The decorative arts have flourished most when the position of women was highly honoured, when woman occupied that place on the social scale which she ever ought to do. One of the most striking facts of history is that art was never so fine, never so delicate as where women were highly honoured, while there has been no good decorative work done in any age or any country where women have not occupied a high social position. It has been from the desire of women to beautify their households that decorative art has always received its impulse and encouragement. Women have natural art instincts, which men usually acquire only after long special training and study; and it may be the mission of the women in this country to revive decorative art into honest, healthy life.
In asking you to build and decorate your houses more beautifully, I do not ask you to spend large sums, as art does not depend in the slightest degree upon extravagance or luxury, but rather the procuring of articles which, however cheaply purchased and unpretending, are beautiful and fitted to impart pleasure to the observer as they did to the maker. And so I do not address those millionaires who can pillage Europe for their pleasure, but those of moderate means who can, if they will, have designs of worth and beauty before them always and at little cost.
Nothing that is made is too trivial or too poor for art to ennoble, for genius can glorify stone, metal, and wood by the manner in which these simple materials are fashioned and shaped. Why, the most valuable curio in an art museum is, perhaps, a little urn out of which a Greek girl drew water from a well over two thousand years ago and made of the clay on which we walk, yet more artistic than all the dreadful silver centre-pieces of modern times, with their distorted camels and electroplated palm-trees.
Today even a man of taste and wealth cannot always get his ideas embodied in art; he cannot escape the ugly surroundings of the age or procure any but the shoddy articles which are usually made. Nor will your art improve until you seek your workmen and educate them to higher views of their relation to art, and reveal to them the possibilities of their callings, for the great difficulty that stands in the way of your artistic development is not a lack of interest in art, not a lack of love for art, but that you do not honour the handicraftsman sufficiently, and do not recognise him as you should; all art must begin with the handicraftsman, and you must reinstate him into his rightful position, and thus make labour, which is always honourable, noble also.
And you must have here a school of decorative art where the principles of good taste and the simpler truths about design would be taught, for the workman’s technical knowledge of his craft makes it easy to teach him the practice of art principles. And this school should be in direct relation with manufacture and commerce. If a manufacturer wanted a new pattern for a carpet, or a new design for wallpaper, he could go to this school, and offer a prize for the best design for the purpose he required. In this way everyone will learn that it is more practical to build and decorate in an artistic manner.
In the question of decoration the first necessity is that any system of art should bear the impress of a distinct individuality; it is difficult to lay down rules as to the decoration of dwellings because every home should wear an individual air in all its furnishings and decorations. This individuality in most cases up to the present has been left to the upholsterers, with the consequence of a general sameness about many dwellings which is not worth looking at, for the decorations of a house should express the feeling of those who live in it. There are, however, certain broad principles of art which should be generally observed, and within which there is plenty of room for the play of individual tastes. Have nothing in your house that has not given pleasure to the man who made it and is not a pleasure to those who use it. Have nothing in your house that is not useful or beautiful; if such a rule were followed out, you would be astonished at the amount of rubbish you would get rid of. Let there be no sham imitation of one material in another, such as paper representing marble, or wood painted to resemble stone, and have no machine-made ornaments. Let us have everything perfectly bare of ornament rather than have any machine-made ornament; ornament should represent the feeling in a man’s life, as of course nothing machine-made can do; and, by the way, a man who works with his hands alone is only a machine.
As regards materials for houses: if rich enough, you will probably have marble. I would not object to this, but don’t treat it as if it were ordinary stone, and build a house of mere blocks of it, like those great plain, staring, white structures so common in this country. I hope you will employ workmen competent to beautify it with delicate tracings and that you will have it beautifully inlaid with coloured marbles, as at Venice, to lend it colour and warmth. And next – stone. The use of the natural hues of stone is one of the real signs of proper architecture. This country affords unusual facilities for using different varieties of stones, in every variety of hue, from pale yellow to purple, red to orange, green to grey and white, and beautiful harmonies may be achieved in ingraining them. Let the painter’s work be reserved for the inner chambers.
