Decorative arts

‘Why all this rigmarole about art-manufactures and what have they to do with Edinburgh gossip some of your readers may be disposed to ask. That I am about to tell. Among other places that determined that their inhabitants should longer be content with the traditional chimney-piece ornaments, such as Tam O'Shanter, and Souter Johnny, Swiss shepherds and shepherdesses, and the like, but that they should pant after Greek vases, heathen goddesses, &c, In Modern Athens to create this better taste, and also familiarise artists with the best types of the useful and beautiful in combination, an Art Manufacture Association was formed. The second annual exhibition of this association was inaugurated on Friday evening last, by a full dress promenade, and, as a matter of course, your correspondent was there. It was a grand crush —only a shade less comfortable than the Queen's levee. It was impossible to get anything like a satisfactory glance at the articles exhibited. One thing, however, could not fail to be remarked, and that was there was a decided expansion in crinoline when compared with the previous year. In fact, to such preposterous extent has the crinoline nuisance been carried, that the head and bodies of the ladies at the promenade rose out of their skirts for all the world like an ornamental turnip on a corn-stack. Your correspondent came away from the promenade impressed with the notion that he had been at a very snobbish affair, and thoroughly convinced in his own mind that little benefit to art-manufactures was likely to result from an exhibition inaugurated in such fashion.’ (Victotrian house interior)This 1857 exhibition was the second organised by The Art Manufacturer’s Association of which John Mackintosh (Number 31) was an active member. Set up the year before to encourage good design, the Association followed the successful format of similar bodies established to promote painting and engraving. ‘It is now very generally admitted that, while this country has been making rapid strides the production of mechanical contrivances, there still exists great want amongst of the application of high art to the production of decorative or ornamental work. We, in the provinces, therefore are now paying the legitimate penalty. The purely commercial element has taken firm root; deep, lifeless, shade has fallen upon us; a less elevated taste now exists among the middle and lower classes of society.’ Not that all the lower classes lacked a discerning eye. In 1834 Janet Charters was sentenced to fourteen years transportation for stealing ‘pearls, precious gems, gold and silver plate, and valuable articles of wearing apparel, amounting to about £5,000 the property of Lady Gordon, wife of Sir James Gordon, of Gordonstone, and Letterfourie, at present residing in Albany Street.’