result of which such features as ‘Anglo-Arab lounges’ and ‘H indoo smoke-rooms’ became popular, particularly in clubs and hotels. However, this fashion was largely met by the importation and adaptation of genuine Oriental examples (Egyptian mushrabiya panels, Chinese embroidered screens, Indian mother-of-pearl and ivory tables and the like) by firms such as Liberty’s, rather than by Western manufacturers, and no serious English designers seem to have been influenced by it.
The Arts and Crafts Movement
Late Victorian furniture design — indeed, the Late Victorian decorative arts generally — was dominated by the birth of what has come to be known generically as the ‘Arts and Crafts movement’ (i.e. the Century Guild, 1882; the Art Workers’ Guild, 1883; the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, 1888; the Guild of Handicraft, 1888; the Home Arts and Industries Association, 1889; the Wood Handicraft Society, 1892; and many others). In fact, during the last dozen years or so of the Victorian era no furniture of interest was designed outside its orbit.