It is by the maintenance of such technical schools, which with more or less success are now being started by our local authorities in different parts of England, that we can to some extent replace the advantages which the old system of apprenticeship gave to the learners of a craft.
THE ELLESMERE CABINET.
In the collection of the late Lady Marian Alford.
Many other societies, guilds, and Art schools have been established with more or less success, with a view of improving the design and manufacture of furniture, and providing suitable models for our young woodcarvers to copy. The Ellesmere Cabinet (illustrated on page [243]) was one of the productions of the "Home Arts and Industries Association," founded in 1883 by the late Lady Marian Alford, a well known connoisseur and Art patron. It will be seen that this is virtually a Jacobean design.
In the earlier chapters of this book, it has been observed that as Architecture became a settled Art or Science, it was accompanied by a corresponding development in the design of the room and its furniture, under, as it were, one impulse of design, and this appropriate concord may be said to have obtained in England until nearly the middle of the last century, when, after the artificial Greek style in furniture and woodwork which had been attempted by Wilkins, Soane, and other contemporary architects, had fallen into disfavour, there was first a reaction, and then an interregnum, as has been noticed in the previous chapter. The Great Exhibition marked a fresh departure, and quickened, as we have seen, industrial enterprise in this country: and though, upon the whole, good results have been produced by the impetus given by these international competitions, they have not been exempt from unfavourable accompaniments. One of these was the eager desire for novelty, without the necessary judgment to discriminate between good and bad. For a time, nothing satisfied the purchaser of so-called "artistic" products, whether of decorative furniture, carpets, curtains, or merely ornamental articles, unless the design was "new." The natural result was the production either of heavy, or ugly, or flimsy and inappropriate furniture, which has been condemned by every competent writer on the subject. In some of the designs selected from the exhibits of '51 this desire to leave the beaten track of conventionality will be evident; and for a considerable time after the Exhibition, we can see, in our designs, the result of too many opportunities for imitation, acting upon minds insufficiently trained to exercise careful judgment and selection.
About the early part of the nineteenth century, the custom of employing architects to design the interior fittings and the furniture of their buildings, so as to harmonize, appears to have been abandoned; this was probably due, partly to some indifference to this subsidiary portion of their work, but also to the change of taste which led people to prefer the cheapness of painted and artificially grained pine-wood, with decorative effects produced by wall-papers, to the more solid but expensive though less showy wood-panelling, architectural mouldings, well-made panelled doors and chimney pieces, which one finds, down to quite the end of the previous century, even in houses of moderate rentals. Furniture therefore became independent, and, "beginning to account herself an Art, trangressed her limits" ... and "grew to the conceit that it could stand by itself, and, as well as its betters, went a way of its own."[26] The effect of this is to be seen in "interiors" of our own time which are handed over from the builder, as it were, in blank, to be filled up from the upholsterer's store, the curiosity shop, and the auction room, while a large contribution from the conservatory or the nearest florist, gives a finishing touch to a mixture, which characterises the present taste for furnishing a boudoir or a drawing room.
THE SALOON AT SANDRINGHAM HOUSE.
(From a Photo by Bedford Lemére & Co., by permission of H.M. The King.)