victorian theory of ornament

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V I C T O R I A N T H E O R Y O F O R N A M E N TAlf Boe

As THE nineteenth century advanced, with its social upheavals and in-creasing industrialization, it became clear that Britain was no longercapable of maintaining her pre-Napoleonic position as leader of fashionand quality in the crafts and the industrial arts. Whatev er its reasons thisstate of affairs was watched with concern by economists and traders, w hosaw exports dwindle under fierce competition from the French, and bymen of taste who regretted such a development even from non-com-mercial reasons. A Parliamentary Committee was set up in 1835 'toinquire into the best means of extending a knowledge of the arts and ofthe principles of design among the people (especially the manufacturingpopulation) of the cou ntry',1 and as a result a 'No rma l School of Design'was established at Somerset H ouse in 1837 with branches in various partsof the country. Although new Parliamentary Committees, in 1847 and1849, pronounced the whole thing to have been a failure, this Schoolwas important in providing conditions for experiment and turning thethoughts of teachers and others towards the principles of good design.Other events of perhaps even greater importance come from the sameperiod. The w ritings of N . W . Pugin w ere published, w ith the earlyworks of John Rusk in. The Society of Arts, with the Prince Consortat its head, took an active interest in design and awarded annual prizes.O n the initiative of Henry Cole, a civil servant, a num ber of artists w erebrought together in support of a venture for the application of designto mass production in industry. The men behind Summerly's Art Manu-factures, the name given to this enterprise, were also responsible for thepublication of a Journal of Design and Manufacture which ran from 1849to 1852. They w ere also largely instrumental in bringing ab out the GreatExhibition of 1851, from which in course of time grew the D epartmentof Practical Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Among the members of this group we meet the authors of books,

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VICTO RIAN TH EO RY O F O RNAMENTarticles, addresses and lectures in which a contem porary theo ry o f designwas expounded. They were men like the painters W illiam Dyce, R .A .and Richard Redgrave, A.R.A., the compiler of the 1846 official cata-logue of the National Gallery, Ralph Nicholson Wornum and GeorgeWallis, headmaster of the Manchester School of Design from 1844 to1846, and were all in one capacity or another concerned in the Govern-men t School of Design. Then there were architects like Matthew Digb yWyatt, later the first Slade Professor at Cambridge; Owen Jones, authorof a magnificent tome of drawings from the Alhambra and later ArtSuperintendent at the Department of Practical Ar t; and Gottfried Sem -per, already famous in Germany and a refugee since 1849 because of hisactivities during the revolutionary movements of the previous year.David Ramsay Hay, an Edinburgh interior decorator, completes thelist of early authors. To a later wave of writers belong the designerChristopher Dresser, the architect C. L. Eastlake, the designers L. F.Day and Walter Crane and, of course, William Morris.

Despite their common interest some of these men were bitterly atloggerheads with one another. To most of them contemporary designmeant adjustment to the fairly recent industrial situation where mass pro-duction by machines was rapidly supplanting the older craftsmanship.The School of Design and the subsequently organized Department ofPractical Art were established to solve problems arising from the newand somewhat perplexing state of affairs. On the other hand to JohnRuskin, who loathed the development going on around him, the workof Cole, Wyatt, Jones, Redgrave and others was based on an utterlyfalse set of valuesan outlook reflected in his words: 'the Professorshipof Sir Henry Cole at Kensington has corrupted the system of art-teach-ing all over England into a state of abortion and falsehood from whichit w ill take twen ty years to recover'.2Whatever the difference in their approach to the ethics of design,however, all were agreed in attaching high aesthetic importance toornament. 'The love of ornament is a tendency of our being . . . orna-mental design has had its birth long before the very conception of thefine arts,' said Dyce. It is called 'a necessity of the mind' and, accordingto Dresser, we 'act in accordance with an inward instinct or passion'when applying colour or ornament to the objects by which we are sur-rounded. Owen Jones laid it down as a general rule that 'constructionshould be decorated' and Ruskin held sculpture and painting to be thechief features of architecture, regre tting the increasing 'prevalence of thelower part over the higher, to the interference of the constructive withthe purity and simplicity of the reflective element'. Pugin, WilliamMorris and others might be quoted to the same effect.

