The artistic hearth: the fireplace in the American aesthetic movement

Inspired by the slogan l'art pour l'art, the followers of the aesthetic movement achieved a brief period of cultural efflorescence that reached its height in the United States in the 1880s. (1) In the visual arts, the movement produced objects in which fundamental formal qualities such as shape, line, texture, and color were emphasized to maximize their aesthetic effects. Proponents of the aesthetic movement, which was more an outlook than a style, sought to elevate taste and make art a part of daily life, especially homelife. (2)

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At the hearth, opulent visual effects were married to meaning. The artistic hearth was a multimedia extravaganza composed of materials such as wood, tile, glass, and mirror and furnished with objects valued for both their artistry and their personal associations. It was also a site of family rituals, and, together, the form, the furnishings, and the experience of spending time around the hearth were an expression of artful domesticity (see Fig. 1). When he put a broad brick fireplace under a low timbered ceiling in the front hall of the house he designed for John and Frances Glessner in Chicago, Henry Hobson Richardson created an emphatic architectural statement (see Fig. 2). But, when the Glessners carried a burning fire from the hearth of the old house to the new, they created meaning. John Glessner later wrote:

The fire on the hearth typified the home, so we carried the living fire
from the hearthstone in the old home at Washington and Morgan Streets,
and with that started the fire on the new hearth, accompanied by a
little ceremony .... the life in the new house must be a continuation of
the life so happily lived in the old.... And so it was with the fire:
the old did not go out, the new merely continued its warmth and
glow. (3)

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The artistic hearth was a natural outgrowth of the era's veneration of the home. (4) The American response to increasing industrialization and urbanization during the post-Civil War era included the separation of the workplace from the domestic sphere. Middle-class men went to work in factories, shops, and offices, while women remained in the house, raising children and safeguarding the moral underpinnings of American culture. As the so-called cult of domesticity evolved through the late nineteenth century, many women began to pursue the artistic aspects of cultural life more vigorously. They sought art education, founded arts organizations, and made art, much of it to adorn their own residences. An artistic housewife might design and sew her own curtains, paint her own ceramics, perhaps even draw portraits of her family. Such activity sprang from a deep-seated belief that the character of the house had a profound influence upon its inhabitants. The aesthetic movement prompted Americans to make the mental leap that beautiful surroundings, in and of themselves, would elevate the soul. Thus, women, who shouldered primary responsibility for domestic life, enlisted aesthetic forces as they shaped their houses, thereby shaping their families and the entire society. Creating a beautiful home was a moral act.

History offered many examples of the beneficial influence of home and hearth upon the development of civilization. In 1886 the physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) wrote in the journal Home Decoration, one of the era's many tastemaking publications:

Houses shape themselves by our inner and outer natures, and did we but
know it, there is no history which more eloquently records the physical
and moral nature of a people, their aspirations, desires and thoughts,
their mental elevation or degradation; their love for the beautiful or
ignorance of it, than the dwelling-house. (5)

Because, as Holmes noted, houses mirrored the cultures that built them, profiles of historical housing types were staples of household art books and magazines.

Historians and cultural commentators also noted parallels between ancient hearthside worship and modern fireside gatherings. For example, they linked the Roman rite of pouring libations on the hearth to secure the protection of the household gods (the lares and penates) to practices in earlier Semitic and pre-Christian cultures. Furthermore, they theorized that such small-scale family worship in all these ancient cultures was the foundation upon which the religious ceremonies of larger social units, and entire civilizations, were based. (6) The aesthetic hearth commemorated these ancient customs, as the writer Harriet Spofford (1835-1921) noted:

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The mantel is a part of the reverence due the chimney, a tribute to the
fire upon the hearth, which is the deity of home; it is the modern and
mediaeval household altar, and the last representative, too, of the
ancient altar and the Lares and Penates: too much honor and remembrance
cannot be given to it. (7)

Americans' dependence upon the hearth for heat and light had diminished over the course of the nineteenth century, with improvements in oil- and gaslighting and evermore efficient cast-iron stoves--which were often placed in fireplace openings. Gradually the use of central heating eliminated stoves, and gathering around a beautiful open fire once again became a family ritual, a development to be celebrated. An 1883 editorial in the Decorator and Furnisher noted: