Michael Duffy, History of 19th & 20th Century Design, East Carolina University, 2003.
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The first two decades of the new century were a continuation of developments in the decorative arts that were initiated in 1795, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. A number of well-illustrated pattern books were published at that time which marked a decisive improvement in pattern books. Those books dealt with interiors as a stylistic whole rather than as an assemblage of parts, which was the trend in compilations by Thomas Chippendale and Giovanni Piranesi. As in the past, pattern books very much reflected the styles of the times. Napoleon's architects, Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine produced Recueil de Decorations Interieures (1801), the first important pattern book of the new century. Thomas Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807) in Britain was inspired by Percier and Fontaine. Several other illustrated pattern books followed in the next two decades which made rich furnishing patterns and designs available for small homes.
The two French architects Percier and Fontaine were patronized by Napoleon's wife, the Empress Josephine, and they undertook the classical decoration of her mansion at Malmaison and Reuil, not far from Paris. Their printed compendium of interior decorations contained many decorations planned for Malmaison and other Napoleonic residences in Paris. These two illustrated books ushered in the new dominant decorative styles, the Empire Style in France of 1804-1814 and the Regency Style in Britain of 1795-1835. The restoration of the Bourbon dynasty to power in France in 1815 (ousted in 1829) also brought back into favor in Paris and in London, to a lesser degree, the restrained elegance of the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles of the Old Regime of the second half of the eighteenth century.
In the early 19th century in Prussia (Germany), Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Berlin popularized a neoclassical architecture and decoration that was similar to practices in Britain. Schinkel's designs were more restrained than French taste of the time and mixed antique sources with later 18th century patterns. In Austria and north central Europe, the Biedermeier Style came into vogue between 1815 and 1848. It represented a highly restrained neoclassicism with simple outlines as well as a clear, bright and somewhat pale appearance to furnishing objects. The unpretentious and comfortable looking shapes and patterns seemed to embody the middle-class values of being trustworthy and reputable. Biedermeier played down the use of exotic materials that one foound in the previous Empire Style.
There was a revival of Gothic (Medieval) ornament and forms in the 1830s and 1840s, which was initiated with effect in England but then spread to central Europe and France within a few years. The Gothic style was made popular by Augustus Welby Pugin's literary work and designs, particularly his book Gothic Furniture in the Style of the Fifteenth Century (1836).
Generally speaking, neoclassical shapes, patterns and motifs were gradually being eclipsed in the 1830s by newer historical styles for household furnishings, household wares and industrial products. These new styles in France included the Rococo style and the Renaissance style.
In Britain a Gothic and Renaissance revival grew out of the resurgence in decoration that occurred in the 1820s. There was a new taste for abundant decoration and richness of effect in furnishings and wares. Ornament was continually promoted in Rudolf Ackerman's Repository of the Arts, which ran from 1808 to 1828. In the decade of the 1830s, on the eve of Queen Victoria's reign, there were a number of encyclopedic works that revealed more detailed and more frequently color illustrations of decoration with commentary. These books were published in the German states, and then in England and France. In his Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture of 1833, J.C. Loudon identified the four revival styles that were dominant at that time in the decorative arts:
The Elizabethan style could include both Gothic and seventeenth-century design, which was frequently interpreted from surviving fragments of very old pieces.
In the 1840s, there was a growing interest in the Italian Renaissance. The revival of Italian villa architecture began in the 1820s with the connoisseurs Thomas Hope and William Beckford, and the architect, H.E. Goodridge. There were both rustic and palatial versions of the villa style. In the 1830s Sir Charles Barry used Italian palazzo styles for his club buildings in Pall Mall. There was also a palazzo style for commercial buildings like C.R. Cockerell's branch offices of the Bank of England at Liverpool and Bristol. In 1844 Prince Albert and Queen Victoria purchased Osborne House near Cowes on the Isle of Wight as a seaside retreat that reminded the Prince Consort of the Bay of Naples. It was designed by Thomas Cubitt with details provided by Prince Albert to make it more correct. In the dining room, nursery and living room, there is a classical and old English vocabulary which includes marble, stucco and gilding.
We know something of Albert's taste through his support of Henry Cole and the Prince's own art advisor, Ludwig Gruner, a decorative painter from Dresden. In 1844, Gruner initially helped Albert to plan out the Garden Pavilion at Buckingham Palace.v
He supplied color tracings of Renaissance ornament for the new London School of Design and in 1854 came out with his well-known Description of the Plates of Fresco Decorations and Stuccoes of Churches and Palaces in Italy in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. He was a strong advocate for the use of terracotta.
