CUT BRICK CHIMNEYS, LEIGH'S PRIORY, ESSEX.
BRICK CHIMNEY, FRAMLINGHAM CASTLE.
Other useful things connected with the fireside and the chimney corner, which are remarkable for their adaptability in ornamental design, are the iron fire-dogs used to support the burning logs. We find them in great variety of shape and treatment, while their main or necessary lines remain the same. It is the standard or upright front part which affords a field for the inventive craftsman and designer. The fire-irons, too, are again purely useful in their object, but have become highly graceful and elegant in some of their forms.
The iron grate back (notably those of old Sussex), placed at the back of the fire against the chimney to protect the brick-work and radiate the heat, had again a purely useful function, but it has been the object of a great deal of fine and rich decorative design, chiefly of a heraldic or emblematic character, and many old examples exist. Cast iron has in modern times acquired a bad name (artistically speaking), but this is owing to its misapplication, as in railings or grills, where it endeavours to usurp the place of wrought iron. In a flat panel or plain surface, such as a grate back affords, however, cast iron has a singularly good effect, and renders bold designs well. There are some fine heraldic grate backs in cast iron to be seen at Cheetham's Hospital, perhaps the most interesting building in the City of Manchester.
CAST-IRON FIRE-DOG, ST. NICHOLAS HOSPITAL, CANTERBURY.
I give a sketch of a quaint cast-iron chimney back of Gothic design from Bruges. At the Museum at the old Rath Haus there is a very good collection of examples. Somehow, with the modern, or rather mid-Victorian iron register fireplace all beauty and interest of design is lost. Though it should be remembered that a really fine artist and designer like Alfred Stevens spent his talent upon such things.
The conception of the thing, however, seems joyless and ugly, and in most surviving examples the ornament in endeavouring to be elegant becomes frittered and mean; and as to sheet-iron stoves they seem to be under a ban of hideousness, which seems sad when one recalls the charming and cheerful earthenware stoves of Germany of Gothic and Renascence times, full of colour and invention. The revived use of tiled chimney, and recessed and basket grates, has done much to restore cheerfulness to our hearths.