Studio: international art (10.1897)

The Choice of Simple Furniture

sider what an incalculable
amount of true pleasure
both to craftsman and pur-
chaser might be gained in
the making and keeping of
rightly designed work, and
if we imagine such work,
carried out in something of
the spirit which inspires that
description by Rudyard
Kipling of the attitude of
the true artist worker :

Who, lest all thought of Eden
fade,

Sends Eden to the crafts-
man's brain,
To Godlike muse, or his own
trade,

And manlike stand with
God again.

If we compare with such
a picture the mechanical
drudge of the modern
workshop, we must con-
clude that the cheapest of
educations will hardly atone
for the loss of the tradi-
tional knowledge of gene-
rations of workmen, or for
the substitution of a bare
individual merit of a particular thing as its relation commercialism for the old craftsman spirit,
to everything else in the room. The furniture should The furniture of the average modern uphol-
appear to grow out of the requirements of the room, sterer will be quite out of the question for those
to represent the finishing touches of a scheme who wish to possess a tastefully furnished house,
which had its inception when the first stone of the It is not implied that the commercial article is
house was laid, and not an alien importation from necessarily too cheap, or that better furniture
the upholsterer's of spick and span suites, at war would be necessarily more expensive. Many
with themselves and their surroundings. people appear to imagine that they cannot afford

The usual method of huddling together indis- to have artistic surroundings, whereas the wonder
criminately a variety of articles which have no is that they can afford so much expensive ugliness,
possible relation to each other, will prove merely For the vulgarity of most of the furniture of the
an expensive advertisement of the bad taste of the shops has been painfully acquired at the expense
owner, and will suggest nothing more homelike of much misdirected labour, and if shorn of its
than the cabinet-maker's shop. so-called ornament it would often be at least

Perhaps when we have begun to learn that the inoffensive,
artist niay be better employed in refining and sim- There is the dining-room suite in black oak, the
plifying the surroundings of home-life than in pro- whole character of which seems to be summed up
ducing an infinitude of mediocre pictures, some- appropriately in the one word "antique," and
thing may be done towards regaining some of those which the purchaser, unmindful of a great gulf
qualities which seem to have been gained so easily fixed, fondly imagines to have all the effect of old
and so inevitably in an earlier age. Till then one work. It would be difficult to find anything more
can only deplore the immense amount of ignoble and debased than these solemn caricatures, and yet
misdirected labour which has resulted in the making they are often to be found in the houses of culti-
of so much that is vulgar and base. If we con- vated people. Some simple designs for dining-

JS3

THE HERALD OF MORN" ' FROM A PAINTING BY T. MILLIE DOW