PRIE-DIEU.
In Carved Oak, enriched with Painting and Gilding.
Designed by Mr. Pugin, and manufactured by Mr. Crace, London.
At this time furniture design and manufacture, as an Industrial Art in England, seems to have attracted no attention whatever. There are but few allusions to the design of decorative woodwork in the periodicals of the day; and the auctioneers' advertisements—with a few notable exceptions, like that of the Strawberry Hill Collection of Horace Walpole, gave no descriptions; no particular interest in the subject appears to have been manifested, save by a very limited number of the dilettanti, who, like Walpole, collected the curios and cabinets of two or three hundred years ago.
SECRETAIRE AND BOOKCASE.
In Carved Oak, in style of German Gothic.
(From a Drawing by Professor Heideloff. Published in the "Art Union," 1846.)
York House was redecorated and furnished about this time, and as it is described as "Excelling any other dwelling of its own class in regal magnificence and vieing with the Royal Palaces of Europe," we may take note of an account of its re-equipment, written in 1841, for the Art Union. This notice speaks little for the taste of the period, and less for the knowledge and grasp of the subject by the writer of an Art critique of the day:—"The furniture generally is of no particular style, but, on the whole, there is to be found a mingling of everything, in the best manner of the best epochs of taste." Writing further on of the ottoman couches, "causeses," etc., the critic goes on to tell of an alteration in fashion which had evidently just taken place: "Some of them, in place of plain or carved rosewood or mahogany, are ornamented in white enamel, with classic subjects in bas-relief of perfect execution."
Towards the close of the period embraced in the limits of this chapter, the eminent firm of Jackson and Graham was making headway. A French designer named Prignot was of considerable assistance in establishing their reputation for taste; and in the Exhibition which was soon to take place this firm took a very prominent position. Collinson and Lock,[22] who afterwards acquired this firm's premises and business, were both brought up in the house as young men, and left some thirty odd years ago for Herrings, of Fleet Street, whom they succeeded about 1870.