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ALF BOEThey were, therefore, no 'pioneers of the modern movement' at anyrate as regards functionalist doctrines. True, Pugin wrote that 'thereshould be no features about a building which are not necessary for con-venience, construction, or propriety'. But here 'propriety' relates prim-

arily to ornament, which should 'consist of enrichment of the essentialconstruction of the building'. It should serve as an 'embellishment ofthat which is in itself useful, in an appropriate manner'. In a similarvein William Morris wrote his famous sentence, which has frequentlybeen given a functionalist interpretation: 'Have nothing in your houseswhich you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.' It isquite clear that he himself considered the 'beautiful' to be of equal sig-nificance with the 'useful'. He defined architecture as 'the art of orna-mental building', and wrote that w e should 'clothe our daily and dom es-tic walls with ornament that reminds us of the outward face of theearth. . . ' .Indeed we should no t be surprised to learn tha t a considerable part o fmid nineteenth-century writings on the reformation of design did notaim at bringing about a major change in its social or technical basis oreven a change of purpose, but rather a purification and systematizationof existing trends and chiefly of the subject-matter of ornament. Theprogressives found contemporary design marred by vulgar naturalismand an unenlightened use of period styles, by logical inconsistencies inthe expressive content of ornament, and by coarseness resulting fromshoddy workmanship or unrefined machine production. Their attemptsat a clarification of principles were first and foremost directed againstshortcomings such as these, certainly n ot towards the abolition of o rna -mental art.Ornament, then, was a serious matter, not to be applied capriciouslyor purely for its own sake. It even had a purpose to fulfil which in thisliterary age was considered as important as its power to adorn: it wasmeant to tell a story, to canalize reflection, to provoke thought. It hadto be reasonable and consistent in a purely literary sense as well asplastically. 'What madness, then,' Pugin wrote, '. . . to worship at therevived shrines of ancient corrup tion, and profane the temple o f a cruci-fied Redeemer by the architecture and emblems of heathen gods. . . . Isour wisdom set forth by the owl of Minerva, or our strength by theclub of Hercu les?'John R uskin saw ornament as an aid to contemplationof the wonders of divinely inspired N ature and praised the Gothic stylefor its noble 'hold of nature', for its 'careful distinction of species, andrichness of delicate and undisturbed organization, which characterize theGothic design'. In it he found expressed 'the history of rural and tho ug ht-ful life, influenced by habitual tenderness, and devoted to subtle inquiry'.

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V I C T O R I A N T H E O R Y O F O R N A M E N TNeither was his pupil William Morris an advocate of art for the sakeof pure colour, line and'form or of pattern as an end in itself. ' I . . . m uststill insist on plenty of meaning in you r pa tterns; I must have unm istak-able suggestions of gardens and fields, and strange trees, boughs and

tendrils, or I can't do with your pa tt e rn .' .. . 'To have a meaning and tomake others feel and understand it, must ever be the aim and end of ourWestern art.' Pure pattern-making, or 'colour for colour's sake only'he held to be 'uncivilized'. The narrative element counted for mucheven with men like Dyce, Redgrave , Cole, Gottfried Semper and otherswho worked in the Governmental Schools from the eighteen-thirties tothe eighteen-fifties. Through Cole's interesting venture, the Summerly sArt Manufactures, some among them became authors of works like 'ABride's Inkstand' adorned with a little Cupid in cast metal or a glassvase called 'The Well Spring', with ornaments 'of.waterplants colouredand enamelled on the glass'. Objects like these illustrate the real sensein which the Victorians understood the thesis that 'form follows func-tion', form must be read as ornamental form, which by means of easilygrasped symbols or pictures should suggest the function of the objectadorned. As Gottfried Semper was to point out: 'Tritons, Nereids, andNym phs w ill always be meaningful by a well, Venus and the Graces bya mirror, trophies and combats with arms'. This is what, in anothercontext, was described as 'appropriate detail relating to its (the object's)use'. In his Official Report of the fury for the 1851 Exhibition, Redgravegave ample proof that the term 'appropriate form' was by no meansunderstood to mean anything like the modern 'functional form' andthat m any a modern-sounding , seemingly functionalist sentence must beread in a sym bolistic sense. It seems necessary to stress this point becausewe are so frequently apt to jud ge V ictorian design on our own premises,giving a twentieth-century interpretation to their theoretical statements.It may even be that our research into the architecture and design of thelast cen tury has to a considerable degree been prog ram matic, in the sensethat too often stones have been turned in order to find forerunners andcreate a history for modern functionalism, while interesting parallels ofa contrary n ature have been ignored.