The Renaissance and Gothic styles made a good showing at the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace Illus. 11 in Hyde Park, London. Among the finest examples of Renaissance revival style furniture and metalware were imported pieces of French silver and French and Italian woodwork. Angiolo Barbetti, the well-known cabinetmaker from Siena, was awarded a prize medal for his group of ornamental furniture for a drawing room. His work was best described for its exquisite carving, constructive design and excessive minutiae, but always recognized as a fine example of the Renaissance revival. His cabinet from the exhibition which was made of walnut and stood 12 and one half feet high Illus. 24 shows exquisite carving in the Renaisance architectural style of Baldassare Peruzzi of the early 15th century. French silver wares by Antoine Vechte, Marrel, Rudolphi and Froment-Meurice received special attention in 1851 and at the Paris Exhibition of 1855. Illus. 26 The parcel-gilt silver, the tapered and oval shapes, the pierced surfaces and handlework were characteristic of the revival of the German Renaissance of the 16th century. Another exquisite piece of 1851, was the bookcase designed in the Gothic style by Bernardis and Kranner and carved by Fernkorn and Maler for Leistler & Sons of Vienna, Austria. Illus. 27 It stands 15 feet high and 19 feet wide and was designed for one of three rooms called the Ladies Library. At the Paris Exhibition of 1855, Edouard Kreisser displayed a Neo-Rococo Louis XVI style table Illus. 25. made with marquetry of various woods, porcelain, plaques, ormolu and silver mounts. Commentators at the London Exhibition of 1851 thought the product type was a very important criterion, which alluded to taste, style and social class. These works exceeded public expectations in the creative use of materials and in workmanship.
According to many in Britain at the time of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, the Englishman differed from the Frenchman in that he looked more to domestic rather than public life. The principle of his taste was comfort. He was pleased by permanence and not change. Some believed that English industrial art might rise to as high a degree of excellence as the French with the Renaissance style. One popular option was the use of the Elizabethan style, by which Queen Victoria and Prince Albert ought to take the lead. The English were superior in ecclesiastic furniture, although the English Gothic was not well understood in carvings and ornament. Even though the Gothic at times is deficient in independence, the whole seemed to express a uniformity of taste, an earnestness of form and a warmth of feeling. A leading contributor to the London Art Journal noted in his fourth piece in 1851 that the English workmen were surprised and somewhat depressed at the fine effects of ornamentation in French woodwork. An English turner and woodcarver was overhead to say out loud, "We are done for ever!" The reporter cocnluded that English works possessed great ingenuity but were unoriginal in taste (p. 293).
[The Crystal Palace ushered in the age of international exhibitions which helped to promote the connection among industrial production, technology and aesthetics in different countries of Europe. and the U.S. Prince Albert (married to the reigning Queen Victoria) and the civil servant Henry Cole decided to expand the annual Britain-wide decorative arts educational exhibitions of 1848 and 1849, sponsored by the Royal Society of Arts, on an international scale. A royal commission was established in 1850 to organize such an exhibition. The architect for the commission, Joseph Paxton, designed an architectural structure based on his greenhouse design used earlier for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth. The new prefabricated Crystal Palace building, which was put up in 6 months by 2,000 men. The building was comprised of materials symbolic of the industrial age--24 4 foot wide girders (horizontal beams) weighing one ton each; 300,000 glass panes; iron weighing 4,500 tons, 34 miles of guttering and over one million feet of sash-bars The structure was supposed to be 1851 feet long, but fell short of that mark by 3 feet. The tall rectangular hall and the transverse section with its overall stepped design, Illus. 21 resembled a great Gothic cathedral. The building was larger than the great Palace of Versailles near Paris and also Saint Paul's Cathedral in London. Each country was allocated exhibition space in the new structure, although half the total space was given to British exhibitions. All exhibitions followed Prince Albert's three-tiered classification: 1) raw materials for industry, 2) manufactures made from them, 3) art used to adorn them. Fine arts were included in a final category, "Sculptures, Models and Plastic Arts," that represented a very small part of the exhibition.
In his speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet in London in November 1850, Albert expressed his idea behind the exhibition: "The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal and we have only to choose which is of the best and cheapest for our purpose, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of competition and capital. . . The exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their future exertions." The exhibition opened on May 1, 1851 to a crowd of 25,000 people, while 700,000 filled the surrounding Hyde Park that day. Many journalists and entrepreneurs remarked at how accessible the Palace was for working people who could devote day trips by train to the London site. There was much attention to new machinery, raw materials and the wealth of every conceivable style of decorative art on view--but especially Gothic, Renaissance and Neo-Rococo styles.
As a response to the British exhibition, the great Paris exposition of 1855 opened in May 1 on the Champs Elysees near the Seine River in the heart of the city. The new Palace of Industry, Illus. 23. one of three French buildings to house the exhibition, had a great hall and two side aisles covered by half-cylindrical vaults of glass and iron. The building had a light gray interior. The smaller fine arts work was housed in the Palace of Fine Arts, 5 minutes away on the Avenue Montaigne.]
