Here and there in great houses a few fine lacquered or Chinese cabinets might be seen, principally brought home as loot, for they were most plentiful in military and naval families. They were much admired and very highly esteemed, and some ingenious individual hit on a mode of making very passable imitations of them in a small way; and it was not entirely a feminine industry, but one in which the sterner sex could find indoor occupation during wet weather and long evenings without loss of dignity. Small tables and the doors of corner cupboards were frequently treated in this manner, especially the latter, which were seldom looked at very closely and did not get much handled. The work was called imitation lacquer, and the materials were collected during summer and autumn.
Very thin leaves were selected, such as the crimson foliage of the Herb Robert when it grows in stony places, silver-weed, which is to be found in hilly districts such as Derbyshire and the Lake Country, and the leaves of the sloe or blackthorn, which in late autumn turn yellowish and assume curious fade green tints. They were most carefully and smoothly dried between sheets of blotting-paper under heavy weights or in the thick volumes of bound-up music then to be found in every house, and when quite dry they were so thin that the ordinary finger might be passed over them without feeling an inequality of surface. The piece of wood—table top, cupboard door, or what not—intended to be ornamented was made perfectly smooth, and the delicate leaves were fixed on it as taste dictated with clean, strong gum. If any stalks were required to connect leaves, they were painted in; and when this was done, well pressed, and quite dry, all the interstices were filled up by means of a small camel's-hair brush with a black or dark brown varnish, probably shellac. Another coat very often had to be put on, and when all was perfectly smooth and flat two or three coats were laid all over by way of finish, and when perfectly dry and hard the article looked remarkably well.
A SAMPLE OF BERLIN WOOL WORK.
Berlin wool work on canvas, either in raised cross or tent stitch, was a great resource to ladies, and largely used for furnishing purposes. Of course, it was the latter-day equivalent of the old tapestry, and tent stitch was usually worked in frames, while really good workers could accomplish cross stitch in their hands without drawing up or cockling. Figure-pieces were often framed and hung as pictures, and fearful and wonderful they generally were. Many of the floral wreaths, however, were really artistic, especially those that depicted carnations, tulips, and poppies. Some designs were absurdly impossible, and a writer in the 'forties describes them as peacocks or birds of Paradise resting on their talons on the petals of passion-flowers. Shading was a matter of taste—good, bad, and indifferent.
The bride of that day generally took many monuments of her own and her family's industry to her new home in the shape of wool-worked cushions, chair seats, screens, and sometimes borders to table covers and curtains. Preparing them was a great pleasure, and she was very proud of them when done. They were quite in the taste of the day, and none of us in such matters lives twenty years before our time.
Another kind of decorative furnishing very highly prized was the leather work which made such handsome frames for mirrors and was also much used for brackets, and those dark articles formed a very welcome relief to the amount of gilding in vogue during the days of the Third Empire in France, which was copied almost ad nauseam in England. They entailed an amount of attention from duster and feather brush that would drive modern mistresses and maids crazy; but that is a detail.
TENT-STITCH FIGURE PICTURE (1797).
(Christ and the Woman of Samaria.)