Part 4
It may seem an impeachment of the taste of our readers to have lingered so long on the lesser lights of games and fortune-telling as “Home Amusements,” when we have before us the great world of decorative art: æsthetic embroidery, dinner-card designing, china painting, the making of screens, and the thousand and one devices by which the modern family can amuse itself.
The making of screens is an amusement which occupies the whole family most profitably for a rainy day, even if it is to be only the cutting out of pictures from the illustrated newspapers, and the subsequent arrangement of them in curious conjunction on a white cotton or muslin background. The use of screens has dawned upon the American mind within a few years. They are delightful in a dining-room to keep off a draught or to hide a closet-door. They break up a too long room admirably. They are very useful in a bedroom to shut off the washstand and bath; and they are very comforting to the invalid, as a protection to his easy-chair against insidious breezes.
Of course, those of satin or linen, embroidered by a skillful hand; those painted on canvas by the best painters of to-day; those from China and Japan--are the screens of the opulent. Very pretty paper screens may be bought at the shops for three or four dollars. But those on which a group of pictures are to be pasted are the cheapest and most amusing of any. And do not go and buy highly-glazed pictures for the purpose. If you do, the screen looks like a valentine. But cut out the pictures from old copies of the “London Illustrated News,” “Punch,” “Harper’s Weekly,” “Harper’s Bazaar,” and the English “Graphic,” paste them thickly one upon another, and you have a curious and most interesting mosaic. A lady in 1876, the Centennial year, made a very beautiful screen of fashion plates from the ordinary magazines of the period. Already (1881) these fashions look very antiquated, and the screen is becoming historically valuable. The effect of these delicately-colored pictures, put on as thickly as possible over the white muslin, has an effect like a festal procession, and is very pretty.
The medium used for adhering the pictures is common flour paste, the pictures being also washed over the outside with the same, and all the edges effectually fastened down, the cotton cloth to which they are applied being tightly stretched over a wooden frame. When domestic paste is made, the material is frequently injured by scorching, or by the addition of too much water. Good paste, when spread on paper, will not strike through it like water, but will remain on the surface, like butter on a piece of bread. To make paste of a superior quality, that will not spoil when kept in a cool place for several months, it is necessary to add dissolved alum as a preservative. When a few quarts are required, dissolve a dessert-spoonful of alum in two quarts of tepid water. Put the water in a tin pail that will hold six or eight quarts, as the flour of which the paste is made will expand greatly while it is boiling. As soon as the tepid water has cooled, stir in good rye or wheat flour, until the liquid has the consistency of cream. See that every lump of flour is crushed before placing the vessel over the fire. To prevent scorching the paste, place over the fire a dish-kettle or wash-boiler, partly filled with water, and set the tin pail containing the material for paste in the water, permitting the bottom to rest on a few large nails or pebbles, to prevent excessive heat. Now add a teaspoonful of powdered resin, a few cloves to flavor the paste, and let it cook until the paste has become as thick as “Graham mush,” when it will be ready for use. Keep it in a tight jar, and it will last for a long time. If too thick, add cold water, and stir it thoroughly. Such paste will hold almost as well as glue.
The famous picture-books of Walter Crane make a very pretty frieze for screens; the artists of the family sometimes paint a frieze. In these days of dadoes the screens are often made with dado, wainscot, and frieze in three different colored papers, so that there are three tiers of background for the pictures, if the maker desires to leave spaces between them. The cutting out of the pictures is an amusing occupation for all the family on a rainy day.
This making of screens sometimes leads to another very attractive work for a rainy day--the preparation for a fancy dress ball. This, in a lonely country house, far away from the chance of any outward amusement, has often cheated a fortnight’s bad weather of its heart-depressing qualities.