If one cannot build in marble or coloured stones, there remains red brick or wood. Red brick is warm and delightful to look at and is the most beautiful and simple form of those who have not much to spend. In England we build of red brick, and the stately homes from the reign of the Tudors down to that of George II give good designs for brick houses. Cut brick gives you the opportunity of working in terracotta ornamentation, the most beautiful of all exterior decorations – the old Lombard’s special prize, and an art we are trying to revive in England.
Wood is the universal material. Wood buildings I like, but wish to see them painted in a better way. You must have warmer colours: there is far too much white and that cold grey colour used; they never look well in large bodies and are dreary in wet weather and glaring in fine weather; imitate rather the rich browns and olive-greens found in nature. The frame house could be made more joyous to look upon with the air of the carver. Every child should be taught woodcarving, and I recommend the establishment in this city of a school of design for the sole purpose of teaching woodcarving. Even the poor Swiss shepherd boy spends his leisure time doing beautiful carving instead of reading detestable novels. Americans might carve as well, and I am sadly disappointed that you do not develop this art more.
All ornaments should be carved, and have no cast-iron ornaments, nor any of those ugly things made by machinery. You should not have cast-iron railings fixed outside the house, which boys are always knocking down, and very rightly too, for they always look cheap and shabby. If possible have beaten ironwork; of all the metal works in this country, so far as it relates to cast iron, it is a shame that none are nobly or beautifully wrought like the beaten globes of even the poorest Italian cities. The old iron ornaments of Verona that were worked by hand out of the noble metal into beautiful figures are as beautiful and strong now as when wrought three or four hundred years ago by artistic handicraftsmen. Finally, your black-leaded knocker should give way to a bright brass one.
Within the house: the hall should not be papered, since the walls are exposed more or less to the elements by the frequent opening and closing of the door; it could be wainscoted with some of America’s beautiful woods, such as the maple, or distempered with ordinary paint. Wainscoting makes the house warm, it is easily done by any carpenter, and it will admit of fine work in panel painting, which is a style of decoration most desirable, and one that is growing greatly in favour.
Don’t carpet the floor: ordinary red brick tiles make a warm and beautiful floor, and I prefer it to the geometrically arranged tiles of the present day. There should be no pictures in the hall, for it is no place for a good picture, and a poor one should be put nowhere. It is a mere passageway, except in stately mansions, and no picture should be placed where you have not time to sit down and reverence and admire and study it.
Hat racks are, I suppose, necessary. I have never seen a really nice hat rack; the ordinary one is more like some horrible instrument of torture than anything useful or graceful, and it is perhaps the ugliest thing in the house. A large painted oak chest is the best stand for cloaks; for hats, a pretty rack in wood to hang on the wall in light wood or bamboo would be best. A few large chairs would complete the furniture in the hallway. Have none of those gloomy horrors, stuffed animals or stuffed birds, in the hall, or anywhere else under glass cases. Plain marble tables, such as I have seen in America in such number, should not be tolerated unless the marble is beautifully inlaid and the wood carved.
As regards rooms generally: in America the great fault in decoration is the entire want of harmony or a definite scheme in colour; there is generally a collection of a great many things individually pretty but which do not combine to make a harmonious whole. Colours resemble musical notes: a single false colour or false note destroys the whole. Therefore, in decorating a room one keynote of colour should predominate; it must be decided before hand what scheme of colour is desired and have all else adapted to it, like the answering calls in a symphony of music; otherwise, your room will be a museum of colours. With regard to choice of colour, the disciples of the new school of decorative art are said to be very fond of gloomy colours. Well, we set great value on toned or secondary colours, because all decoration means gradually ascending colours, while bright colours should be kept for ornament. On the walls secondary colours should be used, and the ceiling should never be painted in bright colours; the best Eastern embroidery, for instance, is filled with light colours. Start with a low tone as the keynote, and then you get the real value of primary colours by having little bits of colour, beautiful embroidery, and artwork set like precious gems in the more sombre colours. If you have the whole room and things generally in bright colours, the capabilities of the room are exhausted for all other colour effects, and you would have to have fireworks for ornaments to set it off. All depends upon the graduation of colour; look at the rose and see how all its beauty depends upon its exquisite gradations of colour, one answering to the other.
