ARCHAIC DECORATIONS

Evening Star, Issue 23375, 19 September 1939, Page 3

ARCHAIC DECORATIONS

PLAGE OF PERIOD FURNITURE OUT OF PLAGE IN MODERN ATMOSPHERE PRESENT DAY FASHIONS ADVOCATED It is quite time that householders generally woke up to the fact that they are living in the twentieth century, and that if they scorn to use the uncomfortable transport of the past, decline to follow the dress fashions of our great-great-great-grandparents, and refrain from ordering their lives by codes and manners alien to their own period, then surely they should abandon the imitations of old furniture and encourage the original talent of the present day.

There are many signs of awakening appreciation for twentieth-century furniture, and the case was put very clearly in an article in the ‘ Manchester Guardian ’ on the subject of collecting period furniture. It was stated that “ the serious and scientific collecting of almost anything is laudable, but the rich man who finds himself a ‘ period ’ house and furnishes it as a collection of various ‘ period ’ rooms, without even a twentieth-century room among them, is no good friend to the arts, and not the best possible friend to himself; for to try to live, mentally and emotionally, in another age than one’s own is the beginning of resthetic sentimentalism and affectation. At every period the best artists and craftsmen of a country are trying their hardest to produce work in which the characteristic life and soul of that time, and no other, find their most handsome expression. .English architects and English designers of furniture are doing it now with a spirit and skill which call for warm admiration.” FALSE PRAISE. Half the gushing eulogies written about antique furniture are inspired by fear on the part of their authors of being compelled to define what is beautiful without having settled, conventional standards which will guide taste. “I adore old furniture 1” is a t phrase too common to be marked by sincerity or judgment, but how often it occurs and how it seems to reassure those who make use of it! But an obsession for styles that belong to the past and an incapacity to appreciate the sane and beautiful things made to-day lead many people who are planning furnishing to effects in bad taste, especially if they adhere rigidly to a set of particular styles. For the cultivation of taste and for the increase of discrimination and th ebuilding up of sound judgment where design is concerned, the study of old furniture and decoration, apart from its fascinating historical interest, is extraordinarily valuable. To see how craftsmen in the past have solved various problems, to see how proportion has been handled by different master cabinetmakers and designers and architects, is to gain an insight into the problems of proportion, and to have far more pleasure in furniture and furnishings than is to be obtained from a mere utilitarian regard or the gratification of the collecting instinct.