the
general community than the instrumental hand itself. For example,
nobody suspects me, or other patrons of labour in a similar position,
of creating, with our own hands, the art works which we call into
existence. The educated master of this age, although he does not pass
his life at the bench, according to the custom of his predecessors of
the Renaissance, is, nevertheless, a technically practised man, who has
been taught his trade in the workshop, and therefore knows what fine
application is, and how to direct it. It would be both undesirable and
impracticable for masters to sacrifice to manual labour time which, by
the modern us'uages of commerce, they are compelled to devote to
business, to study, and to journeying over the principal portion of the
globe, in search, as we have been, of fresh treasures of application,
and the further development of our art.
In
offering prizes, therefore, for the competition of skilled labour, due
regard should be shown to the masters who have given rise to the skill
of the competitors, who, in a word, have created the demand for their
work. This may possibly be by means of an honourable diploma,
acknowledging their share of service in the good cause, or any but a
pecuniary distinction, which they would value little, and consider more
fitly bestowed upon the competitors themselves.
I
seek to demonstrate to you, from the archives of my own house—and you
have seen it verified by Falize and other pioneers of art in gold,
perhaps more strikingly than by the Castellanis, the immortal disciples
of ancient crafts—that it is the duty of every intelligent master to
embrace all the meritorious schools of design. In training the
apprentice, it has always seemed to me indispensable first to improve
his acquaintance with an art by patient and textual reproduction; but
once the head and hand are accustomed to their work, to encourage—in
preference to the servile copy of a jewel, however beautiful—the
creation of those which, while preserving the purity of style, are yet
original conceptions; in short, such works as, under equal conditions
of gems and their manufacture, might have been carried out in their
respective bygone centuries. The accommodation to our wear of the grand
schools of the 15th and 16th centuries, whatever the temptation of
archaeological considerations, should not suffer the use of gems of
inferior quality or primitive manipulation.
Pre-eminent, therefore, among the applied gems of the cinque cento is
the lovely but perishable pearl, the sole unaided gem (if gem it should
be called), the solitary example of skin-deep beauty, incapable and
gloriously independent of improvement at the hands of man.
Goldsmiths
as a class, not only in this country, but also in France and Italy,
appear to be growing unmindful of a great precept of the Renaissance,
reposing-in them the responsibility of creating taste for
jewels of particular schools, which, alas ! for want of a general
determination, an understanding— in a word, a confederation of art and
artists—are allowed, with all their valuable teachings, to lie
dormant, or only to be regenerated by a "very few of their number, in
the cause of the small constituency, always faithful to art, and, like
its great patrons of old, incapable of cherishing such glaring
misapplications as bid fair, once more in our annals, to usurp the
lead. All praise to our chairman to-night, and those with him, who
first conceived the necessity for our Section of Applied Art, which
embodies, as a pledge of success, the expert commercial element always
ready, under the auspices of this Society, to assist in the furtherance
of British art and commerce.
At
this moment of universal depression in the staple trades of our
country, of such giant industries as, in proportion to their own
prosperity, are capable of reflecting either joy or sorrow upon the
arts, and especially updn those arts of luxury to which we are now
addressing ourselves. It cannot loo well be understood, nor too
fearlessly asserted, that English hands can and do produce as fine work
as money can procure in any part of the globe. English workers are
those, at any rate in connection with this trade, who most readily adapt
