Victorian Furniture - Neoclassicism continues

Classical sources continued to provide inspiration throughout the period, although when compared with the work of earlier craftsmen who followed the source material more closely, the line became more indistinct as the period advanced. Most of the great English designers worked in the idiom and many of the design books that appeared in such profusion include pieces in the style. It was however a rather debased form of classical, for the line changed from being relatively severe to being enriched by a considerable amount of ornamentation and having more flowing lines than the original. This evolution was of course in line with the desire of the middle class for handmade furniture which was a visual statement, not merely of their affluence - which was in any case proved by their ability to purchase in the first place - but also of their permanence and status as settled and solid members of society. The style was most commonly used where a great display of opulence was not required, as in the rooms of the Reform Club, furnished by Holland and Sons in 1838. It continued to appear in catalogues throughout the century, but lost much of its popularity after the 1860s.

Since the style was a reflection of past glories, it was naturally revived in France during the Second Empire. The manner varied somewhat from the English, being rather more fussy, with a greater amount of surface ornamentation and the addition of motifs borrowed from the Louis styles. It was largely an anonymous, decorators' fashion, having little following among the more serious and noted designers.

One of the most spectacular of the Neoclassical rooms anywhere was executed in Italy. Designed by Pelagio Palagi for the Castello Reale di Raconigi, near Turin, it was based fairly closely on an Etruscan theme, with rich gilding, painted friezes and wall panels, a mosaic floor and exquisite marquetry fitted and non fitted furniture, and compares extremely well with the work of the earlier masters. Some pieces from the room were exhibited at the Great Exhibition, where they were received with overwhelming praise.

It was a style that travelled well, for it was popular on both sides of the Atlantic, many of the best known of the Victorian cabinet-makers in America working in the idiom. One of the reasons for its success may well have been that with its large flat surfaces and minimal carving it was possible to mechanise production to a large extent. The Americans made some idiosyncratic contributions to the vocabulary of the style, including a decorative process whereby the flat surfaces could be stencilled with gold, a practice that seems not to have been followed elsewhere.

Designers of the period were continually searching for new sources, whether in other times or in other cultures, and expressing, it may be thought, a dissatisfaction with their own. It was not uncommon to find in middle class houses that individual rooms were furnished in totally differing styles. Indeed, certain conventions arose as to which styles were suitable for men and which for women. Neo-Rococo for example, with its gracefully fluid lines, was felt to be best suited to the use of ladies and was therefore found particularly in drawing rooms and boudoirs, where their influence was either strongest or total. Gothic, which was felt to be a masculine style would have been used for the library, while 'Elizabethan' which was neutral was considered appropriate for the dining room. Billiard rooms, smoking rooms and bathrooms, which were downright outlandish, might well be Moorish, but the bedrooms, which were again neutral, were commonly Neoclassical.

Gothic and Elizabethan Styles - Part 2 (final part)

The improved communications throughout Europe naturally affected the universality of appeal of designs, and the Gothic taste in handmade furniture even spread into Italy. This was surprising, for in all other countries where it took root, it was in fact a harking back to a previous native style, whereas in Italy the true medieval Gothic barely reached the northern frontiers. The style was spasmodically popular throughout the century and in most parts of the country, tending towards medievalism  as the years advanced, although even as late as 1898 several Gothic items were shown at the Turin Exhibition when interest in the taste had almost entirely faded elsewhere.

After Pugin's death, the torch was taken up in England by Bruce Talbert, who published in 1867 his Gothic Forms applied to Futniture and by C.L. Eastlake in his Hints on Household Taste, which was published in the following year. These were however, the rearguard of the movement, and their designs were less extreme and tended more towards the medieval.

Talbert, in common with most of the other well known designers of the period, trained as an architect. A strong feature of many of his designs is the use of heavy ornamental ironwork, not surprisingly in view of the fact that he was responsible for the detailed drawings for the metalwork used on the Albert Memorial. He was one of the most famous of the 'exhibition designers', whose pieces were almost invariably greater than human scale. When on realises that many of these pieces were more than 4.5m (15ft) tall, it is startling to think that they were actually used in normal households. His designs have more in common with the work of William Burges than Pugin, being evolved from earlier styles. His influence on design from his first book was not as great as from the second, Examples of Ancient and Modern Furniture, Tapestries and Decoration, published some five years later, by which time his interest was moving away from Gothic towards the Jacobean, which was more to the popular taste.

