Studio: international art (12.1898)

The Art of Wood-Carving

students of our latter-day art classes and technical
schools. Many of these young people are wont to
enter upon a course of study which they imagine
will qualify them for obtaining a future livelihood
as designers of wood-carving, and in this course
they are frequently encouraged, I am sorry to say,
by their teachers. Now, what is the outcome of
all this ? When they have in their own opinion,
and in that of their masters, acquired a sufficient
knowledge of the subject, they set out with their
portfolio of more or less ingenious designs under
their arm, and endeavour to dispose of them to the
master wood-carvers, or to the makers of furniture,
only to meet with a speedy disillusion. The fact
of the matter is that practical wood-carvers either
work from the special designs furnished to them by
the architect, who is responsible for the structure
of which the carving forms a part, or else they
follow their own ideas. It is, indeed, this very
fact, paradoxical as it may seem, which, though it
has in the past done much to lower the artistic
standard of wood-carving in this country, yet offers
the brightest hopes of its forthcoming regeneration.
The wood-carver, by the very traditions of his
craft, must be a designer as well as a craftsman.
Even when he works from an architect's design, it
is only the general lines which are given him to
follow, and it is left to him to supply those details
and subtleties which very often differentiate a work
of art from a mere mechanical reproduction. I
have taken an early opportunity of emphasising
this fact, as it seems to me to have a very vital
bearing upon my whole subject. It is to the
craftsman-designer that this little handful of hap-
hazard papers, for they are designed after the
fashion of loosely familiar talks upon the subject
rather than as stiffly formal theses, are addressed.
Throughout their course, therefore, I shall con-
sistently take for granted the possession by those
who read them of some certain amount of technical
skill.

It now falls to us to consider somewhat more
intimately the question of design as applied to the
carver's art in its several manifestations. In the
course of that consideration we shall find it
necessary to glance now and again at the work of
those who have preceded us. Now, there is a
right way and a wrong way of looking at old work,
or rather there are several sorts of wrong ways, but
only one right way. I have already said enough to
show that in my estimation one of these wrong
ways is to allow one's admiration for the cunning
artificers of the past to so carry one away as to
make one believe that they did the thing they had
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to do so well that there is no way of doing it
better, and that the workman of the nineteenth
century must therefore apply his energies in
slavishly copying the design as well as the methods
of his forerunner of the thirteenth. In avoiding
this Scylla of timid and superstitious adherence to
tradition, one must be careful, on the other hand,
to guard against the Charybdis of that so-called
originality which affects to disregard and make
little of the masterpieces of the past. The fact is,
the art of the wood-carver is a living one, and
without progression there can be no life. To use
a somewhat familiar simile, it resembles a majestic
tree, the main trunk of which, though some of the
limbs are dead and rotten with decay, still gives,
passage to the living sap so that the youngest
branches are able to draw sustenance therefrom
and flourish. So while it is well that the student
should lose no opportunity of carefully studying
every style and every period of carving, he should
cultivate first of all the habit of criticism, that
he may be able with some degree of assurance to
differentiate between what is good and what is bad
in old work. Let him store his mind and memory
with the manner in which the problems he himself
has to face have been worked out by those who
came before him, but let him at the same time
keep constantly before him the fact that his own
problems have to be worked out by himself, and
by himself alone. From the past let him merely take
an allusion here and a suggestion there, a hint, may-
be, as to what to avoid in one case, as well as an
indication as to what to conform to in another.
Now let us see how this theory can be applied to
practice ; and in substituting the concrete for the
general, let us, to begin with, confine our attention
to carving as applied to furniture or mobiliers as.
the French, with a truer appreciation of the exact
meaning of words, term it, differentiating in that
manner between the fixed interior furnishings of a
house and the movable furniture. Half an hour
passed at South Kensington, or anywhere where
a representative collection of the furniture of the
last half-dozen centuries may be found, will be
sufficient to convince us of the somewhat para-
doxical fact that while in the work of the past
period it fell to the carver to inform with the
breath of artistic life the merely utilitarian product
of the workman who preceded him, yet subse-
quently it was the want of restraint on the part of
the carver which led to that vulgar riot of un-
shapely form which marks the furniture of the
most debased periods. Nowhere can the lesson of
the value of restraint be more clearly read. Some