As we have not the stores of old armor, old brocade and satin, powdered wigs, and costumes of the different reigns, which may be supposed from modern English novels to be the property of every English mansion, we must call upon taste and upon our national faculty of invention to help us in this dilemma. The country store will give us black and white tarlatan, chintz, cotton flannel (a most excellent medium), and, indeed, flannels of all sorts. Black lace, jewelry, and flowers are in every lady’s trunk, and, with some stiff linings and _appliqué_ chintz flowers, an old silk can be made into a priceless brocade.
Let us take a Venetian dress first. We will have King _Pantelon_, the Lord of Misrule, in black with scarlet shirt and three-cornered hat, and attended by his gay and dissolute crew. We will have the _Illustrissimi_, wearing the dress of the ancient Venetian nobility, scarlet cloaks, and long bag wigs, mightily disdainful; the _Chiozotti_ in black velvet, wide lace collars, and high cloth caps, adorned with artificial flowers--they shall shower _confetti_ and make jokes; we shall have dominoes and masks, Egyptians and Neapolitans in velvet, with scarlet caps and stockings, clapping castanets; we shall have Armenians, Levant merchants and sailors, Turks in caftans, Greeks and Dalmatians, regular-featured Mussulmans, Hindoos with jet-black hair, and Malay Lascars in many-colored turbans, fez, and scarf; grinning soot-black negroes, Polish Jews in furred caps and long coats, Magyars in Hessians and pelisses; Bohemian nurses in Czechen costume, a colored handkerchief in the hair; dark-eyed young _bourgeoises_ in coquettish black veils; elegant ladies in velvet and point lace; the gondolier, in his picturesque sailor costume and broad sash; the Finland peasant, with short skirts, long-dangling ear-rings, and silver pins; the Maltese with her _fazzoletto_; an old _Contadino_, with short velveteen knee-breeches, gaiters, and colored cotton umbrella; priests all in black gown, shovel hat, and black silk stockings; dashing naval officers; the _Guardia Nazionale_, and weather-beaten fishermen with bronzed faces and red Phrygian cap. We shall have Lord Byron, pale and melancholy, and picturesque Masaniello; the patriarchs of the Greek Church; the Spanish beauties, the Swiss peasant, the German Mädchen; the madcap Harlequin dress of a Spanish princess. Then there will be all the seasons--winter, for instance, in tulle, swansdown, and spun glass; the Marie Antoinettes, in pink brocade with long, square trains and trimmings of Marabout feathers; the lovely Georgian costume, a Seville gypsy, a Russian peasant; a flower-girl, a Nymph; Night and Day; Spanish students and Flemish boors; Pages of Queen Blanche of Castile; the beautiful white uniform of the _Dragon de Villars_; a gothic costume; Charlemagne and his Paladins. In short--“the Carnival of Venice.” All this was done, and well done, at a country house and the adjacent village (a village of not more than fifteen hundred inhabitants), and for very little money, only a few years ago.
The business is done if one only _thinks he can do it_; and there are numbers enough to work at it. A boarding-school holiday, a watering-place, a large town bent on “getting up something” for charity, should have one such home behind it, where a natural-born leader will set the whole thing going, and the picturesque shores of Italy will give up their delights to some western town, some inland village, some quiet and decorous hamlet of New England, where all the inhabitants are dying of _ennui_.
But here, from the pictures of our screen, which have suggested all this, we have been led off from Decorative Art into the business of giving a ball! We have been entertaining a motley crowd indeed!
“The day was dull, and dark, and dreary, It rained, and the rain was never weary.”
But see! how we have cheated the clouds! The rainy fortnight has been the most dissipated season possible--all owing to our happy device of getting up a fancy ball--one of the very many pleasant thoughts which have grown out of screens and screen-making.
VIII.
EMBROIDERY AND OTHER DECORATIVE ARTS.
Let us return to our three legitimate decorations--our fan-painting, our screen-painting, and our embroideries.
Of Embroidery the world is full, and at its best estate. The foolish old German wool-worsted work has gone out, and in its place we have the very elaborate church needle-work of the Middle Ages, and, better still, its tapestry.