W ithout enlarging further on this, we revert to our m ain theme. Fromthe mass of theoretical speculation some particular points will here besingled out for discussionsuch as, to start with, the attitude of variouswriters to the ornam ent and period styles of the past.The age which witnessed the earliest publications o f writers mentionedabove had already hved through the first phases of stylistic copyismwhich was initiated by mid eighteenth-century Gothicists and becamean outstanding characteristic of nineteenth-century decorative art. By320

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ALFBOE1850 the whole gamut had been exploited, from various phases ofClassicism through Gothic, Elizabethan, Louis XIV and XV, withPersian, Turkish or Moorish as the most cherished exotic adjuncts.Employed very often with scant knowledge of correct detail and withlittle sense of appropriate composition, early nineteenth-century pseudo-styles present themselves with a peculiar flavour which makes them easilydiscernible.Today it may be noted with surprise that few if any among our re-formers rejected period styles out of hand. Despite many apparentlyradical-sounding statements, Pugin practised throughout his career, andon principle, in Gothic. To him as a Catholic this remained the solemanner of building expressive of true religious principles: 'in it alonewe find the faith of Christianity embodied, and its practice illustrated'. Hislove of Gothic or 'Christian' architecture was complemented by hiscontempt for classical tradition, as quotations given above clearlydem onstrate. Pugin even preferred Gothic on structural and other tech-nical groundsa fact hardly to be marvelled at in an age which had yetto learn of the Crystal Palace and of reinforced concrete building. Buthe was by n o means averse to improvem ents. 'T he Christian architect',he says, 'should gladly avail himself of those improvements and in-creased facilities that are suggested from time to time,' such as forinstance, 'the great improvem ents in the w ork ing of metals for construc-t ive purposes ' . Again: 'It is the devotion, majesty and repose of Christianart, for which we are contendingit is no t a style, bu t a principle.'If Pugin's preference for Gothic was founded largely on its narrativeand expressive properties, so was that ofJohn Ruskin. B ut while Puginstressed the Catholic character of the style and insisted on a scheme ofornament in the Catholic tradition of Gothic building, Ruskin was aProtestant Pantheist. Praising, like Pugin, the style for its practical andconstructive advantages, in its ornament he sought an expression otMan's joy in the Creation of God. His philosophy concerning thesematters was adumbrated in the first volumes of Modem Painters, andsubsequently elaborated in Seven Lamps of Architecture and Stones ojVenice. Ruskin's rejection of the Classical tradition was consequent onthe assumption that art and architecture should mirror man's wonderand delight before the visual creation of God, since this demanded afreely inspired and naturalistic style to which he felt that Gothic, andGothic only, was really suited. The creation o f ornam ent, then , was anact of faith. To Ruskin, as to Pugin and indeed to numerous contem-poraries, this was no trivial matter.

