Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some light tanning due to age. Plates bright and vivid. Year 1924. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The Wallace Collection at Hertford House is of course far larger but what the Wallace Collection has effected for French decorative art the collection here described has-up to the limit of its size-fulfilled for English. A difference however is that whilst at Hertford House we see specimens with the character and style of which we are already well acquainted few of us were aware that English work had reached the high standard of the objects here illustrated. Both collections embrace the work of the same period the late 17th and the 18th Centuries and it was then that decorative surroundings such as are aimed at to-day reached perfection. A collection of objects of that period therefore possesses far greater educational value than if as in so many Museums the earlier work is almost exclusively represented. Surely the primary objects of a Museum of Decorative Art are to improve taste and to be a guidance and help to the designers of articles for modern requirements? Oak credences and settles Gothic tapestries mazer bowls etc. however interesting to the antiquary possess little value for practical purposes. Every great movement in art has been primarily due to the patron artists and craftsmen have always appeared to carry out the demand so created and the history of ancient Greece and Rome of the medieval Church of the Burgundian Princes and of the diverse development of the Renaissance in districts of Italy of the wealthy Dutch traders during the first half of the 17th Century are independent illustrations of this truth. Therefore in endeavouring to understand any period of art it is an advantage to realise the patronage which induced it. (OS)