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

by Moncure Daniel Conway

In passing from the consideration of works of a public and semi-public character I cannot refrain from paying some tribute to the most influential decorative artist whom England has produced, and whose death in April, 1874, all lovers of beauty are still mourning. Mr. Owen Jones carried into decorative art that spirit of archæological accuracy—one might almost say that profound scholarship—which was brought into pictorial art by Delaroche in France, Baron Wappers in Belgium, and Maclise in England. It is said that there was but one thing in England which the Shah of Persia wished to carry back with him to his palace—the Alhambra rooms, at the Crystal Palace; but of all their possessions, in the way of art, there is hardly one that the London people would so unwillingly part with. Yet it is probable that as little as the Shah the thousands who every week find in those rooms their châteaux en Espagne realize what it really cost to put them there. Mr. Owen Jones had passed his youth and his early manhood journeying, both personally and mentally, on the track of the race to which his fine culture belonged: he had studied the mystical figures and lines of Egyptian temples; he had pondered the principles by which reason and truth find expression in stone amid the ruins of Greece; he had learned the secrets of simplicity and grandeur in Rome, where were poured the converging streams of beauty from many tribes, each bearing its freight of faith and aspiration, to be deposited in marbles and monuments which are the gospels and bibles of a primitive world. By this path, which meant for him a growing culture, he came to dwell on the heights of Granada, as the recluse and devotee of Beauty, and when he thence returned to his native land he brought with him a new era. He expended a fortune on the grand folio of colored drawings of the Alhambra, which brought him no return, but a single copy of which is now a collector’s treasure. When proposals were being received for the decoration of the glass palace of the International Exhibition of 1851, Mr. Owen Jones offered to Prince Albert and the Royal Commissioners his plans. The Prince held out against them for some time; but the fascination was on him, and again and again he returned to the exquisite designs, until he surrendered to their charm. He selected Owen Jones with some tremor, but every year since the Palace has been transferred to Sydenham has shown that it was a felicitous incident of his life to have encountered the right man for a task which was to be of far more permanent importance than he supposed. Since then Mr. Owen Jones has not only given the large interiors of various great business establishments that beauty which makes many of them worthy of study and admiration, but he has won for himself and his country the highest honors of the three great Continental Exhibitions. It was with some amazement that the world found itself pointed to England as the leader in decorative art by the French Exposition of 1867. “It requires,” said the official catalogue of that exposition, “but a slight insight into modern domestic life in England to perceive how great a change has taken place within the last ten or fifteen years in the internal embellishment of the dwelling-houses of the upper and middle classes of society; and there can be little doubt that the extension of art education will lead still farther to the production and appreciation of articles which combine the three requisites of fitness of purpose, beauty of design and ornament, and excellence of workmanship.” It might be supposed by those who have not seen this master’s work that it consisted merely in clever imitations of the Moorish and other designs with which his name is associated; but, on the contrary, his chief excellence was, that he showed how the ideas and principles which underlie the great works of the past were capable of being led out into new forms and adaptations. In taking the chair at the Society of Arts, in 1851, on the occasion of a lecture on the arts and manufactures of India, by Professor Royle, Mr. Owen Jones, having accorded superiority to the Indian and Tunisian articles in the Exhibition of that year over all contributed by Europe, added: “Many of these specimens have been purchased by government for the use of the School of Design, and will, no doubt, be extensively circulated throughout the country. But it is to be hoped that they will do more than merely teach us to copy the Indian style. If they only led to the origination of an Indian style, I should think their influence only hurtful. The time has arrived when it is generally felt that a change must take place, and we must get rid of the causes of obstruction to the art of design which exist in this country.”

The Daily News, in an editorial article on the death of Owen Jones, said: “It was to bring the beautiful in form and color home to the household, and to mingle its subtle influences with the whole frame-work of social and family life, that the great designer we are lamenting labored all his life with the patient, unselfish enthusiasm of one to whom, though full of the keenest sympathy with all the great historic movements and events of his time, his art was his life.”

OWEN JONES.

The devotion of such a scholar and refined gentleman as Owen Jones to decorative art has helped to make an era in that kind of work. Before that it suffered in England from being regarded as a sort of upholstery, implying neither talent nor culture. Some gentlemen of culture and wealth recognized the genius of Mr. Owen Jones at a time when the Prince Consort was still inclined to regard him as a superior kind of upholsterer or house-painter, among whom must be especially mentioned Mr. Alfred Morrison, well known for his antiquarian and numismatical accomplishments. His residence in Carlton House Terrace is the truest monument of the genius of Owen Jones, and it is a work which need fear no comparison with any other, of whatever age or country. It makes the chief palaces of Northern Europe vulgar. Sádi tells us of one recovering from an ecstasy, who said he had been in a divine garden, where he had gathered flowers to bring to his friends; the odor of the flowers so overcame him that he let fall the skirt of his dress, and the flowers were lost. Some such account one must needs give of a visit to Mr. Morrison’s house. A thousand of the touches, the felicities, which combine to produce the happiest effects in this mansion, can by no means be conveyed from the place where they would appear to have grown. I will only mention a few suggestive features of this system of decoration.

