The later ones, as in London, are often tall square funnels moulded and bent into vase-like forms, the projection was small compared to the width, only three or four inches sometimes. A piece of projecting pipe is at times inserted in the front of the head to serve as an overflow. The late pipes were circular and the heads very often followed this form.
The material has an appropriateness for this purpose that cast iron cannot pretend to; a simple square box of lead and round pipe is much to be preferred to fussy things in cast iron, they will not require painting, nor do they fill the drains with rust; and although it has been necessary to draw the elaborate and eccentric forms, the simpler ones form better models for our purpose.
Fig. 76.—Haddon.
The earlier pipes were almost always a flat square, sometimes ornamented up its whole length, but usually only at the collars, where the bands of lead for attachment to the wall were placed, [here] and on the flaps of the collars are often crests, flowers, or letters. The lead band was cut long enough, so that after the nails had been driven through it into the wall the ends were folded back over their heads. Those at Canons Ashby, Northants, have the ends curled and cut like the scroll of a mediæval text.
Lead working as an art for the expression of beauty through material, with this ancestry of nearly two thousand years of beautiful workmanship behind it here in England, has in the present century been entirely killed out. Only one simple present use of lead can be mentioned as having the characteristic of an art—the expression of personal thought by the worker to give pleasure. This is nothing but the lining of stairs and floor spaces with sheet lead nailed with rows of copper nails, some examples of which are done with a certain taste. Pipe heads and other objects of a somewhat ornamental kind have recently been made again, but we must remember that ornament is not art, and these have only been carefully, painfully, “executed” to the architect’s drawings. The plumber’s art, as it was, for instance, when the Guild of Plumbers was formed, a craft to be graced by the free fancy of the worker, is a field untilled. That someone may again take up this fine old craft of lead-working as an artist and original worker, refusing to follow “designs” compiled by another from imperfectly understood old examples, but expressing only himself—this has been my chief hope in preparing the little book NOW CONCLUDED.
Messrs. MACMILLAN & CO.’S
BOOKS FOR TECHNICAL CLASSES.
DRAWING AND DESIGN. A Class Text-book for Beginners. By E. R. Taylor. Head Master of the Birmingham Municipal School of Art. With Illustrations. Oblong crown 8vo, 5s. net.
ELEMENTS OF HANDICRAFT AND DESIGN. By W. A. S. Benson, M.A. Oxon. With Illustrations. Extra crown 8vo, 5s. net.