Union of Craftsmen and Designers, part 2
The golden age went through some growing pains, but they were over by the end of the seventeenth century. As a natural reaction against Puritan austerity, designers in the Carolean period often indulged in the most profuse displays of ornamentation, but these light-hearted essays in extravagance were wholly different from the oppressively ponderous work of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Stuart chairs and cabinet stands might be gorgeous with elaborate carving and gilding, but such things were never clumsy, they never had that thick look, that corpulent solidity of form, cherished by under-educated taste, which never knows how to begin or where to stop with ornament.
Directly the universal system of classical design was understood and practised throughout the country, designers could deal with craftsmen, who worked in an accepted idiom ; briefly, when things were designed and made, all the parties concerned spoke the same language. Designers and craftsmen were united in partnership: very often (he craftsman became the master designer, and two outstanding examples of this transition are William Kent and Thomas Chippendale. There were some limitations; inevitably some talent was curbed; but by the late seventeenth century a future industrial pattern became faintly apparent.
It has been suggested in another book that the character of the modern industrial plant was occasionally anticipated by the working methods of architects like Wren and Kent, and organisers of skilled labour, such as Thomas Chippendale. Certainly 'the allocation and distribution of work by master designers like Wren and Chippendale had more in common with the allocation and distribution of work in a mid-twentieth century factory, than with the collective craftsmanship, the flexible partnership of skilled men, that reared the medieval churches and cathedrals'. In the building of St. Paul's, for -example, 'Wren imposed his taste in exactly the same way that the directors of an industry decide to impose upon the whole productive capacity and activity and output of their factory certain standardised forms for products'. The benefits of the system outweighed any disadvantages: it was not repressive; it gave ample opportunity to imaginative craftsmen to breathe new life into the forms that had become paralysed by the implacable standardisation of the Roman Empire. They were boldly experimental; witness such examples of the English genius for innovation and practical common sense as the stick-back or Windsor chair, the tallboy or double chest of drawers, the winged chair; they were ready to learn from abroad, and absorbed foreign craftsmen who had been driven from their homes by the tyranny or folly of some government. But apart from persecuted Frenchmen, like the Huguenots, whose skill enlarged and improved our textiles, Walloon and Flemish makers of Turkey pile carpets had settled and established works in various parts of the country by the end of the seventeenth century and, early in the eighteenth, Henry, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, introduced French and Walloon carpet makers to work for him in Wiltshire. In 1751, Pere Norbert became a naturalised Englishman, changed his name to Parisot, and started a factory for making pile carpets and a training school at Fulham; but the works were sold up in 1755, and Parisot tried to start again at Exeter, though the venture failed and (he Exeter stock was sold the following year. In the seven-teen-fifties, the Society of Arts gave premiums for carpet design and manufacture to Whitty of Axminster, Passavant of Exeter, and Jeffer of Frome; and it was stated in Volume I of the Society's Transactions (1783) that as a result of this encouragement the manufacture of carpets 'is now established in different parts of the kingdom, and brought to a degree of elegance and beauty which the Turkey carpets never attained.' Such carpets generally preserved Oriental characteristics, though the brothers Adam produced designs with classical motives, precise and elegant in detail, rather cold in colour, but not dissimilar in effect from Roman tesselated pavements.
Article Union of Craftsmen and Designers, part 2 was readed 214 times.
|
