Backgrounds
The employment of punched grounds in carved work is to be deprecated as mechanical in effect. Sufficient interest is obtainable by the process of cutting back, in the perfect levelling of which the carver need not be too concerned. Suspiciously uniform grounds are suggestive of work fret-sawed and applied.
No. 277. Wood Carving. English.
Late Elizabethan or Early Jacobean.
When carving in wood is in very high relief, it is occasionally, as in the Grinling Gibbons work, built up. This may not be a matter of great objection if properly attached, and the grain of fibre matched, but is, however, better avoided.