Studio: international art (3.1894)

On the Decoration of the Day

as it was, they were without the pretence of art, and
they were innocent of imitation. Between the
artistic value of the middle-class room of those
days and the middle-class room of these, there is
not so vast a difference as we like to think. The
modern room is hardly less discordant, although in
detail it is infinitely better. However informed
with style the separate things may be, they are
rarely brought together congruously. T,o have a
room in which your chairs talk to you of Chippen-
dale, your fender of the early Georges, your wall-
paper of the days of Chaucer, with here and there
a muttering of Queen Anne, is not to achieve
decoration, but to amass possibly decorative
objects. And when you add to this incongruity
the incongruity of trifles, the bringing together of
an ebony elephant from Colombo, a bit of Georgian
silver, a Satsuma jar, a Chelsea shepherdess, your
room is transformed into a curiosity-shop. Of
course with a long enough purse you may employ
a single firm to supply every article of furniture, to
choose every wall-paper, every carpet, every deco-
rative object, and in this way you will achieve con-
gruity, but it will be the congruity of a museum
filled with objects of a single period. It will be a
triumph of careful and consistent imitation. That
Mr. William Morris has produced very beautiful
rooms is not to be denied, while Messrs. Liberty
can supply you with charming Oriental arrange-
ments, but to the average proprietor of a villa the
acquisition of such rooms would be the prelude to
an appearance before the Official Receiver. To
the man who is as far removed from plutocracy as
from pauperism they are simply impossible, and it
would seem as if he were to be condemned forever
to a decorative pot pourri on the one hand, or to
cheap orientality on the other. Is it possible to
invent a style for him ?

It is obvious that the best art is that which is
most clearly the outcome of the time of its pro-
duction ; the work of art most significant of its
moment is precisely that which ultimately becomes
classical. To give to art the complexion of the
time, boldly to express the actual in verse, in paint-
ing, in decoration, is the thing infinitely desirable.
In painting, Degas has expressed the ballet-girl
and the cafe, and Mr. Whistler has given us the
London rag-shop, while Mr. Sargent has immor-
talised La Carmencita. All this time our decora-
tive designers have been mumbling old formulas
and have combined in a gigantic scheme of imita-
tion. No past style has escaped the sincerest
form of flattery. The dignified rigidity of Greece,
the grotesqueness of the Middle Ages, the in-

comparable elegance of the days of the Pompa-
dour, have all been laid under contribution. Even
that which was only questionably good in its own
day has been reproduced. Occasionally an artist
seems to have resolved to be new ; sometimes he
has succeeded, but more often he has failed. Mr.
Walter Crane certainly did not succeed in reducing
the dress-coat into decoration, and Mr. Woolner did
not convince us that the London servant-girl
whitening the front doorsteps was possible as
sculpture. The mower interpreted by Mr. Hamo
Thorneycroft succeeded not by its modernity, but
by its rusticity.

Hardly anything has been done to induce the
average man to exchange cheap medievalism or
toy-shop orientality for a style more appropriate
to his existing surroundings. It may be that a
new style, or even a radical modification of old
forms, is as impossible in decoration as it seems
to be in architecture. If the best that can be
done in the way of original architecture is a mere
mixture of old styles, may we be preserved from
any further experiments; let us continue our
homage of pure imitation. But if our designers
could infuse into their work something of the spirit
of their day, something unmistakably the outcome
of the present, the result would undoubtedly be
interesting and might be important. Efforts, bril-
liant efforts, have been made, but they have been
very specialised. Ch^ret, for example, has suc-
ceeded in expressing one aspect of France as he
sees it. The heat, the hurry, the vexations, the
lurid excitements, the curiosity, the unanticipated
graces of the Paris of our day are all to be found
in his work. The great wall pictures are reminis-
cent neither of Athens nor Florence. They are the
natural decorative outcome of the Moulin Rouge.
It would be very curious to see what Cheret would
make of a wall-paper, to see whether the limitations
necessarily imposed on him would destroy his
joyous charm, or whether he would triumphantly
introduce a new style.

While in England we certainly do not seem to be
on the eve of a decorative revolution, we undoubtedly
possess a number of very vigorous young decorative
designers who, to some extent, express the spirit
of their day. To say that they are not derivative
would be to say a great deal too much. Even the
intensely personal, the poignantly modern art of Mr.
Aubrey Beardsley is in part the outcome of what has
gone before, and the finer, more subtle work of Mr.
Shannon has clearly had forerunners. But these
artists are neither content to be without a style on the
one hand, nor to work in an old style on the other.

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