Mr Whistler has recently done two rooms in London which are marvels of beauty. One is the famous Peacock Room, which I regard as the finest thing in colour and art decoration that the world has ever known since Correggio painted that wonderful room in Italy where the little children are dancing on the walls; everything is of the colours in peacocks’ feathers, and each part so coloured with regard to the whole that the room, when lighted up, seems like a great peacock tail spread out. It cost £3,000. Mr Whistler finished the other room just before I came away – a breakfast room in blue and yellow, and costing only £30. The walls are distempered in blue, the ceiling is a light and warm yellow; the floor is laid with a richly painted matting in light yellow, with a light line or leaf here and there of blue. The woodwork is all caneyellow, and the shelves are filled with blue and white china; the curtains of white serge have a yellow border tastefully worked in, and hang in careless but graceful folds. When the breakfast-table is laid in this apartment, with its light cloth and its dainty blue and white china, with a cluster of red and yellow chrysanthemums in an old Nankin vase in the centre, it is a charming room, catching all the warm light and taking on of all surrounding beauty, and giving to the guest a sense of joyousness, comfort, and rest. Nothing could be simpler, it costs little, and it shows what a great effect might be realised with a little and simple colour.
A designer must imagine in colour, must think in colour, must see in colour. Your workmen should be taught to work more freely in colours, and this can only be done by accustoming them to beautiful ones. Even in imaginative art predominance must now be given to colour: a picture is primarily a flat surface coloured to produce a delightful effect upon the beholder, and if it fails of that, it is surely a bad picture. The aim of all art is simply to make life more joyous.
You should have such men as Whistler among you to teach you the beauty and joy of colour. When he paints a picture, he paints by reference not to the subject, which is merely intellectual, but to colour. I was speaking to Mr Whistler once, before a great critic, of what could be done with one colour. The critic chose white as the colour offering fewest tones; Mr Whistler painted his beautiful Symphony in White, which you no doubt have imagined to be something quite bizarre. It is nothing of the sort. Think of a cool grey sky with white clouds, a grey sea flecked with the crests of white-capped waves; a grey balcony on which are two little girls clad in pure white leaning over the railing; an almond tree covered in white blossoms is by the side of the balcony, from which one of the girls is idly plucking with white hands the petals which flutter across the picture. Such pictures as this one are of infinitely more value than horrible pictures of historical scenes; here are no extensive intellectual schemes to trouble you and no metaphysics, of which we have had quite enough in art. If the simple and unaided colour strikes the right keynote, the whole conception is made clear. I doubt not that our Aesthetic movement has given to the world an increased sense of the value of colour, and that in time a new science of the art of dealing in colour will be evolved.
But to return to our room. If there is much, or heavy furniture, the design on the walls should be rich; if the furniture is limited, or light, the design should be light and simple. The walls cannot often in this country be hung with tapestry; therefore, they should be papered. However, do not use white and gold paper; divide the wall into two uneven parts, either with a dado and paper from it to the cornice, or with a frieze and paper from it downwards; I do not advise the use of both unless the walls are very high. You will want a joyous paper on the wall, full of flowers and pleasing designs, but the dado should not be of paper, but either of woods or some of the beautiful Japanese mattings which come to this country, so as to carry out the principles of utility, that is, to protect the lower and more exposed part of the wall from being scratched or marred by the furniture coming in contact with it. Nor should the frieze be of paper; it should be painted, and the remainder of the wall papered.
About the ceiling: the ceiling is a great problem always – what to do with that great expanse of white plaster. Don’t paper it; that gives one the sensation of living in a paper box, which is not pleasant. The ceiling should be broken up in texture, so that the light may constantly play upon it, and not lie in a dead way. If you are having a house built, contract with the builder to leave the main rafters of the ceiling exposed in outline; this conveys a sense of solidity and support, and there may be worked out the most delightful effects in finishing between the rafters, as is done in panel work or plaster decorations. For ceiling decoration, the old style of plaster may be used, but not the modern plaster – it dries almost immediately and is a glaring glossy white; the beautiful old plaster of the Queen Anne period, often so beautifully designed, was of a finer, more plastic texture, it took a long time to dry, and one had time to mould it. If you cannot use plaster, the ceiling might be panelled in wood, with paintings or stamped leather in the centres. If you cannot have the cross-beams or woodwork, then have it painted in a colour which predominates in the room, but do not in any event paper it; on papered ceilings the light falls dull and lifeless and sodden.