Unlike Pugin and Ruskin the men connected with the GovernmentalDrawing-Schools and related enterprises did not single out any onec 321

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VICTORIAN THEORY OF ORNAMENTamong the period styles as the only safe basis for contemporary ex-ploitation and possible development. Their attitude, clarified in numer-ous written passages, may be summarized as follows: Styles from thepast, and from foreign cultures, should be subjected to the closest study,but not in order to imitate them. Rather they should be considered toembody 'facts and conclusions already arrived at' concerning proportion ,the use of colour, the form or disposition of ornament, etc., etc.inshort, the well-established authority of ancient art 'may be proved tobe founded on the most accurate perception of the objective causes ofnatural beauty' (Dyce). This attitude was later reflected in the customof setting museums and schools of design in close proximity. In thewords of Christopher Dresser, modern work might employ 'the vigourof the best Gothic ornament, the severity of Egyptian, the intricacy ofthe Persian, the gorgeousness of the Alhambra, and so on, only it mustno t imitate in detail the various styles of the past'.

The practice of Owen Jones, M. D. Wyatt and others shows, how-ever, that it was by no means easy to win free at a stroke from thedominance of electicism; so we frequently find an insistence that, whenemployed, borrow ed features should at least be correctly used. The feel-ing, however, was widespread that a new ornamental art should befounded on the judicious study offorms in nature.John Ruskin's preference for naturalistic ornament has already beenmentioned. He is interesting for his introduc tion of a strange and highlypersonal scale of expressive value in ornament based on natural form.This gradation he justified by his belief that those forms are 'mostnatural which are most frequent; or, rather, that on the shapes which inthe everyday world are familiar to the eyes of men, God has stampedthose characters of beauty which He has made it man's nature to love'.Thus 'the noblest ornament' is that which represents 'the highest ordersof existence. Imitated flowers are nobler than imitated stones; imitatedanimals, than flowers; imitated human forms, of all animal forms thenoblest'. In Stones of Venice a m ore elaborate list of precedence was given ,starting with the forms least frought with divine association: 'AbstractLines; Forms of Earth (Crystals); Forms of W ater (Waves); Forms of Fire(Flames and Ra ys) ; Forms of Air (Clouds); O rganic Forms (Shells); Fish;Reptiles and Insects; Vegetation (a) Stems and Trunks; Vegetation {b)Foliage; Birds; Mammalian Animals and Man.' We shall see later howits placing on this list came to influence the position and em ploym ent ofany single motif when used for decorative purposes.The contemporaries of R usk in expressed themselves in far less ph ilo-sophical terms. An early writer, the Edinburgh designer David RamsayHay, in a Report on Design before a Royal Commission in 1836, had

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ALF BOErecommended that inspiration for ornament and design be found innature, thereby forming 'a school peculiar to this country'. WilliamDyce expressed it as his opinion that 'nature must be held up as a sourcefrom whence . . . all the forms of beauty applicable to the uses of theornamentist must be derived'. Similar views were held by RichardRedgrave and Owen Jones, and were voiced in The Journal oj Designas well as in Henry Cole's pamphlet for Summerley's Art Manujactures.Almost a generation later than this William Morris held that the de-signer's teacher 'must be Nature and History'. His own design is full offanciful renderings of flowers and greenery w ith nothing much besides,while the influence on his composition of specimens of old Sicilian andNear East textiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum is evident. Hiscontemporary, Christopher Dresser, being educated as a botanist, em-ployed natural form for his ornamental design throughout his careeralmost to the exclusion of other elements; while throughout the latterhalf of the century series of books and articles published in England andabroad on the subject of natural forms as a model for ornament testifyto the importance of the principle.It was a principle which, as we have already pointed o ut, was not byany means new or at that time held only by the thoughtful few. Whatmakes the naturalism of our reformers stand out as something apart istheir insistence on some sort of stylization as opposed to realistic repro-duction of natural form and their belief that certain principles could befound to guide them in the process. W e find this point elaborated fairlyearly. Pugin, for example, in a publication of 1849 relates that at sometime in the course of his studies he had noticed how the foliage work inGothic architecture had obtained its peculiar character 'chiefly ow ing tothe manner of their arrangement and disposition' . . . 'it is the adaptationand disposition of it which stamps the style '. The observation was furtherreflected upon. Whereas 'a modern painter would endeavour to give afictitious idea of relief, as if hunches of flowers were laid on', therebyproducing 'an appearance of cavity or projection . . . on a feature whicharchitectural consistency would require to be treated as a plane', theancient Gothic artists 'disposed the leaves and flow ers... into geom etri-cal forms and figures, carefully arranging the stems and componentparts so as to Jill up the space they w ere intended to enrich; and they wererepresented in such a manner as not to destroy the consistency of thepeculiar feature or object they were employed to decorate . . . forinstance, a panel, which by its very construction is flat, would be orna-mented by leaves orflowersdraw n out or extended, so as to display theirgeom etrical forms on aflatsurface'. Ornam ent, in fact, should be treatedand employed in a reasonable manner, and should affront neither feeling

