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.