their regular positions, but if so, they were afterwards finished with the brush, by hand, as they have nothing of the appearance of patterns produced by stencil printing.
The materials and mediums used in the painting of walls, ceilings, or woodwork, were the dry colours ground in water, and mixed with parchment or egg size. The latter size, with or without the addition of fig-tree juice, was chiefly used in the painting of the figure subjects and pictorial work, while size made from cuttings of parchment, by boiling them, or from ordinary glue, was used for the larger surface colouring. The general medium of the work was therefore tempera, or distemper, though sometimes, but rarely, oil was mixed with the colours. Pictorial and ornamental paintings on the screens were varnished with an oil varnish over the tempera painting, but in many instances such paintings were left unvarnished. Most, if not all, of the decoration on the screens, pulpits, and the woodwork generally, in the English medieval churches, was certainly executed in tempera, with the egg-size medium, which was the common method of picture or panel painting on the Continent at that time, and most of the pictorial decorations were varnished afterwards, so that those which remain to this day have the appearance of oil paintings, and this has led many to class them wrongly as such.
The subjects on the screens, pulpits and reredoses were generally representations of saints, apostles, prophets, kings, queens, knights and angels, etc. The figures were usually placed on alternate red and green grounds, the latter being diapered over in small patterns in white, purple, or gold. In some cases a raised gesso diapered ground of gold has been prepared, as in the Southwold screens. The robes of the figures were also richly decorated with elaborate patterns, in colours heightened with gold.
There are still some remains of decorative painting on the screens of many medieval churches in Devon and Cornwall, but as a rule the work on these screens does not possess so high an artistic value as that of the East Anglian painting. In Devon most of the screens are found in churches between Totnes and Exeter. The best examples are those at Ashton, Plymtree, Buckland-in-the-Moor, Wellcombe, and the miniature-like paintings at Hennock on the hill above the Teign valley. Some painted screens in Devon of a later date, at Southpool, Blackawton, and Chivelston, are the only ones, according to Father Camm, out of forty in Devonshire that contain fillings of arabesque ornament, all the rest having painted figures. The ornament on these is in the Italian Renaissance style, with the Elizabethan English influence. The colouring of these arabesques is white, on grounds of red and green.
We have treated the subject of medieval colour decoration in England at some length, but our excuse for this must be that the period it embraces was one of the greatest activity in the history of decorative art in this country. Further, it may be said, it was in this time that churches and other buildings were coloured completely throughout, and not as in the more modern custom, where, with a few exceptions, churches and secular buildings are treated with a few isolated bits of colour, which being also done at different times, and by different hands, cannot possibly have any sort of homogeneity or unity as a suitable colour finish for the building. When any of us are fortunate enough to be trusted, or favoured with an opportunity to decorate the interior of a building completely throughout, we might do worse—we cannot do better—than take some lessons from the practice and methods adopted and followed out so successfully by the early English decorators.
Though little now remains of this old coloured decoration, that little enables us to construct from the fragments the scheme and colour of the entire work, as the anatomist is able to construct a prehistoric creation from the skeleton, or even from a portion of it.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colour decoration of buildings was almost non-existent in England, for interiors that showed any pretension to decoration were finished, or unfinished, in schemes of white and gold. Sometimes, however, the decorator was permitted to revel in pale shades of pea-green, “French grey,” very pale blues and still paler pinks, so that many interiors of the Adam and Georgian styles, though famous for their delicate ornamentation in stucco plaster work, were either left white, like brides’ cake decoration, or in the pale tints of other kinds of sugar confectionery, a dainty, but timid type of colour decoration which we borrowed from France (Plate [33]).
About the latter half of the eighteenth century, after the discovery of Pompeii, in 1753, with its richly-coloured wall decoration, colour began to show itself on the interior walls and ceilings of some English buildings, both of a public and private nature, but not in churches, for it was not until about the middle of the nineteenth century that there was a partial revival of church decoration, a sort of renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth century work, that was brought about chiefly by Pugin, Sir Gilbert Scott, and other neo-Gothic architects. Many churches were decorated in England about this time in schemes of rich and strong colouring, and with similar types of ornament to those used by the early English decorators. Two very elaborately-coloured and decorated examples may be mentioned, namely, the chapel or crypt at Westminster Houses of Parliament, and that of the Catholic Church at Cheadle, in Staffordshire, after Pugin’s designs. The colour decorations of these two churches are among the rare examples of Gothic colour revival, where the interiors have been finished in complete schemes of strong colouring.
During the last fifty years there have been many