Union of Craftsmen and Designers, part 1
The Golden Age of English design lasted approximately one hundred and seventy years, from 1660 until 1830. Obviously these are not rigid dates: there was no proclamation, no triumphal trumpet blasts to announce the beginning of a new era; nevertheless, the music and the shouting which greeted Charles II when he returned to England certainly heralded something much more important than the restoration of that shifty, astute and lascivious monarch. The rejoicings were emphatically sincere, for the restoration closed a gloomy period of austerity, of urgent exhortation, and constant prying into the large and small matters of life, and the English revelled in their new freedom from interference.
The sixteenth-century craftsmen had resented interference by patrons determined to have foreign fashions; designers in the mid-seventeenth century, although no actual restrictions were put on their work, felt it was prudent to keep on the safe side of luxury and ostentation; but with a king once again established in Whitehall, and those grim Puritan regional controllers, Cromwell's Major-Generals, either in flight, exile or awaiting the scaffold, England threw its hat in the air; and almost immediately a gay, spontaneous exuberance was apparent in the design of all kinds of things. Everywhere men with skill and ingenuity were at work, breathing again the air of freedom, without fanatical overseers glowering their disapproval: goldsmiths and silversmiths, weavers and clock-makers, cabinet makers and chair makers, joiners and glass-makers; and, controlling all the activities of such people with intelligence and highly civilised standards of taste, were new and incredibly accomplished architects. Inigo Jones had prepared the way; quietly, throughout the Puritan period, many fresh experiments in building had been made; and early in his reign, Charles II appointed as Assistant to the Surveyor General a man whom John Evelyn had described as 'that miracle of a youth' and 'that prodigious young scholar', when he first met him at Oxford, and who was at the time of his Royal appointment Savilian Professor of Astronomy at that University: his name was Christopher Wren.
Outstanding among the architects of the true English Renaissance were Inigo Jones, who was the progenitor, Sir Christopher Wren, Sir William Chambers, the brothers Adam, and that last great light in which the spirit of the Renaissance burned so vividly, and who lived and worked after the Golden Age of design had ended, Sir Edwin Lutyens.
The chief achievement of the golden age of design was to bring into coherent relationship the form of everything that was made, through the universal comprehension and use of the rules of proportion. Gibbon, indulging his power of graceful compression, summed up the matter by saying 'the practice of architecture is directed by a few general and even mechanical rules'. It sounds like a facile over-simplification now; but Gibbon's words reflect the urbane simplicity of conception induced by the mastery and practice of those rules. They were applicable to the making of nearly everything that was used by people in every walk of life; and because they were understood and their relative simplicity was explained in clearly written and well illustrated copy books, craftsmen were enlightened by them. There was none of the resentful muddling with proportions and ornamentation which had taken place in the sixteenth century. Everything derived benefit from that fundamental study: everything acquired graciousness of form while preserving that basic English characteristic, common sense, which demanded stability and delighted in good workmanship. Even the arrangement of patterns printed or woven on fabrics or stamped on leather or painted on china benefited by this all-pervading sense of order.
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