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V IC T OR IA N T HE OR Y OF OR N A ME N Tnor good common sense. 'Nothing', Pugin continues, 'can be moreridiculous than an apparently reversed groining to walk upon, or highlyrelieved foliage and perforated tracery for the decoration of a floor.'With one notable exception similar considerations were voiced by allthose among Pugin's contemporaries with whom we are concerned.William Dyce declares: 'Ornamental art is rather abstractive and repro-ductive than imitative.' The designer must 'anatomize' the works ofnature, and 'the power of representing objects in the form of diagramsis to him far more necessary and valuable than that of imitating themwith all their effects of light and shade, of surface or of material'. Hay,in 1844, had written a book to elucidate 'the princples of combinationswhich constitute beauty ', insisting on flatnessof design and conventionaltreatment of ornament. Throughout the series of important theoreticalwritings which followed during the latter half of the century, the themewas elaborated and various manners and degrees of stylization recom-mended to make ornament fit its material, the function of the object towhich it was applied and the technique by which this object was pro-duced. And already during the period between the 1851 and 1862 W orldExhibitions a notable change took place in the look at least of Britishdesign forflat-surfacepattern in wallpapers and textiles.

It would lead us too far afield to trace the multiple variations on thetheme of stylization, but it must be noted that the principle was not leftunquestioned by all. Dyce for one objected to what he called the 'crudeand hazy notion that, as a general rule,flowersand all other objects m ustundergo a conventionalizing process before they can be employed asmatter of ornament. . . . There is no general rule. Each case must beconsidered by itself.' Professor M. D. Wyatt gave his support, findingthat 'the tendency of the chief directors of taste has been . . . to tie thedecorative artist's hands somewhat too dogmatically. The result will beth a t. . . our productions will grow dry and arid.'The most direct opposition, however, was voiced by John Ruskin,who was sceptical of the basically commercial aims of Cole's designpolicy; this was a field where in Ruskin's view moral considerationswere the only ones to be taken into account. As we have already seen,the act of reproducing in ornamental art the divine forms of nature wasto him an act of faith and piety, inconsistent not only with any mechani-cal means of reproduction or multiplication but even with any notstrictly necessary simplification or transformation of form for orna-mental purposes. To him conventionalization or stylization of ornamentrepresented 'not an improvement of natural form into something betterand purer than Nature herself... in all cases whatever, right conven-tionalism is either a wise acceptation of an inferior place, or a noble