Eastlake's influence was wider than Talberts, as his book achieved wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. His strictures on his contemporaries make amusing reading, and it must be conceded that his designs are in fact an improvement on the general standard of work at the time, for they are comparatively simple and logical. He was aiming at non fitted furniture that would be easy to construct, whose decoration would not be excessive and yet when made to high standards would not be expensive. In this, of course, he was echoing the ideals of the Morris group; even with all these favourable factors, however, very few of his designs seem actually to have been executed. He was extremely fond of the use of rounded arches and turned wood, frequently also using carved mottoes as a decorative element. His influence in America was so great that his name came to be used as a verb, a house being said to be 'Eastlaked' when it had been refurnished in accordance with his principles.

Simultaneously with the Gothic revival of the 1820s, there was another popular retrospective style, called at the time 'Elizabethan' which in fact owed little to the furniture of that period but was in fact relatively direct copying of Jacobean, certainly for seat furniture. Most of the furniture made in this style in the early years of the period was anonymous, and it only appears to have attracted Anthony Salvin and Henry Shaw among known designers. Shaw included several in his design book Specimens of Antique Furniture, which was published in 1836, while Salvin designed pieces for Mamhead and Scotney Castle in the style.

Carcase furniture, when made in this idiom, was massive in the extreme, with almost overbearingly heavy carving. One of the best examples of this type of work is the sideboard in the dining room at Charlecote Park, Warwickshire; Sir Walter Scott, perhaps wishing to feel that he was living in the period of many of his novels, refurnished much of Abbotsford in the manner.

While significant as an early pointer to the trend towards historicism in England, the 'Elizabethan' style was never as all-embracingly popular as Gothic and certainly was of little direct influence on other parts of Europe.

Gothic and Elizabethan Styles

Possibly the most retrospective of all these styles was the Gothic, which had seen a new flowering during the 18th century in England but which achieved its most popular heights, both in Europe and America during the 19th century. In the course of the 1820s, George IV was engaged on the renovation of Windsor Castle, and a great deal of the work was done in the Gothic style. Much of the handmade furniture design was entrusted to Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, who was only 15 when first commissioned. Pugin, as well as being a talented designer, was also an extremely able self-publicist, and above all it was this that enabled him to obtain such a commanding influence over his contemporaries.

 

Because of his extremely strong religious faith, he became convinced that Gothic was the 'only true style of architecture' and therefore by extension, of fitted and non fitted furniture design, but even he was never able satisfactorily to solve the difficult transition between ornament that was suitable for buildings and ornament that was suitable for tables and chairs. His designs, however, appealed strongly to the middle-class mass market, for it was a taste with which they were instantly familiar from their religious observances. While in his hands the style had some hold on everyday reality, in the hands of less restrained practitioners it could be positively dangerous and he himself commented on the danger of impalement on irrelevant crockets or of cracked shins on stray flying buttresses.

Pugin was a compulsive worker, cramming more into his 40 years than most men could into 100. Perhaps the work for which he is best known is that undertaken for the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, where, aside from any involvement with the design of the building itself, the subject of acrimonious pamphleteering between the sons of Pugin and Sir Charles Barry, the official architect, he was certainly responsible for the design of most of the furniture. This reflects his conscientious and scholarly approach to Gothic, but was without the more excessive detail of his earlier work, for he himself publicly decried his own designs for Windsor Castle. He died in 1852, worn out it is said, by the work that he undertook for the Great Exhibition of 1851, when he was responsible for the Medieval Court. This was the type of work, involving committees and commissioners that he disliked most, being more accustomed and indeed better suited to working on his own.

Not surprisingly, in view of the English influence in Germany, especially on the northern states, the taste developed there as well, and in the international exhibitions so popular during the period, the German and English craftsmen vied with each other to produce the most extravagant colossi for the stupefaction of the juries. Scale in these special pieces seems to have become unimportant: surfaces that logically should be at waist level are not reached until eye level, giving a sense of having strayed into Brobdingnag. One of the foremost makers of this type was Karl Leistler of Vienna, who made a display cabinet in this style for presentation to Queen Victoria by the Austrian emperor, which was received with approbation at the Great Exhibition.

to be continued tomorrow...