Have no great flaring gas-chandelier in the middle of the room; if you have, it does not make much difference how you adorn and beautify the room, or whether it is done at all, for in six months’ time the gas will discolour and ruin all you do. Also, no light should shine directly in one’s eyes; the room shall be lit by reflection of the light rather than by direct light. If you must have gas, let the room be lighted from side-brackets on the wall, and each jet of flame should be covered with delicate shades or hidden by screens so that the light may be reflected from the walls and ceiling. Lamps and wax candles are still better as they give a softer light, are best to read by, do not destroy any other decoration, and are very much prettier and healthier than gas.
As regards the floor: don’t carpet it all over, as nothing is more unhealthy or inartistic than modern carpets; carpets absorb the dust, and it is impossible to keep them as perfectly clean as anything about us should be. In this, as in all things, art and sanitary regulations go hand in hand. It is better to use a parquetry flooring around the sides and rugs in the centre; if inlaid or stained floors are not practical, have them laid with pretty matting and strewn with those very handsome and economical rugs from China, Persia, and Japan.
As regards windows: builders do not realise that there is a difference between light and glare; most modern windows are much too large and glaring, and are made as if you only wanted them to look out of; they annihilate light and let in a glare that is destructive to all sense of repose, and by which one cannot write or work or enjoy any comfort; you are obliged to pull down the shutters whenever you enter a room. The small, old windows just let in light enough. If you have big windows in your house, let a portion of them be filled with stained glass – of course, I do not mean such stained glass representations as are seen in churches and cathedrals – I advise merely the use of toned green or grey glass with little bright spots of pure colour which give a more subdued light, a pleasing blending of colours, and a sense of quiet and repose.
As regards style of furniture: avoid the ‘early English’ or Gothic furniture; the Gothic, now so much thought of in this country, though honestly made and better than modern styles, is really so heavy and massive that it is out of place when surrounded with the pretty things which we of this age love to gather around us; it is very well for those who lived in castles and who needed occasionally to use it as a means of defence or as a weapon of war. A lighter and more graceful style of furniture is more suitable for our peaceful times. Eastlake furniture is more rational than much that is modern: it is economical, substantial, and enduring, and carried out Mr Eastlake’s idea of showing the work of the craftsman. However, it is a little bare and cold, has no delicate lines, and does not look like refined work for refined people; Eastlake furniture is Gothic without the joyous colour of the Gothic, and pretty ornaments of glass are out of place in a Gothic room for they would be an anachronism. The furniture of the Italian Renaissance is too costly, and French furniture, gilt and gaudy, is very vulgar, monstrous, and unserviceable.
The style most liked in England, and the one which is the most suitable in every way for you, is that known as Queen Anne furniture. Why it goes by the name of Queen Anne I do not know; it was designed and used one hundred years before the reign of that monarch, but there is no reason why we should not use that name as well as any other, so long as we are not deceived as to its meaning. This furniture is beautiful without being gaudy, so delicate in appearance and yet so strong. It is good furniture made by refined people for refined people, and is so well adapted to our styles of crockery, to our light decorations, and our system of ornamentation, and it is as beautiful as any that can be found in Italy. It is a furniture which will last a very long time; pieces of very old furniture of this kind are to be seen in a great many houses in England and which are still as sound as they ever were. It is most comfortable too: what seem to be stiff and straight lines are really very delicately curved lines, exquisite in their symmetry, and while the cushion of the modern chair is a monster of iron springs, that of the Queen Anne period slopes back and is made to fit the figure, which gives great ease and thereby combines comfort and beauty. It is most beautiful, too, in colour: the rich colour of the mahogany and the bright brass catches all the warm lights, and is the most cheerful of all designs. Modern furniture should be better than the old, with all our improved machinery and our great variety of woods to choose from, but it is not.
