Union of Craftsmen and Designers, part 3
Throughout the golden age of design, foreign ideas and fashions were absorbed and happily anglicised. The influence of the great classic system of design was ubiquitous: it not only established a national appreciation of good proportion, but determined the nature and placing of ornament. The lanterns of a ship, the gilded lamps of a coach, the carved and gilded or crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceilings of fashionable drawing rooms or the sconces on the walls; the silver candlesticks on the nobleman's dining table, or the brass candlesticks in the cottage, all bore the impress not only of a universal system of design, but of a common approach to every problem of design. The operation of the system was disclosed by excellent proportions and the confident use of ornament; the common approach was apparent in the way materials were selected and used. The carved decoration on the stern gallery of a man-of-war; the scrollwork on the hilt of her captain's sword, the engraving on the metalwork of the pistols he used, the case and works of his watch; and on his table at home, the silver salt cellars and sugar casters, the cream jug and teapot, his furniture, the brass knocker on the front door of his house, the mud scrapers by the doorstep, the. railings and gates, the very street where his house stood, and the coach in which his wife went visiting, all bore witness to a great release of educated inventiveness; unique, recognisably classical in origin, and yet as English as beef and beer, or oak and ash and thorn.
Not only were designers confident, and executant craftsmen competent and informed: patronage was educated. 'It had become part of a gentleman's education to understand design, and every new idea, every fresh foible of fashion was accommodated by the all-pervading system. Dutch taste, French taste, Chinese taste, fashions from all over Europe and the Far East, might acquire a fleeting modishness, but they were never permitted to disturb the established observance of good proportion. Even experiments with Gothic forms made by eccentric antiquaries like Horace Walpole failed to disrupt the system of design or even to embarrass its practitioners.'
The easy accommodation of foreign ideas had become almost a national habit; in many crafts and industries patterns and devices that had evolved originally in China or in the Greece of Pericles, were transmuted into something characteristically English. The variety of English accomplishments in design during the golden age was astonishing. Silversmiths produced some of their finest work in the Georgian period; at Braintree and Spitalfields silk weaving was established and flourishing; china and pottery had grown from small country crafts into vast industries; the wares of Chelsea, Fulham, Worcester, Derby and Bow became famous. Most progressive and innovating of all pottery businesses was Wedgwood's, with its new works at Etruria near Hanley. Josiah Wedgwood's epitaph states that he 'converted a rude and inconsiderable Manufactory into an elegant Art and an important part of National Commerce'. His influence on the design and technique of English pottery was comparable to the influence of Inigo Jones upon English architecture. He greatly improved domestic ware, and 'he supplemented the use of the primitive potter's wheel by afterwards turning his ware upon an improved lathe. He was the actual inventor of at least Iwrnty new bodies for the manufacture of earthenware ....' Gay colours, delicate or bold patterns, sensible and graceful shapes, were characteristic of the work of the great English potteries, though the delicacy never became faded, or finicky, or the boldness too brutally vigorous. There was occasionally a rustic jollity about some of the patterns and scenes that adorned mugs, plates and jugs; and the English landscape, incomparably lovely in its gentle and continuous variety, was a favourite subject. But it was Wedgwood who popularised classical motives. He was one of the first industrialists to apprehend the significance of industrial design, and he established a practical system of collaboration with artists and sculptors. It worked; but the example of that partnership between art and industry had little or no effect upon later generations, either in the pottery industry or others.
Wedgwood lived and worked and organised the production of his wares during the time when the first industrial revolution was already beginning. Unanticipated, unrecognised, with its .colossal powers for good and evil as yet unsuspected, that revolution destroyed the English tradition in design in many industries, and produced a new rich class, far more ignorant and tasteless than any new rich class had ever been before. The tidy, compact world of the eighteenth century, in which good design was the rule and nearly everything men made or used gave satisfaction and delight to the eye, gradually disintegrated, and a few generations later the traditions, the habits of thought and the knowledge which characterised the golden age of design were lost, its achievements were despised, and craftsmen and skilled technicians were afflicted and thwarted by a new age of confusion, as their ancestors had been three hundred years earlier.
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