Craftsman versus Fashionable Designer
The Puritan period which darkened the middle years of the seventeenth century affected the character of design by temporarily checking the extravagances of fashionable taste: lo indulge in luxurious display of any kind was to invite suspicion which might lead to enquiries, zealously conducted by grim and godly fanatics. Because many cultivated English gentlemen were driven abroad by such invasions of privacy and by the repressive policy of Cromwell's military dictatorship, craftsmen were granted a respite from foreign influences. They used it well and regained much of the confidence they had lost in the previous century. Tools and methods of fabricating and manufacturing materials were gradually improved in many crafts and industries, and although some luxury concerns declined, English design benefited by this breathing space. One of the casualties was the Mortlake tapestry works, which had been organised by Sir Francis Crane in 1619, and heavily subsidised by James I and later by Charles I; but the products of that venture were not characteristically English, because foreign workmen were largely employed.
As in earlier times, the way wood was handled in this period affords the most instructive illustration of the English genius for design in operation, and some notable inventions and improvements in technique were made. Of these the gate-leg table, the mule chest, which was the forerunner of the chest of drawers, and many new ways of using turning for chair and table legs were the most outstanding. The extravagance of the Jacobean period, the obese and over-ornamented articles of furniture, and the enormous and heavily carved chimney pieces, gave way to simpler and purer forms. The most agreeable ornamentation that classic architecture had hitherto inspired had been the arcaded panels which appeared on bed heads, the fronts of chests, on chimney pieces and walls. Turning became more elaborate, though it was never complicated. Some remarkably beautiful forms emerged, notably the barley-sugar twist and bobbin turning for the legs and stretchers of chairs and tables. Leather began to be used for upholstery, and much of the furniture made in the sixteen-forties and fifties was 'utility' furniture: plain, straightforward stuff, sturdy and deliberately austere. Oak, hitherto the basic material for furniture-making and joinery, was now frequently supplemented by various fruit woods, such as apple and cherry, also by yew, ash and elm. A latent capacity for mechanical invention gradually became apparent all over the country among craftsmen. John Evelyn records several instances of exceptional ingenuity displayed by locksmiths and other metal workers in country districts. Presently this gift manifested itself conspicuously in clock-making, and by the end of the seventeenth century, the great age of the English clockmakers had begun.
Many members of the nobility and gentry returned from their self-imposed exile, when they realised that the Puritan government was firmly established, and they brought back fresh ideas. Evelyn returned from Paris with a pattern for his first coach (Diary, April 29, 1652). The pages of his diary are thronged with new ideas, introduced from abroad. He discloses how the educated, wealthy man of the times regarded design, and perhaps his most illuminating statement was made during his visit to Rome in 1644, about the "Palace Farnezi," which was built, as he put it,'when Architecture was but newly recovered from the Gothic barbarity.' (Diary, November 4, 1644.) This is an echo of the intolerance for all forms other than classical, that afflicted the sixteenth century, but with this difference: Evelyn, and thousands of other gentlemen, knew that classic design represented order and lucidity; their fathers and grandfathers had thought of it merely as the modish 'Italianate' way of building and decorating. This new enlightenment ended the conflict between craftsmen and fashionable designers; for the craftsman, in those middle years of the seventeenth century, began to understand what the fashionable designer was getting at; and the designer-who was generally an architect-exercised a clarifying educative influence; but it was a slow process, old ideas and prejudices remained, but in time a full and practical understanding of the freedoms and possibilities inherent in the classic orders of architecture and all that they implied, spread through the country. This fresh understanding first affected builders, masons and joiners; then woodworkers and metalworkers.
The man whose example had fostered and made possible (his national comprehension of the significance of the great system of design had died in 1652, disappointed and thwarted, without ever seeing the results of his work; but it was to that man, Inigo Jones, that the subsequent Golden Age of English design owed its strength and universal acceptance.
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