When I advise you to have Queen Anne furniture, I do not want you to send to Chippendale in England for it; it could be made here, and to that end a good school of design should be established. In your school of design let the pupils, instead of painting pictures, work at decoration and designs, and their work will soon be in all your houses. Young designers should begin by painting on furniture, which they could really learn to do well in six months and soon be able to give delight by their work. In Bavaria the furniture is beautiful because of the colour alone. The people of Switzerland adorn their own houses, and there is no reason why as great excellence in making all these things should not be reached by the people of this country as by any other part of the world. But pottery takes more knowledge to secure good results; you have to know a great deal about the potters’ wheel: you have to understand practically the results of burning, of overglazing and underglazing, and other processes.
An invaluable school of art would be a museum, which, instead of showing stuffed giraffes and other horrible objects which scientific men wish to see gathered together, would contain all kinds of simple decorative work, different styles of furniture, dress, etc., made in different periods, and especially in the periods when English artists made beautiful things, and where local artisans and handicraftsmen could go and study the styles and patterns of the noble designers and artisans who worked before them. Such efforts at cultivation would be appreciated by the working people, as witnessed by the scene in the South Kensington museum in London on Saturday night, where artisans are to be seen, notebook in hand, gathering ideas to be used in their next week’s work. A good museum would teach your artisans more in one year than they would learn by means of books or lectures in ten years.
You are probably provided with a mantelpiece, about which you were not consulted; it is probably dreary, and cold white marble with machine-made ornamentation that is always so coarse and heavy. In that case there is nothing for it but to hide it as you best can: you might do it with matting, or you might cover it with carved wood and build your mantel up to the ceiling with little shelves on which you may place your rare china or ornaments; at the back of the shelves Spanish leather may be placed, or panels which you can paint yourself; in the centre of the shelves a space might be left for a little circular mirror. The great gilt mirrors of today are not only costly, but destroy all attempts at decoration; mirrors were meant to concentrate light in a room, which is the beauty of the little circular mirrors.
Your fireplace should not be of highly polished steel, nor should there ever be a cast-iron grate which, as a rule, is heavy and coarse. The porcelain stoves used in Holland are beautiful, and I am glad always to see the healthy, old-English open fireplace; but you should have red tiles, an iron basket, and bright brass tongs and shovel. The amount of colour which one can get into a fireplace is simply incalculable: the fire, the red tiles, the brass work – everything is full of colour.
The pictures hung up in most of the houses I have visited in America were dull, commonplace and tawdry. Poor pictures are worse than none. If there are good pictures in the house make the decoration subordinate; if you have not good pictures confine yourself entirely to decorative art for wall ornaments. For instance, sconces of beaten brass light up the wall. It is foolish to hang small plates on the wall, for small plates should be on a shelf and not stuck about. Large pieces of china, or large, noble Japanese dishes could be suspended on the wall and arranged with an idea of taste, and their beauty should be enhanced at night by the light of candles instead of gas.
Embroidery you will have, of course, but don’t, I pray you, have everything covered with embroidery as if it were washing day. Don’t do little things with embroidery, but cover large surfaces with delicate designs; good embroidery must be done on a larger scale than you do it: cushions, curtains, covers, and every large surface should be covered with delicate embroidery patterns, but don’t use silk—it is too iridescent.
One must have a piano I suppose, but it is a melancholy thing, and more like a dreadful, funereal packing-case in form than anything else. Some people cover it up with embroidery, which is well enough if the piano is out of tune, or one plays badly, or if one does not love music: the cloth cover entirely spoils the tone, and no one who really loves music would think of using one. Some people put china and books on it, as if it were a table, but this is clearly wrong. The best form for pianos, the upright grand, gives grand opportunities for inlaying or for painting; the first school of decorative art in America which decorates pianos successfully will create an era in decorative art. It should not be made of rosewood, nor be highly polished, nor should manufacturers put any machine-made ornaments upon them, but should give us them perfectly plain, and then we could beautify them with colour. It must not be supposed that I am so impractical as to object to machinery, but none of us want to hear even the choicest lines ground out by a music box, and it is the same with other arts; machinery’s mission is to lighten men’s labour. The revolving stool should be sent to the museum of horrors, and a seat large enough for two players be substituted.
