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

by Moncure Daniel Conway

“The eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony.”

BOYD’S GRATE.

Of the many different papers with which they hang rooms, only a few have appeared to me unsuited for the purposes of a refined decoration of almost any room. One, an imitation of square trellis-work, with a bird sitting in each opening, I have seen on the walls of a bedroom (which, I suspected, might have been originally intended for a nursery; in which case I am not prepared to say that it might not have appeared in place), where it was not pleasing, and it has appeared to my eye frivolous in sitting-rooms. Nor do I altogether like their lemon-yellows, which are so well placed in corridors, to find their way (as they sometimes do) into drawing-rooms; that color, however adapted for daylight, suffers bleaching by candle or gas light. But generally their wall-papers are of beautiful grays—pearl, sage, or even darker—and, while full of repose and dignity by day, light up well under any artificial light. This firm also does the finest wall mouldings in relief that I have met with. A remarkable instance of this may be found in the Grill Room at the South Kensington Museum, to which reference has already been made. And a somewhat similar moulding is still more effectively used in the drawing-room of the Hon. Mr. Howard, in his house at Palace Gardens—a willow pattern, with buds, on a cream-colored background, which rises to a deep frieze of green. In two rooms of the same mansion the light pomegranate paper, with shut and open flowers, is used with good effect. In the dining-room the general hue is faint pink, and this is also pleasing. In the nursery there is an exceedingly beautiful paper of wild daisies on a mottled ground. Mr. Howard is not only an artist himself, but a collector of pictures and other objects of art. His walls have in a great measure been decorated with the idea of adapting them to the purpose of displaying to the best advantage the quaint old cabinets which he possesses, and the many fine pictures of pre-Raphaelist art which adorn his walls. On one of the landings of the stairway there is a fine organ, upon which Dr. Burne Jones has painted a charming picture of St. Cecilia playing on her keys. This picture sheds light and beauty around, and shows how much may be done in a house by having such objects brought into the general system of ornamentation adopted in the house. It is hardly enough to bring into the house furniture of a color which is vaguely harmonious with the wall-paper; by a little decoration even the piano, the cabinet, the book-case, may be made to repeat the theme to which the walls have risen.

Dr. Burne Jones—for Oxford has bestowed on him its D.C.L., to its own honor as much as his—has decorated a grand piano with finest art. Around its bands is told the fable of Orpheus, the potency of music, in scenes of classical, but not conventional, treatment. On the lid is a Muse leaning from an oriel of the blue sky; beneath stands a poet musing; and between them is a scroll inscribed with a bit of old French, “N’oublié pas”—motto of the family for whom the piano was made. At another end of the lid is painted amid bay-leaves the page of a book, with illuminated letters here and there, the lines being those of one of Dante’s minor poems, beginning, “Fresca rosa novella.” But all these beauties are surpassed when the lid is lifted. Amid the strings, which are exposed, there is a drift of roses, as if blown into little heaps at the corners by the breath of music. On the interior surface is painted a picture to be gazed on with silent admiration, for few can be the strains from those keys which will interpret the subtle sense of the picture. The only name given is Terra Omniparens. Between the thorns and the roses sits this most beautiful Mother, naked and not ashamed, with many babes around her. Above, beneath, around, amid the foliations they are seen—impish, cherubic, some engaged in ingenuities of mischief, others in deeds of kindliness and love. Greed, avarice, cruelty, affection, prayer, and all the varieties of these are represented by these little faces and forms. Some nestle around the Mother; one has fallen asleep on her lap. The fair Mother is serene; she is impartial as the all-nourishing, patient Earth she typifies; all the discords turn to harmonies in her eternal generation. Her impartial love waits on the good and the evil; she is one with the art that “shares with great creating Nature.”

Although the hangings of Morris & Co. do not imply a lavish, but only a liberal, expenditure, they do not readily adapt themselves to a commonplace house inhabited by commonplace people. There must be thousands of these square-block houses with square boxes for rooms which would only be shamed by the individualities of their work. The majority of houses attain the final cause of their existence when the placard inscribed “To Let” may be taken down from their windows. No doubt the decorative artist might do a great deal toward breathing a soul even into such a house, if it were inhabited by a family willing to pay the price. But there are houses built with other objects than “to let,” built by or for persons of taste and culture, and to such the decorations of Messrs. Morris & Co. come as a natural drapery. Mr. Ionides, who has just entered a new house in Holland Park Villas, has shown, by adopting in it decorations similar to those of the smaller house he has left, that, after many years, the hangings of Morris & Co. still appear to him the most beautiful; and it is significant of the spirit in which he has carried out his own feeling in both cases that he has steadily refused to let the house his family had outgrown to all applicants who proposed to pull down its papers and dados, and convert the house into the normal commonplace suite of interiors. He preferred to retain for some time, at a loss, that which he and his artistic friends built up with so much pains, rather than have it pass into inappreciative hands. In the new residence of Mr. Ionides he has found a beautiful hanging for his drawing-room in a Morris paper of willow pattern, with two kinds of star-shaped blossoms, white and yellow, which harmonizes well with the outlook of the room into a conservatory. The curtains of the bay-window in the spring season are of Oriental cream-colored linen, with flowers embroidered in outline (light gold), and at wide intervals, upon them. The paper in the large dining-room is the small floral square (sage-gray) pattern of Messrs. Morris & Co., which harmonizes well with the red carpet, the pictures, and the green-golden lustres of the velvet curtains. Mr. E. Danreuther, in whose brilliant successes as interpreter of the “Music of the Future” America as well as Germany has reason for pride, has his residence in Orme Square decorated mainly with the Morris patterns. The house is quaint and old, and nothing can exceed the sympathetic feeling with which these designs harmonize with the style of the halls and rooms. It is a picture for the imagination to think of Carlyle and Sterling (who once resided here) conversing on great themes amid these quietly rich, these even poetical designs and colors. Nearest to that imaginary picture is the real one which I have seen a little way from Orme Square, namely, in the villa of the late Mr. Edward Sterling, son of the poet John Sterling, himself an artist, who had used his own excellent taste, and that of his wife (a sister of Marcus Stone), in adorning his house at Kensington. An especially fine appearance has been given to a high wall which stretches through two stories beside the stairway by changing the style and color of the (Morris) paper midway, and thus breaking the monotony. The hangings of the lower hall are dark, and the light shed down from the higher wall is thus heightened. In this, as in the majority of beautiful houses, the first effect at the entrance is that of shade. The visitor who has come from the blaze of daylight is at once invited to a kindly seclusion. Beyond the vestibule the light is reached again, but now blended with tints and forms of artistic beauty. He is no longer in the hands of brute Nature, but is being ministered to by humane thought and feeling, and gently won into that mood

“In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.”

That mood, my reader will easily understand, cannot be secured by the papers of Morris & Co.; but where a true artist is able to find such artistic materials as theirs to work with, he is able, as in the case of Mr. Sterling, to weave them on the warp of his own mind and sentiment into a home which shall not fail to distribute its refining and happy influences to all who enter or depart.

Among the younger artists of high position and achieved fame in the fine arts who have aimed to include house decoration within their poetic domain, the most successful has been Mr. Walter Crane, who is fortunate in having a firm of skilful paper-stainers (Jeffrey & Co., of Islington) to embody his beautiful and quaint designs. Mr. Crane’s “Chaucer,” or “La Margarete,” paper received a special medal and diploma at the Philadelphia Exhibition, and his more recent designs are not inferior. The “Margarete” paper, which takes almost any color that is not garish, has become a prime favorite among the lovers of chaste decoration in London, and the light olive tint is preferred. The daisy is the motive, taken from Chaucer: