By John A. Levitties, John Alexander Ltd
In 1853, art critic and social philosopher John Ruskin published The Stones of Venice.
In this, his seminal work, Ruskin proposed that all good design must be essentially
Gothic in character. For Ruskin, the embodiment of this ideal was Venetian architecture
of the fourteenth century as typified by the Ducal Palace on Saint Mark’s Square,
what Ruskin would call “The Central Building of the World.” Venice was, he suggested,
“The first of the states in Christendom;" and stood at the crossroads of passionate
Northern Gothic and orderly North African influences, both of which, in their primary
uses in religious structures, sought the glorification of God.
Red Lion Square Chairs:
Designed by William Morris; Painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; The Arming of a Knight
(l.) and Gwendolen’s Golden Hair (r.); Painted Deal, Leather and Nails; Delaware
Art Museum, acquired through the bequest of Doris Wright Anderson and through the
F.V DuPont Acquisition Fund.
Photograph courtesy of
Delaware Art Museum.
Ruskin was not writing for an unprepared audience, for the Gothic style was well
established in Britain. At the end of the eighteenth century, popular recognition
was probably more closely associated with the “Gothik” fashion, known from design
and pattern books, than with its historical British precedent. By the early nineteenth
century, however, the Gothic Revival became the mode of church architecture in Britain.
In fact, it was effectively legislated as such through its endorsement by subsidized
church building programs. These associations were bolstered by the selection of
Gothic as the style for the new Houses of Parliament in 1835, and the 1824 coronation
of George IV, for which he wore Medieval attire, each powerful examples of the identification
of Gothic Revival as a national style.
Much was written about Gothic architecture and literally hundreds of Gothic styles
were identified, broken down by period, national origin, and even the degree of
pointiness of their arches. Nor was Ruskin the first to theorize about the Gothic
style. A.W.N. Pugin, the first of the great Gothic Revival architects, published
The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture in 1841, which
posed several arguments that Ruskin would echo a decade later: that a building should
first be functional; that decorative details should embellish the functional; and
that materials and conditions should indicate methods of construction. Pugin was
an architect and his work, however much he might have theorized about the social
forces tied to architecture (Pugin was a convert to Catholicism, an act tied quite
closely to his architectural theory), was written from the architect’s concrete
perspective rather than the theoretician’s abstract one. What sets Ruskin apart
is that he was a non-architect using architectural theory to promulgate social doctrine.
Armchair : Designed by Philip Webb for Morris & Co.; Circa 1870; Mahogany with Upholstery (replaced).
In championing Gothic architecture, Ruskin was not merely a promoter of cusped arches
or particular forms of tracery to which he devoted a significant amount of space,
but the essence of his work was that good architecture embodied certain ideals in
both their design and execution. In short, there was honesty in the organic and
imperfect handiwork of a designer cum craftsman, as well as a straightforward quality
in the design that precluded pretense.
It was Ruskin’s assertion that this had been the case in the middle ages; great
design was the product of a society that was not only capable of its execution,
but also of its conception. The execution of one individual’s design by another
was, for Ruskin, a form of enslavement, and was worse still when this form of serfdom
tied men to machines. Preventing this was the philosophical purpose of Ruskinian
Gothicism. If virtuous architecture could only he produced by free men, the same
could be said of furniture and objects. In Ruskin’s terms, honesty in design was
beautiful, and in beauty was truth, such that beautiful objects were the product
of moral means of production and were capable of infusing in their users that same
morality.
Clissett Armchair: Ernest Gimson; Circa 1918; Oak with Rush Seat.
The publication of The Stones of Venice in 1853 coincided with the arrival
of William Morris at Oxford University. At Oxford, William Morris met Edward Burne-Jones,
and, through him, a group of other young men who would come to be fast friends.
Morris had been sent to Oxford to study for the clergy, and in this group, "The
Brotherhood" as they were known, discussed entering a monastic order. Deeply influenced
by The Stones of Venice however, Morris and Burne-Jones determined instead
to pursue work in the arts. To Ruskin, artistic labor was a form of divine glorification,
so this change in direction was less radical or precipitous than it might at first
appear.
Upon graduation, Burne-Jones moved to London and Morris was articled to the renowned
neo-Gothic architect George Edmund Street. Morris remained in Street’s office for
eight months before changing direction and joining Burne-Jones in London with the
intention of pursuing a career as an artist. The two young men took an apartment
at Red Lion Square for which Morris, presumably unable to find commercially available
furniture to his liking, designed a number of pieces including a simple round table,
a large settle, and a pair of hall chairs. The pieces were executed by ‘a nearly
anonymous’ cabinet-maker, Henry Price, who worked for the firm of Tommy Baker in
Covent Garden. For assistance in the decoration of the chairs, Morris called upon
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, himself already a well-known artist and a part of the pre-Raphaelite
circle.
Armchair: Designed by M.H. Baillie Scott; Circa 1900; Oak with Leather.
The chairs Morris designed would never be singled out for their comfort. They were
crudely executed, exposing joints that skilled cabinetmakers had long before learned
to conceal. They utilized materials as though their maker had had neither the skill
to cut finer boards nor the collected knowledge of hundreds of years of chair design
and manufacture to know that the structural members could be much thinner and still
be sound.
One hundred years before, at the height of the Georgian era, designers and craftsmen
like Thomas Chippendale and designer-architects such as Robert Adam produced extraordinary
pieces of furniture. In the elegance of their design and the skill of their execution
they signaled the accumulated knowledge and refinement of generations. How was it
that in the span of 100 years, which saw dramatic improvements in furniture-making
technology and increasingly international influences on design, furniture design
and manufacture could appear to have regressed so dramatically? How was it that
a designer who must have known the work of Adam and Chippendale, Sheraton, Hepplewhite,
and Hope, who must have had at least a passing familiarity with the designs of the
ancient world, and who had access to the artisans and industry necessary to produce
chairs every bit as sound as his predecessors, would produce such crude furniture?
Wycliff Chair: Designed by Leonard Wyburd for Liberty & Co.; Circa 1901; Oak, Walnut and Beech with Rush Seat.
Certainly, the design and execution of Morris’s furniture was deliberate. And if
so, there must have been some purpose served by a chair on which it was uncomfortable
to sit yet which so self-consciously articulated Ruskinian Gothic virtues. It was
a polemical statement as much as a piece of furniture, the first in a series of
applied aesthetic manifestoes that would impact virtually all design that followed.
It was, in fact, the first Arts and Crafts chair.
While Morris’ chair for Red Lion Square should properly be identified as Arts and
Crafts, so, too, should the work of Philip Webb, Ernest Gimson, M.H. Baillie-Scott,
Leonard Wyburd, E.G. Punnet, and legions of others. Scholars and collectors, and
even the artists themselves, have identified and labeled a movement, but on stylistic
grounds the connections are, at times, quite tenuous. Arts and Crafts was not a
movement that developed in a stylistically linear fashion, and therein lies the
difficulty in describing the movement as a whole.
Side Chair: Designed by E.G. Punnett for William Birch; Circa 1900; Oak Inlaid with Ebonized Wood and Pewter with Rush Seat.
Where some designers, such as Morris in his early years, drew their inspiration
from Gothic forms, others drew on the Georgian or Classical. Where many were steadfast
in their adherence to British forms, others looked to the Continent, and still others
took from the Far East. And where most looked to the past, others were enthralled
with the industrial age. In construction, one group eschewed all use of machinery
while another executed designs specifically for mass production (although most fell
somewhere in between). And some produced for individual patrons while others for
the collective appetite of the burgeoning middle class.
What tied them together was the philosophy that underlay their efforts. Before the
Arts and Crafts in Britain was a style or a fashion it was a theory, an approach
to design that underlay the life work of William Morris. It was first manifested
in those few, early pieces of furniture designed for his own use. The products of
the Arts and Crafts movement are the embodiment of the idea that people can shape
and are shaped by their environment, by the products they encounter and use every
day; that the right sort of design and production imbue both the maker and the user
with a moral purpose. Or, in a larger sense, that design and craft are forms of
artistic expression equal to the “fine” arts rather than simply statements of fashion.
Armchair From The Sussex Range: Morris & Co.; The Design Attributed to Philip Webb; Circa 1865; Ebonized Beech with Rush Seat.
First appeared in The Catalogue of Antiques and Fine Art