The house is one of those large, square, lead-colored buildings, of which so many thousands exist in London, that any one passing by would pronounce characteristically characterless. It repeats the apparent determination of ages that there shall be no external architectural beauty in London. Height, breadth, massiveness of portal, all declare that he who resides here has not dispensed with architecture because he could not command it. In other climes this gentleman is dwelling behind carved porticos of marble and pillars of porphyry; but here the cloud and sky have commanded him to build a blank fortress, and find his marble and porphyry inside of it. Pass through this heavy door-way, and in an instant every fair clime surrounds you, every region lavishes its sentiment; you are the heir of all the ages. Entering a room for reading and writing, near the door, we are conscious of a certain warmth of reception even from the walls. They are of silk, made in Lyons, after a design by Owen Jones. The shade and lustre are changeable, but the prevailing color dark red. The design is as if an endless series of the most graceful amphoræ had suddenly outlined themselves, and the lines had taken to budding off into little branches. The surface is Persian, and the whole sentiment of the room is Oriental, without having in it a single instance where Oriental work has been copied. The carpet is Persian, but the design is by Owen Jones, the most noticeable figure being the crossed squares, making a star-shape to match a similar one on the coffered ceiling. This tapestry of silk starts a theme, so to say, which is carried, with harmonious variations, throughout the building, expanding in the larger rooms, until it recalls every variety of Etruscan shape, and taking on the most beautiful colors. There is a Blue Room, a Pink Room, a Yellow Room; yet in no case is there anything “loud” or garish in the tints. The ceiling of the reading-room is somewhat after the fashion of the best Italian work of four centuries ago—a kind of moulding in deep relief, which probably ceased to be much used because it was found difficult to make it without incurring the danger of its falling, so great would be the weight. But Owen Jones invented something which he called “fibrous plaster,” by which the most heavily coffered ceilings can be made with perfect security. It consists in first making the shapes to be used in wood; the wood is then covered with canvas, and this canvas is covered with repeated coats of the finest plaster, which is rubbed down into any mouldings required, and painted. The coffers here are star-shaped, and in each an inverted convoluted shell of gold. It is an indication of how finely the decorator has blended Oriental lustres and classic designs that the various antique objects and fine metal-work, done by the best Spanish, Italian, and Viennese workmen, after classic models, everywhere set about the rooms, have an easily recognizable relationship with the scrolls and forms on carpets, ceilings, and walls.

But neither the Lyons silk nor the Persian carpets can be pronounced unique in the same sense as the wonderful use made of various woods in this house. In the dado, jambs, chairboarding, we find no carved work, but simply the most exquisite combinations of ebonized and many-colored woods. Some of these, as the Indian holly, are so fine that the grain is invisible to the closest inspection. Other woods are so soft and beautiful that they have the surface of petals. Trees belonging to every land and clime of the earth have sent here their hearts, and, without a particle of pigment being used on any one of them, they gather to form rosettes on the chimney-pieces, cappings for the dados, and finest featherings around the doors—white, golden, red, cream-colored, brown, and these of every shade. The tables and chairs of several rooms are of this tarsia-work of forms untouched by staining or by metal.

In the library the book-shelves, which do the duty of a dado around the room, have alternate doors of glass and wood, and the latter are adorned with a foliation, over two feet high, growing from the bottom of the panel and leafing out at the top, which cannot be surpassed by any ancient marquetry. Above these shelves the green and gold lustres of the wall rise to a cone, which has the appearance of a blue and gold enamel, above which is an early Tudor ceiling of checker pattern, between reliefs of a large star with four shadings of different colors, or star within star, golden, dark, and white. The chimney-piece here may be regarded as a large arched cabinet, with fire-grate beneath, having two wings, in which are contained specimens of porcelain from Persia and Cashmere, which, old as they are, have an appearance of having been designed by the decorator of the room, who certainly never saw them until they came into the harmony he had prepared for them.

The drawing-room, whose windows overlook St. James’s Park, is a very large apartment, whose division, if it ever had any, has disappeared, giving an unbroken range to the eye, which, whether it takes in the whole effect or pauses to examine a detail, is simply satisfied. The fretted ceiling; the frieze of damask picked out with gold; the tarsia dado, a necklace surrounding the room; the chimney-pieces, one of which Lepec of Paris was two years in making—they are all fine without frivolity, cheerful without fussiness. One mantel-piece reminded me of what Baron Rothschild is said to have remarked once, when a fop was displaying his malachite shirt-studs, “Very pretty: I have a mantel-piece of it at home.” Some of the incised ornaments here are gems indeed, but in no case have they the appearance of being set there for their costliness; they are all parts of the general artistic work. One of the best features of this drawing-room is, that it is not “stuffed” with things. The objects in it are comparatively few, yet they are sufficient in number and variety; and being beautiful and interesting, one can look at each without being bewildered, as in some houses, where an idea seems to prevail that the model for a reception-room is a museum.