Flowers you will have, of course, about your room, but don’t have all kinds of flowers vaguely arranged or crowded together in great bouquets. Some flowers, such as roses or violets whose greatest beauty is their colour, are made to be seen in masses, but flowers which are perfect in form, like the narcissus, daffodil, or lily, should be placed singly in a small Venetian glass so that they can hang naturally as they are seen upon their stem.
Speaking of glass: never have cut glass; it is too common for use, and is so hard and sharp, and without grace in its lines. Have delicate blown glass. I dislike very much the American dinner service: plain white china is too cold, and modern designs in silver are of vulgar design. People of taste cannot help expressing their indignation, upon going into the modern jewellery establishment, at the sight of the great amount of costly material that is ruined in the manufacture of centre-pieces. The beauty of the table depends upon the quality and appearance of the china and glass; for a good permanent dinner set have Japanese or blue and white china, and have old silverware until your artisans learn to make it. There should be flowers on the table too.
Those of you who have old china use it I hope. There is nothing so absurd as having good china stuck up in a cabinet merely for show while the family drink from delft; if you can’t use good old china without breaking it, then you don’t deserve to have it. Whatever you have that is beautiful if for use, then you should use it, or part with it to someone who will. The handling of coarse things begets coarse handling: in a restaurant in San Francisco I saw a Chinese navvy drinking his tea out of a most beautiful cup as delicate as the petal of a flower, while I had to drink, at one of the first-class hotels in which thousands were spent on gaudy colours and gilding, out of a cup which was an inch-and-a-half thick; these navvies do not break these delicate cups, because they are accustomed to handling them. You have to use delicate things to accustom your servants to handle them securely; it will be a martyrdom for a long time at first, but you may be content to suffer in so good a cause. I bought Venetian glass when I was at college, and for the first term my servant broke one glass every day, and a decanter on Sunday, but I persevered in buying them, and during the succeeding terms of my whole stay at college he did not break a single piece.
About pictures: I have to see the ruining of so many fine pictures in the framing, by reason of the frame being out of all keeping with the picture. I don’t like to see the great, glaring, pretentious gold frames for fine pictures; use gold frames only where the picture can plainly bear it, and in all other cases picture frames should be tinted a middle tone between the picture and the wall. Oil paintings in gold frames should be richly hung with velvet bands, while water-colours and etchings should be suspended by cords.
Nothing is more saddening, nothing more melancholy, than having to look upon pictures hung in lines; you might as well set ten or twenty young girls on a platform playing one tune on pianos at the same time. Two pictures should not be hung side by side – they will either kill one another, or else commit artistic suicide; to stick them in rows makes me wonder why people like pictures at all. Your pictures may be hung with good effect upon a chocolate shade of paper, but not having geometrical figures, which distract the attention. They should be hung from a ledge under the frieze and should be hung also on the eye-line; the habit in America of hanging them up near the cornices struck me as irrational at first; it was not until I saw how bad the pictures were that I realised the advantage of the custom.
Put no photographs of paintings on your walls – they are libels on great masters; there is no way to get a worse idea of a painter than by a photograph of his work; I don’t think I ever saw a photograph that was a decoration, for the first thing you should see is its beauty of colour, and there is no colour of worth for decorative purposes in photographs. They are ridiculous pretences, and should be kept in portfolios to show to friends whose friendship is not treacherous. As a painting should be an exquisite arrangement of colours, so an engraving should be an exquisite arrangement of black and white, which the photograph never is. Most modern engravings are not good; they may be hung on walls, or framed in plain wood and placed on a shelf; woodcuts of masters like Doré may be framed in wood and hung on the walls.
Every house should have some good casts of old Greek work if possible. There can be no nobler influence in a room than a marble Venus of Milo: in the presence of an image so pure, no tongue would date to talk scandal. There should be casts of good men in the library.
