18th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1998 by Wendell Garrett

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1733-1734

Order was also the first law for the English of the Georgian era, who claimed kinship with the noble civilization of Augustan Rome. For them Newtonian astronomy and the revelations of the microscope confirmed God's supreme, and orderly, designs. Painters, sculptors, architects, and cabinetmakers strove for correctness and the "right" thing according to ancient, or at least Renaissance, precedents.

Order for the English Augustans required thoughtful conduct, intellectual clarity, and organization: balance, not frenzy; simplicity, not complexity; discipline, not spasm. Order was reassuring. It meant that things made sense, creating what Soame Jenyns called the "best of all possible worlds."

The century, that followed the Great Fire of London in 1666 was among the richest for the visual arts in Britain. The pursuit of ornament led these Augustans on an extravagant chase to satisfy the dictates of taste. They felt the need to break with the Jacobean style of the early seventeenth century, which was still largely derived from the Elizabethan age. Timbered ceilings surrendered pride of place to wood and plaster embellishments alive with motifs derived from pattern books, mythology, biblical stories, or tales of travel. The ribs of the great compartmented ceilings were encrusted with plasterwork fruit and flowers, and carving of the greatest virtuosity softened the severe lines of wainscoting. The evolution in design was accompanied by superb craftsmanship. As Cesar de Sanssure, one of the most observant students of English character, wrote in about 1725, English craftsmen "work to perfection."

Grinling Gibbons, master sculptor and carver in wood to the crown after 1693, could be considered the incarnation of this perfection of workmanship. His riotous assemblages of fruit, foliage, emblems, and portraits, rendered with amazing dexterity in the wood of the lime, or linden, tree were voluptuously three-dimensional, and astonishingly true to nature.

The evolution of English taste was greatly stimulated in the eighteenth century by young gentlemen polished by a grand tour to the Continent. They returned with a heightened respect for decoration that swept artists and craftsmen into a whirl of activity until, by the second half of the eighteenth century, five stylistic modes had come and gone: Palladianism, the rococo, Gothic revival, chinoiserie, and neoclassicism. The rooms in grand houses came to embody the distilled essence of informed patronage as well as the finest craftsmanship.