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ALF BOEdisplay of power under accepted limitation'. Consequently, 'the onlyessential distinction between Decorative and other art is the being fittedfor a fixed place; and in that place, related, either in subordination or incom mand, to the effect of other pieces of art'. Stylization was permissiblewhere decoration was placed too far out of sight for details to show orwhen so placed as to be subject to wear and tear; or when o rnament wasused to decorate for instance dress materials, which would fall into foldsso that the decoration would not show properly anyway except asmasses and pure pattern of form and colour. His rule for conventional-ization, when of necessity this expedient had to be resorted to, was,however, 'perfectly simple': 'If the designer of furniture, of cups andvases, of dress patterns, and the like, exercises himself continually in theimitation of natural form in some leading division of his work; then,holding by this stem of life, he m ay pass dow n into all kinds of m erelygeometrical or formal design with perfect safety, and with noble re-sults.' It follows without further documentation that his scale of prefer-ence as regards ornamental subject-matter, quoted above, was workedinto this scheme, less noble motifs being preferred for materials, uses,or place of least d istinction.It is interesting, although not surprising, to find in the theory andpractice of William Morris an echo of the more technical aspect ofRu skin's views. Having obviously profited as an artist from the activitiesboth of the Governmental Schools and of the collections at South Ken-sington, he believed the Schools of Design to be necessary but felt at thesame time that 'when people talk most about Works of Art, generallyspeaking at that period they do least in art'. He was concerned morewith creating a society in which art could grow than with expoundingtheories for the fashioning of that artthis was to him a matter of feel-ing rather than of theory. The 'scientific' approach of the Schools ofDesign he deeply distrusted, talking of 'a sham science of design' andholding that 'designing cannot be taught at all in a school'. His own com -ments on various crafts were always given the form of technical, pro-fessional advice, rarely narro wing into definite rules on m atters of form .Undiluted naturalism in ornament he rejected, but maintained at thesame time that 'your convention must be your own, and not borrowedfrom other times and peoples'.

This insistence on 'conventionalization' in one form or another formsperhaps the most outstanding achievement of Victorian theory ofornament. Its impact was to be considerable, first on Art Nouveau atthe turn of the century and then on the activities of designers and studiocraftsmen to this day. It is particularly interesting that such principlesshould have influenced the 'm inor' art of design at a time w hen pa inting325



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V IC T OR IA N T HE OR Y OF OR N A ME N Tand sculpture were passing through a blatantly naturalistic phase, to besuperseded only towards the close of the century by tendencies com-parable to early Victorian trends in design.It may seem difficult to find two theoretical tendencies in sharperopposition to each other than on the one hand the mid-Victorian atti-tude as demonstrated here and on the other recent doctrines of formalPuritanism which for convenience's sake may be given the label ofFunctionalism. True , to a very limited degree parallels may be found inVictorian times to the purist attitude of twentieth-century theorists.Before a Parliamentary Com mittee of 1835 James Nasmyth, inventor ofthe steam hammer, stressed the importance of'the entire reconcilabilityof elegance of form with bare utility'; it may, however, be questionedwhether, in an age when Gothic or Classical styling was commonlyapplied even to machinery, this can be understood to imply a distaste forornamental design. But be that as it may among critics, for instance, ofthe 1851 Exhibition praise is fairly generally given to the unadorned,strictly functional appearance of horse carriages and even of kitchenranges or machinery and in this we may see a very early and very real,if fairly insignificant, anticipation of twentieth-century Functionalisni.

Through what other links are our Victorian theorists related to theircolleagues of the early twentieth century? Most directly, I believe,through Art Nouveau. In the early continental manifestations of thestyle a debt to Britain has been universally recognized, and in a greatmany instances personal contacts are known to have existed betweenprominent followers of the advanced British line and Continentalavant-gardistes. It may be mentioned as a curiosity that in his you th evenLe Corbusier was educated on the principles of Joh n Ruskin supple-mented by Ow en Jones's Grammar of Ornament. He later worked underPeter Behrens, a founder member of the Darmstadt colony of artists,inspired largely, and not only through its Viennese leader Olbrich, byBritish trends.Quite soon, however, the Puritan outlook made itself more stronglyfelt until, under the slogan of 'Neue Sachlichkeit', important avant-garde architects and designers came to regard ornament as incompatiblewith contemporary trends in production and with what was looselytermed 'the modern spirit' in general. In 1908 Adolf Loos, Viennesearchitect and critic, wrote his essay on Ornament und Verbrechen, in whichhe maintained that ornament belongs to less mature stages of culturaldevelopment and that contemporary ingenuity should be reserved forhigher thingsan anticipation, it seems, of Le Corbusier's conceptionof modern man as a contemplative being whose intellect should becaptivated by more subtle devices than ornamental art in the traditional

