International studio (59.1916)

Toys at the tVkite chap el Art Gallery


TOY POULTRY DESIGNED AND EXECUTED
BY MISSES M. V. WHEELHOUSE AND LOUISE JACOBS

for it must not be supposed
that toys, except when they
are of metal, demand an
expensively equipped fac¬
tory. Wood-working and
wood-carving tools, a light
lathe for turning wood, with
a few benches, would suffice
for an experimental ven¬
ture. It must be remem¬
bered also that besides the
cheap toys exported in
great quantities, both
Germany and Austria pro¬
duce toys of a better and
more expensive kind, but
these are rarely seen in
England, and, like all other
artistic productions, are of course made in a studio
by a small group of art-workers.
The exhibition under review showed evidences
that these groups are already at work, if only here
and there. It must be emphasised that they must
consist of art-workers or be controlled by such.
Mere patriotism in the form of encouragement of
home arts is not enough, as the difficulty of sustain-
ing rural centres for metal-work, weaving, wood-
carving, etc., has repeatedly shown.
A toy should possess several qualities for
which we must go to the artist. First it should
possess humour; beautiful in the hackneyed sense
it need not be, for it is to appeal to children, whose
sense of beauty has not fully developed. They are
attracted by that interest of form which we call
grotesque; hence in short the toy should be a
caricature. But the toy designer who sets out to
caricature may miss his mark. The quality of
form which appeals to the child is obtained not by

conscious funniness, but by that humour which is
attained by direct and clear-cut form with simplifi-
cation brought about by economy of means. Thus
a toy representing an animal or person which has
been produced by plain sawing with little or no
carving is likely to be more humorous than one
on which so much labour of carving has been
expended that the object loses vitality—becomes
a model rather than a toy.
Perhaps the deepest pitfall some of the modern
toymakers have fallen into is to make their toys
consciously picturesque or quaint, by simulating a
look of age. The doll’s-house, let us say, appears
to have a leaky thatched roof, its walls are painted
with cracks and broken plaster. This is quite
beside the mark. In the ages of great art,
when work was at its freshest, the notion of
“ picturesqueness ” was quite absent. Nothing in
Japanese art suggests age ; the houses and streets
are clean and rectilinear as if just built. The same


TOY VILLAGE DESIGNED AND EXECUTED BY MISSES RENJSe DUNN AND JOAN DE BUDE

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