Travels in South Kensington / with Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture in England

by Moncure Daniel Conway

5. Students cannot join the School for a shorter term than five months, but the students who have already paid fees for five months may remain until the end of the scholastic year on payment of a proportional fee for each month unexpired up to the 31st of July in each year.

6. Classes for School-masters, School-mistresses, and Pupil-teachers of Elementary Schools meet on two evenings in each week. Fee 5s. for the session. Teachers in private schools or families may attend the day classes on payment of a fee of £1 per month.

7. The morning classes for Practical Geometry and Perspective are open to all students, but they may be attended independently of the general course on payment of a fee of £2 per session for those classes.

8. Students properly qualified have full access to the collections of the Museum and Library, either for consultation or copying, as well as to all the School Lectures of the Department.

9. A register of the students’ attendance is kept, and may be consulted by parents and guardians.

Nothing can exceed the care and devotion with which the great work of South Kensington is carried on by both teachers and pupils. In walking through the rooms with the head-master I could only marvel at the indications unintentionally furnished by the pupils, from moment to moment, of his intimate knowledge of their work and their progress, however remote from such details he might be officially. In his room he keeps all the works sent in by the pupils in competition for the many valuable prizes offered by the school at each stage of progress, and these are preserved in large albums, each marked with the young artist’s name, so that by looking through it we trace the unfolding in this or that direction of a human mind, from the first crude geometrical drawing to mastery of the finer strokes of form and color. The pupil applying for admission is not simply put in at one end of a machine-like system to be turned out at the other, but a specimen of his or her work is demanded, and a place assigned in accordance with it.

NETTLE IN ITS NATURAL STATE. NETTLE IN GEOMETRICAL PROPORTIONS.

It was morally impressive to witness the large numbers of women who have here found a field for the cultivation of their powers. In one room—that of geometrical proportions—the students of both sexes are taught together, and no doubt the co-educational system will gradually creep from this to other classes, as it has to some extent done in University College and other institutions. But the museum is able to supply both schools with any quantity of models and aids. The young female artists have excited the admiration of their teachers and examiners by the remarkable perfection to which they carry ornamental designs, especially such as may be derived from flowers, fruits, and leaves. In one part of the museum there is a series of grottoes, filled with all manner of ferns and other plants, which serve the double purpose of adorning the room, from which they are seen through large glass doors, and of supplying subjects for the study of decorative foliation. They who see the beautiful combinations of these plants made in the training schools will discover that their previous acquaintance with some very common things has been very limited. In this study of the geometrical capacities of plants for decorative purposes the female pupils seem to excel. The exquisite art of one of them, Miss Louisa Poole, enables me to present an example of this kind of work, for which she recently received a gold medal. The subject of this very clever piece of combination is the common nettle; and, even without the beautiful colors with which Miss Poole’s original work was rendered, these outlines she has drawn for me will perhaps enable the reader to understand the kind of work by which this school has relieved England of its former dependence on Paris and Lyons. It is but just, however, to state that Miss Poole’s work, when exhibited, on occasion of a distribution of prizes by the Duke of Richmond, was surrounded by a score of similar sketches which had brought their designers well-merited prizes. No one could examine them without perceiving that the young artists have learned the main secret of ornamental art—that nature is but an alphabet, which it is the task of the artist to combine into words and sentences that shall convey human purpose and thought.