Studio: international art (30.1904)

Wicker Furniture

It is one of the fundamental laws of Austria to
teach her people to help themselves, and although
they cannot earn very much, still they manage to get
along; their wants are small, the home industries are
kept up, and their small earnings at any rate suffice
to keep the workers from being a burden to their
parishes.

It was with this idea that, some seventy-five
years ago, the government erected a number of
schools for the purpose of training teachers to go

wicker chair designed ey hans vollmer

w

wicker chair designed by h. funke

executed in the imperial
pattern workshops, vienna

out and instruct the villagers in the different crown
lands in the art of basket-weaving, so that during
the hard winters when agricultural work was an
impossibility they might be, at any rate, able to
keep the wolf from the door. The work is still
being carried on, the teachers being trained at the
Imperial School in Vienna, under the Austrian
Museum, of which Hofrath von Scala is the
Director, whence they are sent out to the
villages of Bohemia and Austrian Poland, and
Croatia, Carinthia, and
Moravia, to teach their art
■I^mhhb to others. The Director
of these schools, Mr.
Funke, is an artist, and
he spends much of his
time in designing new
patterns, which are sent to
the districts to be copied;
or old patterns, and others
from the East are made
and sent to the district
schools to be again copied

. p| and produced in large

quantities for the foreign
market. But this applies
chiefly to the basket
trade, which has become
staple; for though at one
time the efforts of the

wicker chairs designed by hans vollmer ;,1„ r j .

executed by prag-rudniker villagers were confined to

stuff by Leopold bauer and backhausen & son's marketand packing baskets,

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