Some ingenious lady discovered that a plain piece of carpet made a very good background for a rich curtain, after a few stitches of embroidery were added; and it took but one step farther for another lady to find in cotton velvet a good background for tapestry. The figures are sketched on, and then the embroidery is artistically added, in the style of the thirteenth century, when the characters were outlined by a single line, which also designates the shape and folds of the garments. These outlines are filled in with masses of stitches in two or three shades of color. It is best, in making tapestry, to adhere to this simplicity, as in attempting the later richness of the Gobelins the work degenerates into a vulgar imitation.
And in stitching away at the tapestry frame, the well-read mamma might give her daughters a little sketch of the history of tapestry. How once these artistic draperies were the adornments of those stone castles which knew no plastered walls. How they caught the story of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” the scenes from the Bible, the whole story of mythology, the history of great wars. There hangs to-day, at Blenheim, a perfect set of pictures of the victories of the great Duke of Marlborough, done for him by the pious Belgian nuns.
But those works anterior to the sixteenth century have the greatest interest for the student of tapestry. Gold thread and silk were freely used in their embellishment, and the effect is rather that of a mosaic than of a picture. The greens are a study. They are produced with a dark blue for the dark, and a yellow for the light tints. The wonderful work of Matilda, called the Bayeux tapestry, wrought on brown linen; the many historical pieces found in Italy, done in wools; and the collections all over Europe, show a mastery over the needle which we have lost.
But it was left for Francis I, of France, to establish the most renowned factory for these beautiful things, when at Fontainebleau he founded what is now the _Gobelins_. The Gobelins were two Dutch dyers of wool, celebrated for their brilliant scarlets, who eventually gave their name to the art, and a “Gobelin” got to mean a tapestry. Under Louis XIV the Luxurious this manufactory attained to highest importance. They became the Herters and Marcottes of France. Colbert, the Prime Minister, united under one head all the different bands of workmen who were employed on furniture and decorations for the royal palaces of France. To the weavers of carpets and tapestry were added embroiderers, goldsmiths, wood-carvers, dyers, etc. Charles Lebrun and his pupils were charged with furnishing designs. Lebrun himself furnished over twenty-four hundred designs. In 1667 Louis himself paid a visit of state to the manufactory, accompanied by Colbert, and examined the magnificent carpets, tapestries, silver plate, and carvings which formed the splendid “Manufactory of Furniture to the Crown.” This great establishment, however, went down, as Louis lost money; and after the death of Lebrun (he was father to the wretched husband of pretty Madame Le Brun) it returned to its original function of producing tapestry. These Gobelin tapestries grew to be the most wonderful reproduction of pictures ever seen.
But why, one pauses to ask, try to reproduce a picture “done in oils” by the laborious process of needle-work or weaving? Why by process of mosaic? It is one of the useless fancies of the human race. The old tapestry, done by hand when there were no Gobelins, had a meaning and a use. So has the modern tapestry done by hand. It is cheap, it is individual, it is original; but for the Gobelins, that favorite luxury of kings, we fail to see an excuse. However, it is very beautiful, expensive, and rare.
The process of tapestry weaving is called the “_haute lisse_,” the warp being placed vertically, in contradistinction to the “_basse lisse_,” a work with a horizontal warp, as is usual. The weaver stands with the model which he is to copy behind him. As the surface of the tapestry must present a perfectly smooth and even surface, all cuttings must be made on the wrong side, for the workman never sees the beautiful work he is doing. This has been made use of in poetry in the following simile:
“We work but blindly at the loom, Nor see the pattern, save in parts; Not ours to mark the gleam or bloom, But labor on, with patient hearts.
“But when the angels overhead The soul-wrought tapestry unfurls, Perhaps the tears we vainly shed May glow amid the threads--like pearls.
“The sorrow which has crushed the heart A lily blooms, on azure field; The strife in which we bore our part In bud and flower may stand revealed.”