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ALF BOEsense. Among the many radical trends towards a new conception ofform in the major and minor arts during the following decades few w eremore insistent upon a new style based on pure line, surface and formthan the Dutch Stijl-Group. The Deutsche Werkbund committed itselfto a similar position by the publication in 1924 of its book, Form ohneOrnament, and the Bauhaus, after some initial flirtation with less austereprojects, became a centre for the propagation of the modern Puritanprinciples in design. The twenties and thirties saw the dramatization ofthe sleek beauty of the automobile, the steamboat or modern men'swear.Although Puritanism has dominated twentieth-century avant-gardethink ing until now , it has not been alone in the field. From tim e to timerevivals have produced work of high quality and interestNeo-Baroque superseding Art Nouveau, with Neo-Classicism reigningthroughout the twenties; while constantly attempts to create new formsof ornam ent and to use contemporary materials and techniques for newexpressive effects have stimulated interest and enriched a number ofworks and trends. The Wendingen group of Amsterdam, the Germanexpressionist architects, the later phase of Hoffmann's Wiener Werk-stdtte with the w orks among others of Dagobert Pache may be cited asinteresting examples of tendencies which have been overlooked ortreated w ith less than justice by scholars imbued with the modern puristicspirit.

W here d o w e stand today ? Leaving aside the perpetual interestandmoneywhich an undiscerning public squanders on bad or eclecticornament, it seems clear that contemporary taste is again swinging to-wards the ornate, if not the ornamental. In shape and colour the lesstechnical and less austere branches of design are now often charged withemotion in a manner that would have been unthinkable during thethirties. Our studio craftsmen, direct descendents of nineteenth-centuryforerunners like William Morris, William Morgan, E mile Galle or JeanCarries, are still free to work along the most fanciful lines; and if theiroutput is restricted, their work is made influential through publicationin periodicals and books, which today are more numerous than everbefore. The studio craftsman may even be capable of influencing massproduction, using his understanding of material and artistic experiencefor the benefit of mechanized industry as in the case of Bertel Gardberg,the Finnish silversmith, Gertrud Vasegaard, Danish potter, or TiasEckhoff, Norwegian ceramics and general designerto mention onlya few.

But what about ornament in the production of today? It seems ex-tremely likely that ornament, in the sense of 'embellishment' or 'fea-327

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V I C T O R I A N T H E O R Y O F O R N A M E N Ttures or work added for decorative purposes' (The Concise Oxford Dic-tionary) in one form or another will always force itself upon us, and thatwe might as well meet the challenge and avail ourselves of it to giveadded interest to material life. It is doubtful whether any consistentschemes of ornamentation comparable to the period styles will ever beresuscitated, and it is probably right that migrant modern man shouldconstruct the interiors of his dwellings neutrally with regard to formalexpression. How resplendent, however, may be the furnishings whichhe m oves along w ith him from place to place! Carpets, intricately pa t-terned if he wishes them so, their material coloured in the pure and last-ing tints procured by modern dyes; if furniture will probably neveragain be the same by Baroque or Rococo standards, both the materialsand techniques of prod uction could make possible far greater freedom ofexpression than is the case today . Wherever material is being woven andsurfaces stencilled or printed, or form moulded, pressed or cast, there arethe possibilities of creation within the limits set by industrial mass pro-duction; while for special commissions artists and craftsmen outsideindustry w ill always be able to wo rk for a price well below that of evensecond-rate antiques.

