In England, during the reign of Charles the second and of James, French furniture was imported; the old Tudor oak lingered in country houses. Boule hardly found its way till the following century to England. Splendid silver furniture consisting of plates embossed and repoussé, heightened with the graver and of admirable design, was occasionally made for the Court and for great families. Wood carving, in the manner of the school of Sir Christopher Wren, as in the bracket here shown, was long continued in connexion with architecture and furniture. Another style was carried to the highest pitch of technical execution and finish, as well as of truth of natural forms in the carving of Grinling Gibbons. This artist was English, but partially of Dutch descent. He carved foliage, birds, flowers, busts and figures, pieces of drapery, &c., with astonishing dexterity. We find his work principally on mirror frames, wall panels, chimney pieces, &c. Specimens may be seen over the communion table of St. James's church, Westminster, and in the choir of St. Paul's cathedral. The finest examples known are probably the carved work at Petworth house in Sussex, and at Chatsworth. His material is generally lime and other white woods. The flowers and foliage of his groups or garlands sweep round in bold and harmonious curves, making an agreeable whole, though for architectural decorative carving no work was ever so free from conventional arrangements. His animals or his flowers appear to be so many separate creations from nature, laid or tied together separately, though in reality formed out of a block, and remaining still portions of a group cut in the solid wood.
A. REID PEARSON, S.C.
Gibbons died in 1721. Walpole mentions Watson as having been his pupil and assistant at Chatsworth. Drevot of Brussels and Laurens of Mechlin were other pupils: the former did not survive him. His school had many followers, for we find the acanthus carvings on mouldings, round doorways and chimney pieces, down to the middle of the eighteenth century, executed in England with a masterly hand. Specimens of such work have been recently acquired in the Kensington museum, the fruits of the demolition of old London, continually in progress. The border of this page represents one of these admirable pieces; a door and frame from a house in Lincoln's-inn. Nothing can surpass the perfect mastery of execution. All the work is cut clean and sharp out of wood which admits of no tentative cuts, and requires no rubbing down with sand paper, and in which errors are not to be repaired. Lengths of these mouldings were worked off by hand, evidently without hesitation and without mishap. Country houses abound with this fine though unpretending work, and give ample evidence of the existence of a school of fine workmen, carvers at the command of the architects of the day.
We may here revert to an important addition to room furniture, which became European during this century. Mirrors had been made from the earliest times in polished metal, but were first made of glass at Venice. In 1507 Andrea and Dominico, two glass workers of Murano, declared before the Council of ten that they had found a method of making "good and perfect mirrors of crystal glass." A monopoly of the right of manufacture was granted to the two inventors for twenty years. In 1564, the mirror makers became a distinct guild of glass workers. The plates were not large: from four to five feet are the largest dimensions met with till late in the eighteenth century. They were commonly bevilled on the edges. The frames in soft wood (as in the woodcut, p. 100) are specimens of free carving during the seventeenth century. Both in Venice and in Florence soft woods, such as willow or lime, were used. The mirror-plates were, at first, square or oblong. Towards the end of the century we find them shaped at the top. In the eighteenth century they were generally shaped at the top and bottom. Figures were sunk in the style of intaglio or gem cutting on the back of the glass and left with a dead surface, the silver surface of the mercury showing through as the mirror is seen from the front.
The looking-glasses made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by colonies of Venetian workmen in England and France had the plates finished by an edge gently bevilled of an inch in width, following the form of the frame, whether square or shaped in curves. This gives preciousness and prismatic light to the whole glass. It is of great difficulty in execution, the plate being held by the workman over his head and the edge cut by grinding. The feats of skill of this kind in the form of interrupted curves and short lines and angles are rarely accomplished by modern workmen, and the angle of the bevil itself is generally too acute, whereby the prismatic light produced by this portion of the mirror is in violent and too showy contrast to the remainder.
In England, looking-glasses came into general use soon after the Restoration. "Sir Samuel Morland built a fine room at Vauxhall in 1667, the inside all of looking-glass, and fountains, very pleasant to behold. It stands in the middle of the garden covered with Cornish slate, on the point whereof he placed a Punchinello." At about the same period the house of Nell Gwynne, "the first good one as we enter St. James' Square from Pall Mall, had the back room on the ground floor entirely lined with looking-glass within memory," writes Pennant, "as was said to have been the ceiling." "La rue St. André-des-arts," says Savarin, speaking of Paris in the seventeenth century, "eut le premier café orne de glaces et de tables de marbre à peu près comme on les voit de nos jours."
