Plate XXXI—QUEEN ANNE CHAIR
With marquetry back and carved cabriole leg with hoof and serpentine stretcher Courtesy of P. W. French
In summing up the seventeenth century as a whole, it seems to show a British and insular attempt to form its own styles, to dress its homes and palaces in a British way, regardless of what the world else-where was doing. Bits of outside product came drifting across the Channel, but these were not treated with too great seriousness. They were never adopted intact with all the feeling of foreign thought shining from their elegant surfaces, but rather were cut apart and certain bits were used to tack onto the more British work. And it is just here that is found the secret of the charm which lies in old English furniture. It is the endeavour of England to tell her own story, and her story is necessarily different from that of France, Portugal, Spain, Holland, the East. So, although she borrows motifs from foreign lands, it is only to indicate her historical connection with them and not to make a witless copy of their wares.
This holds true even at the time when two great artists dominated the decorative arts in Europe, Rubens and Le Brun, and that decorative monarch, Louis XIV, ruled art as well as politics. Yet the insularity of England kept her, happily, from realising the fine flowering of French art to imitate it, and, instead, she expressed her own sturdy characteristic development.
And so we love the evidences of sincerity and the pursuit of beauty that our English ancestors made for us, and in our homes of ease, with these things about us, we like to dream of the men and women who created and used these dignified time-kissed old pieces. And in dreaming we forget the frailty and cruelty of courts and rulers and think on the nobility and courage of the lesser yet greater folk who laid the foundation of our country.
THE END
[TABLE OF INTERESTING DATES]
James I. 1603 to 1625