And now books: an old library is one of the most beautifully coloured things imaginable; the old colours are toned down and they are so well bound, for whatever is beautiful is well made. Modern bookbinding is one of the greatest drawbacks to the beauty of many libraries—books are bound in all manner of gaudy colours. The best binding is white vellum, which in a few years looks like ivory, or calf, and with age takes on the tints of gold. You can’t have all your books rebound. The only thing left is to have curtains to hide them out of sight until a more tasteful style than the modern one of binding prevails. When I landed in Boston I found my old publisher, who had moved from London, binding my poems in all those dreadful colours which I had spent my youth trying to abolish; he might have spared me, I thought.
As regards dress: the true nobility of dress is an important part of education, but there is much in the dress of modern times to discourage us. If it were not for the lovely dressing of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the excellence of Venetian art would never have existed; but there is nothing in the styles of the present to give such models to the artists; I hardly dare suggest what must be the thought of the true sculptor when asked to work out the statue of a modern – his thought must be suicidal. There is nothing more indicative of moral decline than squalor and an indifference to dress: the money spent on modern dress is an extravagant waste.
People should not mar beautiful surroundings by gloomy dress; dress nowadays is altogether too sombre, and we should accustom ourselves to the use of more colour and brightness; there should always be a beautifully arranged composition of well-balanced light and shade. There would be more joy in life if we would accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes. The dress of the future, I think, will use drapery to a great extent and will abound with joyous colour.
One should have nothing on one’s dress that has not some meaning or that is not useful; beauty in dress consists in its simplicity – all useless and encumbering bows, flounces, knots, and other such meaningless things so fashionable today are nothing but the foolish inventions of the milliner. All the evil of modern dressing has come from the failure to recognise that the right people to construct our apparel are artists, and not modern milliners, whose chief aim is to swell their bills.
Nothing is beautiful, such as tight corsets, which is destructive of health; all dress follows out the lines of the figure – it should be free to move about in, showing the figure. Anything that disfigures the form or blots out the beauty of the natural lines is ugly, and so a knowledge of anatomy as well as art is necessary in correct dressmaking. If one could fancy the Medicean Venus taken from her pedestal in the Louvre to Mr Worth’s establishment in the Palais Royal to be dressed in modern French millinery, every single beautiful line would be destroyed, and no one would look at her a second time.
Go through a book of costumes, and you will find that when dress was most simple, it was most beautiful: one of the earliest forms is the ancient Greek drapery, which is most simple and so exquisite for your girls, but I must warn you that it is most difficult to design. And then I think we may be pardoned a little enthusiasm over the dress of the time of Charles II, so beautiful, indeed, that in spite of its invention being with the Cavaliers, it was copied by the Puritans. And the dress for the children at that time must not be passed over: it was a very golden age for the little ones; I don’t think that they have ever looked so lovely as they do in the pictures of that time. And the ladies might study the costumes of the old Venetian ladies and pattern after them. If something more modern is desired, the dress of the last century in England was also particularly generous and graceful: it can be found in the style of dress painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and by Gainsborough; there is nothing bizarre about it, and it is full of harmony and beauty. There should be nothing outre in dress; a man or woman of taste can so conform their dress that it will not merit disapproval but receive the praise of those who have an artistic eye.
Of all ugly things, nothing can exceed in ugliness artificial flowers, which, I am sure, none of you wear; and it is better not to wear any modern jewellery, since none of the designs are good. It is difficult to speak of the modern bonnet – there are no limits to indignation, but there are limits to language – for the modern bonnet is an irrational monstrosity not affording the wearer the slightest use: it does not keep the sun off in summer nor the rain off in winter. The large hat of the last century was more sensible and useful, and nothing is more graceful in the world than a broad-brimmed hat. We have lost the art of draping the human form and have even discarded the graceful cloak with its deep folds for the unnatural and ungraceful jacket; the cloak, on the other hand, is always graceful, and is the simplest and most beautiful drapery ever devised.