In the decade of the 1850s, there was more international collaboration in design education at a time when the so-called "battle of the styles" was heating up. Several French designer-crafstmen in silver, porcelain and wood came to work for English manufacturers. In the 1862 and 1867 international exhibitions, British designers benefited from this cooperation and appeared to be more competent in using European styles, particularly the Renaissance revival.
There was also the battle of the styles expressed in architecture and the decorative arts. This contest publically came to a climax in the competition for the new Foreign Office Building near Downing Street. Lord Palmerston rejected the winning classical design by H.B. Garling, but eventually accepted the third place contestant, Gilbert Scott as architect provided that Scott abandon his Gothic design for a building in an Italian Renaissance revival style.
Henry Cole, a highly respected senior civil servant in the government, helped to create a national agenda for the decorative arts that included collective consciousness of past arts. In 1847 Cole was named as head of the newly formed School of Design in London. He and the Prince Consort were members of the Society of Arts and decided to collaborate on establishing the Great Exhibition in 1851. After the exhibition was over, they were also involved in establishing a campus in South Kensington for a museum, school and exhibition area. Captain Francis Fowke of the Royal Engineers built the South Kensington Museum in an Italian Renaissance style with red brick and detailed terracotta mouldings. The Royal Albert Hall amphitheatre for Arts and Sciences followed, expressly from Albert's wishes for a National Gallery away from the noise of Trafalgar Square. At the time of its completion in 1871, the building was planned to hold annual exhibitions.
In the late 1840s, Cole went from one project to another in an effort to bring artists and manufacturers together. The painters William Dyce, Daniel Maclise, Richard Redgrave and George Wallis along with the sculptor John Bell worked briefly for Felix Summerly Art Manufacturers. Redgrave, Owen Jones and Gottfried Semper participated in Cole's Journal of Design and Manufactures, while Matthew Digby Wyatt, Ralph Wornum and Alfred Stevens were very soon brought into what became know as the Cole Group. The group's members all had strong sympathies for the Renaissance, while Stevens was considered to be one of Britain's leadiing authorities on High Renaisance art.
Digby Wyatt, who in 1853 designed the Renaissance Court at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, contributed writings on Renaissance ornament for Owen Jones and others. Wyatt felt that the history of Renaissance design provided good information for the artist on how to approach and study revival styles. From the late thirteenth century pioneers of the Renaissance, we should look directly to the principles of antiquity and follow nature with a certain freshness and naiveté. In the 14th century, design and workmanship were raised to a new level while artists effectively combined the various media of painting, sculpture and architecture. "Figures, foliage and conventional ornaments," Wyatt concluded, " were so happily blended with mouldings and other structural forms so as to convey the idea that the whole sprang to life in one perfect form in the mind of the artist by whom the work was executed." The best qualities of the Renaissance included a delicacy of relief, a thoughtful choice of details, and graceful and deliberate lines.
The Museum of Ornamental Art and then the South Kensington Museum purchased many works of Renaissance revival directly from manufacturers or from the international exhibitions. For example, Elkington's electrotype ewer of 1852, Minton's earthenware candlestick, Minton's tazza and cover of 1860 and Fourdinois's ebony wood cabinetof 1867--were all good examples of the Renaissance Revival.
Richard Redgrave, who was closely associated with South Kensington and the international exhibitions, wrote a number of reports and addresses on design which reflected the establishment's preoccupation with style and materials. Redgrave placed a universal Renaissance style on equal footing with the Gothic in its artistic merit and usefulness. He challenged the perception of many that there was no principle of unity and congruity among the designers of the Renaissance, unlike the Medieval period. The Renaissance was first seen in the new interior furnishings and decorations for older medieval cathedrals and churches. Redgrave felt that the more spiritual and refined beauties of the renaissance, which appealed too the highest minds, had been overlooked in favor of grotesque and novel features. He argued that authentic renaissance pieces followed good design practices by using ornament somewhat sparingly to bring out the construction of the object. Like Wyatt, he noted that the renaissance painter also designed furniture, metalware and textiles.
At the International Exhibition of 1871 in South Kensington, George Wallis made many comparisons with the Great Exhibition of 1851 and found that art was now more pre-eminent in England. Wallis noted the greater abundance of art manufacturers in 1871 who presented the revival styles, but with more freedom of interpretation.
Please read chapters 1-3 in Industrial Design by John Heskett on reserves in Joyner Library and accessable through the Related Resources area of this course as electronic reserves. You can find more information on Samuel Colt and Isaac Singer by investigating the following web pages:
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