The Gobelins used gold, silver, pearls, and everything decorative in their work, at times, to produce effect. The first Revolution brought destruction to the Gobelins, as it did to everything else, and many choice pieces were burned. But it rose again under the first Napoleon, David furnishing designs. In 1871 the Communists again set fire to the manufactory, burning up the exhibition-room. Four hundred thousand dollars was the estimated loss. But when we remember that there perished tapestries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the “Acts of the Apostles” by Raphael, and the now valuable, graceful, although affected, charming designs of Boucher, which were wrought for Pompadour, besides historical portraits and scenes, this seems a low estimate. The embroidery of the cartoons of Raphael, copies of which may be seen at Hampton Court, were among the greatest of the Gobelin triumphs.
However, to those who have walked the galleries of Florence, who have seen there the grand and beautiful specimens of embroidered tapestry of the sixteenth century, there will ever be a charm about old tapestry in the crude perspective and the sudden shading. It is this, perhaps, which can be copied. It is this to which the modern tapestry worker should address herself, if among the amusements of home she counts the making of curtains, and wall-coverings, and _portières_, which shall almost suggest the possibility that they once hung in a Florentine or a Venetian palace. A dark background of some cheap woolen stuff, a knowledge of drawing, the silk and woolen and cotton and linen threads now brought to our hand so cheaply--will all furnish forth the appliances for the making of tapestry hangings, such as a castellan of the Middle Ages would not have despised.
Painting on fans has become a very common Home Amusement, and it is a very elegant one. The white silk fan is usually selected, although linen, satin, and wood fans are all easy and pleasant mediums. For painting on silk, some technical knowledge is necessary, some gum-water, or sizing, to prevent the paint from spreading. For painting on wood, one needs only the common water-color box, and a simple knowledge of drawing and painting. Flowers, birds, and butterflies are the favorite devices, monograms having gone out of fashion. It is better, if possible, to have the silk stretched on a frame before it is mounted on sticks, as one still sees the masterpieces of Boucher, Watteau, and Greuze, not yet mounted, but framed, in galleries--far too precious to mount, the Marchioness who ordered them having, perhaps, fortunately forgotten her caprice that we may admire it.
And what pretty and pleasing and altogether historical memories come in with the fan! It was created in primeval ages. The Egyptian ladies had them of lotus-leaves; the Greek and Roman ladies followed. The word _flabellum_ occurs often in the Roman literature. They also had fans of peacock-feathers, and of some expansive material painted in brilliant colors. They were not made to open and shut like ours; that is a modern invention. They were stiff, with long handles, for ladies were fanned by their slaves. The _flabellifer_, or fan-bearer, was some young attendant, generally male, whose common business it was to carry his mistress’s fan. Would that were the fashion now! There is a Pompeian painting of Cupid as the fan-bearer of Ariadne, and lamenting her desertion by Theseus. In Queen Elizabeth’s day the fan was usually made of feathers, like the fan still used in the East. The handle was richly ornamented, and set with stones. A fashionable lady was never without her fan, which was chained to her girdle by a jeweled chain. A satirist of the day, Stephen Gosson, approves of the fan if used to drive away flies and for cooling the skin. He, however, continues scornfully:
“But seeing they were still in hand, In house, in field, in church, in street, In summer, winter, water, land, In cold, in heat, in dry, in wet-- I judge they are for wives such tools As babies are in plays for fools.”
Queen Elizabeth dropped a silver-handled fan into the moat at Amstead Hall, which occasioned many madrigals. Sir Francis Drake presented to his royal mistress a “fan of feathers, white and red, enameled with a half-moon of mother-of-pearl; within that a half-moon garnished with sparks of diamonds, and a few seed pearls on one side. Having her Majesty’s picture within it, and on the reverse a crow.” Why not try, young ladies, to paint a fan like this? Use silver dust to illustrate “sparks of diamonds.” It would be a very pretty conceit.