The uncomfortable character of our present dress is shown by our willingness to adopt a new fashion every three months. All really beautiful dress is durable too, and if the beautiful is obtained, economy would be secured also. In these days, when we have suffered so dreadfully from the incursions of the modern milliners, we hear ladies boast that they do not wear a dress more than once; in the old days, when the dresses were decorated with beautiful designs and worked with exquisite embroidery, ladies rather took a pride in bringing out the garment and wearing it many times, and handing it down to their daughters, as something precious and beautiful for them to wear – a process which I think would be quite appreciated by modern husbands and fathers when called upon to settle the bills.
And how shall men dress? Men say they don’t particularly care how they dress, and that it is little matter. I am bound to reply that I don’t believe them and don’t think that you do either. They dress in black and sober greys and browns because that is the custom, and their dress is not beautiful, either, in design, being careless and without harmony of style. In all my journeys through the country, the only well-dressed men I have seen in America were the miners of the Rocky Mountains; they wore a wide-brimmed hat which shaded their faces from the sun and protected them from the rain, and their flowing cloak, which is by far the most beautiful piece of drapery ever invented, may well be dwelt upon with admiration. Their high boots too were sensible and practical. These miners dressed for comfort and of course attained the beautiful. As I looked at them, I could not help thinking with regret of the time when these picturesque miners should have made their fortunes and would go West to assume again all the abomination of modern fashionable attire. Indeed, I made some of them promise that when they again appeared in the more crowded scenes of Eastern civilisation, they would still continue to wear their lovely costume, but I don’t believe they will.
The dress of the men of the last century was graceful; the gentlemen might study for their pattern the noble and beautiful attire of George Washington; that brave and great man dressed with taste, as did other American gentlemen of his day. Men should dress more in velvet – grey or brown or black – as it catches the light and shade, while broadcloth is ugly as it does not absorb the light. Trousers become dirty in the street; knee-breeches are more comfortable and convenient – prettier to look at, too, and easier to keep out of the mud; high boots in the streets keep the mud off, but low shoes and silk stockings should be used in the drawing room. Finally, cloaks should be worn instead of coats.
In conclusion, what is the relation of art to morals? It is sometimes said that our art is opposed to good morals; but on the contrary, it fosters morality. Wars and the clash of arms and the meeting of men in battle must be always, but I think that art, by creating a common intellectual atmosphere between all countries might, if it could not overshadow the world with the silvery wings of peace, at least make men such brothers that they would not go out to slay one another for the whim or folly of some king or minister as they do in Europe; for national hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest. And hence the enormous importance given to all the decorative arts in our English renaissance; we want children to grow up in England in the simple atmosphere of all fair things; the refining influence of art, begun in childhood, will be of the highest value to all of us in teaching our children to love what is beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and ugly. Then when a child grows up he learns that industrious we must be, but industry without art is simply barbarism.
For there never was an age that so much needed the spiritual ministry of art as the present. Today more than ever the artist and a love of the beautiful are needed to temper and counteract the sordid materialism of the age. In an age when science has undertaken to declaim against the soul and spiritual nature of man, and when commerce is ruining beautiful rivers and magnificent woodlands and the glorious skies in its greed for gain, the artist comes forward as a priest and prophet of nature to protest, and even to work against the prostitution or the perversion of what is lofty and noble in humanity and beautiful in the physical world, and his religion in its benefits to mankind is as broad and shining as the sun. There are grand truths and beauty in the Catholic pictorial art, and in the Protestant religious music, which no sectarian prejudices and no narrow-minded bigotry can keep the world from acknowledging and admiring. I urge you all not to become discouraged because ridicule is thrown upon those who have the boldness to run counter to popular prejudice; in time the true aesthetic principles will prevail. Throughout the world, in all times and in all ages, there have been those who have had the courage to advocate opinions that were for the time abhorred by the public. But if those who hold those opinions have the courage to maintain and defend them, it is absolutely certain that in the end the truth will prevail.
And so let it be for you to create an art that is made with the hands of the people, for the joy of the people too, an art that will be a democratic art, entering into the houses of the people, making beautiful the simplest vessels they contain, for there is nothing in common life too mean, in common things too trivial, to be ennobled by your touch, nothing in life that art cannot raise and sanctify.