Studio: international art (20.1900)

Home Arts and Industries

sent by John, Sidney, and Ellen Firth, of Kirkby
Lonsdale,— the only surviving family of potters in
that district.

Toy-making seems to have found a good deal of
favour, both with the committee and with country
classes. It is one of the most dangerous of handi-
crafts for an amateur association to take up;
firstly, because it encourages working in miniature,
which has an almost invariably bad effect both upon
technique and upon imagination in a beginner: and,
secondly, because of the popular notion that any-
thing is good enough for a toy so long as it is either
mechanical or in some way dramatic or grotesque.
There should be immense scope for beautiful toys,
as well as merely ingenious ones ; for something
other than diminutive copies of grown-up people's
things. But no artist (except, perhaps, Mr.
Gordon Craig) has yet set himself either to make
or to draw toys in the child-spirit. Interpreters of
beautiful form and colour to the young are still on
a level, in this country, with the fourth-rate music-
teachers who are thought quite fit to "ground"
them in exercises and scales.

Leather work was represented by two classes of
excellent tradition — Miss Bassett's at Leighton
Buzzard, and Miss Baker's at Porlock Weir. The
latter group have made some bold and praise-
worthy experiments in coloured and embossed
applique panels lightly backed, which gave very
interesting and promising results. A narrow
horizontal panel thus treated was wonderfully rich
in tone and varied in surface modelling, without
having lost the characteristics of leather. Among
the staple work of the class was a handsome book-
cover for St. George the Martyr Public Library,
with Miss Baker's design of St. George and the
Dragon executed by Philip Burgess. The Leighton

Buzzard class showed a great variety of tastefully
embossed and tooled stationery and letter cases,
bookbindings, and caskets of various sizes, in-
cluding several favourite South Kensington models.
A little hand-bag, with steel fittings, was designed
by Miss Bassett and Miss Shepherd, and orna-
mented by Arthur Smallbones, who also carried
out, with his wonted good workmanship, a fine
decoration adapted by Miss Willis as a book-cover
design. In the caskets and some smaller book-
bindings Ada Carter sustained her reputation as a
craftswoman. There was some good leather work
from Kirkby Lonsdale, and also from the members
of the Chiswick Art Workers' Guild, though the
faint reflection of Kelmscott glory seems rather
to have slackened than stimulated their invention.
In this and other leather classes may be noted
a tendency to bestow too much labour on the
covering-lip of ugly things. A certain incongruity
strikes us in a railway time-table assuming the
binding of an edition de luxe. There is little
gained by making fair the outside of the guide
and the catalogue while inwardly it is bad paper
and worse type. The suggestion reminds us how
very little the Home Arts classes have done in the
way of designs for printing, or black-and-white
decoration of any kind. The only approach to
this in the exhibition was a bold sketch for a
needlework design, a procession of children, with
the device, " Gather ye rosebuds while ye may."

The needlework exhibits were, of course, too
numerous to review in detail, and though compris-
ing an immense amount of delicate, patient, and
tasteful handicraft, did not present any remarkable
features in the way of design. Mr. and Mrs.
Godfrey Blount's peasant embroiderers at Hasle-
mere are the striking exception ; their work has

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