Poor Leicester gave, as his New Year’s gift, in 1574, “a fan of white feathers set in a handle of gold, garnished on one side with two very fair emeralds, and fully garnished with rubies and diamonds, and on each side a white bear (his cognizance), and two pearls hanging, a lion romping, with a white muzzled bear at his foot.” This fan would be difficult to copy. It was evidently a love-token from poor, ill-used Leicester to his haughty queen. Just before Christmas, in 1595, Elizabeth went to Kew, dined at my Lord Keeper’s house, and there was handed her a “fine fan, with a handle garnished with diamonds.”
Fans in Shakespeare’s time seem to have been composed of ostrich-feathers, and so on, stuck into handles. In “Love and Honor,” by Sir William Davenant, we find the line,
“All your plate, Vasco, is the silver handle of your old prisoner’s fan.”
Marston says:
“Another, he Her silver-handled fan would gladly be.”
Forty pounds were often given for a fan in Elizabeth’s time. Bishop Hall, in his “Satires,” in 1597, says:
“While one piece pays her idle waiting man, Or buys a hood, or silver-handled fan.”
The fan of the Countess of Suffolk resembles a powder-puff.
But gentlemen carried fans in those days. We find in a manuscript in the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford, the following allusion: “The gentlemen then had prodigious fans, as is to be seen in old pictures, like that instrument which is used to dry feathers, and it had a handle at least one half as long, with which their daughters oftentimes were corrected. Sir Edward Cole, Lord Chief Justice, rode the circuit with such a fan, and William Dugdale told me he was witness of it.” The Earl of Manchester also used such a fan. “But the fathers and mothers slasht their daughters, in the time of their besom-discipline, when they were perfect women.” Both fashions have happily passed away. Lords Chief Justices no longer “slash” their daughters, nor do they carry fans.
Of Catharine de Braganza (1664) we read that she and her maids walked from Whitehall in procession to St. James’s Palace through the park in glittering costume of silver lace in the bright morning sunshine. Parasols being unknown in England at that era, the courtly belles used the gigantic green shading-fans, which had been introduced by the Queen and her Portuguese ladies, to shield their complexions from the sun, when they did not wish wholly to obscure their charms by putting on their masks. Both were in general use in this reign. The green shading-fan is of Moorish origin, and for more than a century after the marriage of Catharine of Braganza was considered an indispensable luxury by our fair and stately ancestral dames, who used them in open carriages, in the promenade, and at prayers, where they ostentatiously screened their devotions from public view by spreading them before their faces while they knelt.
But China and Japan--the home of fans--are waiting to be let in! and as soon as the India trade was opened by Catharine’s marriage treaty, there entered the carved ivory fan, the light bamboo and palm-leaf, the paper fan, the silk folding fan, mounted on beautiful Japanese sticks; all came to England about this time.
The vellum fans of France, on which Watteau first painted his shepherdesses in hoop-petticoats, and swains in full-bottomed wigs, the choice impossible goddesses of Boucher, with cupids and nymphs, all came next. The history of fans, in France alone, would fill a volume; and the neighboring kingdom of Spain, where the language of fans has become a very serious study, would give us another volume. The fans of tortoise-shell, enriched with jewels, are a favorite luxury of to-day. Oliver Wendell Holmes has written a delightful poem on the “Origin of the Fan.” In all our art loan collections there is, nowadays, an exhibition of fans. The young student of fan-painting should strive to see some of those of Watteau and of Boucher. Tiffany to-day turns out some very beautiful specimens; and more than one of our artists could admirably paint a fan or two as his contribution to Fan History.
Nothing can be prettier as a Home Amusement than fan-painting, into which much, but not too much, Japanese suggestion should creep. Remember, young ladies, the plea of that poor stork, of which we have seen so much, “that he be allowed to put down his other leg!” and spare us the gilded bird, or give him to us but seldom.
The art of Illumination, which is now studied occasionally by our young ladies, goes wonderfully well into fan-painting. Perhaps it is too good for it. Perhaps the same hand which can copy the old initial letter which makes the missals rich and rare, should not condescend to the application of the same delicate manipulation in order to ornament a fan. But a fan of vellum, painted by an illuminator, is still a very beautiful thing.