Though it seems evident, however, that doctrinaire Functionalismhas by n ow 'fulfilled its historic mission', there is no telling w here ournew sense of drama will lead usand in no case should the useful lessonof Neue Sachlichkeit be forgotten. Austerity of form and the elegance ofbare simplicity are fitting not only for our technical equipment likerefrigerators, heating installations and the rest, but indeed for our fur-nishings and objects of ease and luxury. Nor should it be overlookedthat the last generation has learned consciously to exploit the aestheticproperties of materials in a way unknown before; the register of ex-pression has thus been widened without resort to ornament in the tra-ditional sense of that w ord .Things are doubtless happening in the 'useful arts' of today that wouldhave shocked a purist of the early thirties. In this situation our overridingconcern must be that ornament, whatever form it may take, shouldreally add something of value and not be introduced to spoil a gooddesign or to gloss over a bad on e. The non-functional elements of designshould be welcomed only in so far as the designer knows their properplace and restricted use. The strictest standards of quality-should beappliedas a matter o f course; the form should be suited to the materialand technique; if ornament is representational, its subject should bereasonably well suited to the circumstances in which it is employed. Inshort, it seems not unlikely that our old Victorian authors are due for arevivalw hich, to be sure, wou ld have pleased them vastly.

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ALF BOER E F E R E N C E S

1 Report of the Departmental Committee on leadership of Peter Floud and H ughTh e Royal College ofArt (Lon don, 1911), Wa kefield. Their exhibition in 1952 ofpp. 27ff.The quotation has been taken Victorian and Edwardian Dec orative Artsfrom Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art must b e singled ou t for especial praise.Past and Present (1911), p. 247.1 take this i Fors Clavigera, Letter 79, 8th July , 1 877.occasion to stress my indebtedness to the Collected Works (Cook and W e d d e r -pioneer works of this author. Since the burn), vol. X X IX , p. 154. Qu oted fromperiod before World War I he has been Alf Boe , From Gothic Revival to Func-the first to take serious interest in this tional Form. A Study in Victorian Theoriesaspect of nineteenth-century aesthetics. of Design (Oslo , 1957) p. 93. M y presentBooks like Pioneers of the Modem Move- essay has been based on this book;ment, High Victorian Design, with where no references are given in thenum erous shorter treatises, have do ne present text, sources of quotations mayfar more than sketching the outlines. be found there by way of the index.O f equal significance has been the wo rk Th e boo k also contains a fairly adequatedon e at the Victoria and Albert Mu seum bibliography.Department of Circulation under the

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORSMONBOE c.BEARDSLEY is Professor of P hilosophy at Swarthmore C ollege and is a memberof the editorial board of Th e Monist. He has written Aesthetics. Problems in the Philosophy of

Criticism (1958) and is editor (wid i Elizabeth B eardsley) of the series Foundations of Ph ilosoph y(1963-5). He is writing A Short History of Western Aesthetics.HANS EICHNEE is Professor and Chairman of the Department of German in Queen'sUniversity, Canada. He has written Thomas Mann (1953 and 1962) and is co-editor of th ecritical Friedrich Schlegel ed ition .AlP BOE is Chief Curator at the Museum of Applied Art, O slo. He has written From Gothic

Revival to Functional Form. A Study in Victorian Theories of Design ( 1 9 5 7 ) .BAY FOHSYTH is Lecturer in English at the University of Western Australia.HICHAHD KELL teaches English in a technical colleg e. H is first collection o f p oems. ControlTower, was published by Chatto & Win dus in 1962.JOHN INGAMELLS isAssistant-K eeper in the Department ofArt at the National Museumof Wales.HUTH SAW is Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London University and is

Chairman of the Advisory Council of The British Society of Aesthetics.NiNiAN SMART is Professor of Theology at Birmingham University. He has written

Reasons and Faith: an Investigation ofReligious Discourse, Christian and Non-Christian (1958)in the International Library of Psychology.DONAID BROOK is a professional sculptor, at present engaged on a doctoral thesis on aspectsof the appraisal of sculpture at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Australian NationalUniversity.i_ B. ROGERS is a sculptor member of the Midland Group of Artists. He is Senior Lecturerand Co-ordinator of Three-Dimensional Design Studies at Loughborough College of Artand lectures tohandicraft teachers at Loughborough Training College.

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