Editor’s note: September 1, 1939, two days before the declaration of war, Britain imposed mandatory nightly black-outs to prevent enemy aircraft from identifying targets. The black-outs resulted in many people spending long, quiet hours at home once darkness fell.
Years ago I knew an old schoolmaster who, after his retirement, had made a hobby of landscape painting. All through the summer months, and on any mild winter’s day, you would meet him stepping out briskly with his folding easel, sketching stool, paints and canvas—a lean, dapper, grey-bearded man, with weather-beaten face and twinkling eyes. A man who enjoyed talking to any man, woman, or child he met, who had his own cheery philosophy of life and sent every one away smiling from the encounter. A man who in the evening of his days was leading a contentedly full, happy life.
***
Even then I did not realise, till after his death, all that he had gained from it. It happened that I was invited to his house to choose one of his pictures as a souvenir. I was one of the merest of acquaintances, just one of the many who used to enjoy a gossip with him by the way, and I had never entered his house during his lifetime. I remember gazing about me in astonishment at the overwhelming evidence of his industry. Not only were the walls of every room completely covered with pictures, but there were stacks of them in a lumber room as well. And, looking at them, one realised that not one moment spent upon them had been wasted. They were not great art. They would never make him famous. Probably by this time, except in the houses of those who loved him, they have become real lumber and have long ago been destroyed. But in them he had captured the sunlight shining on the buttercup fields, lighting up old red roofs, glinting on the surface of a running stream and on the grey-green of overhanging willows. He had caught the sky in all its moods, dappled with drifting cumuli clouds or dark with storm. And he had looked at it all with the eyes of understanding and painted the best he knew. Gazing at those pictures, you felt how he had enjoyed painting them. They had taken him into another world, shown him the beauty that lies hidden in simple, everyday things. No wonder he was a very happy man.
***
All this comes back to me now in reflecting how much more in the months—perhaps even in the years—to come, we are going to be thrown back upon our own resources for the filling of our leisure time. There will not be the same facilities for pursuing our pleasures away from home, still less an inducement to do so during the long black-out evenings. But if we can really concentrate upon some hobby or occupation that will keep hands and minds employed we shall not lose by the change. The man already having a fair proficiency in woodwork who sets himself to become a skilled craftsman, the novice who determines to remain a novice no longer, by so doing enter into a new world, one in which they are discovering the possibilities of their own powers, establishing new standards of self-reliance. And one never knows where discoveries of this kind will end. …
***
… So that we have to set to work to make our plans for the black-out evenings—plans that will not allow us time for brooding over-much over what the future may bring, because that is futile and weakening. “Don’t cross your bridges before you come to them” is excellent advice. Our imagination is so apt to run riot, to show the bridges breaking down under our feet, without revealing the other side of the picture—that there is always some way of getting across. Let us therefore keep these troubled minds of ours fully occupied over a good practical job and worries and anxieties will assume reasonable proportions: In times like these we cannot hope—or even wish—to escape them altogether. To do so would be to stand altogether aloof from the common danger and the common purpose. But we can learn to cope with them like men.
Thomas Sheraton (British, Stockton-on-Tees 1751–1806 London), Thomas Bensley (London), 1793–94, London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NK2229 .S54 1793
Editor’s note: This article, by Charles Hayward, appeared in the June 1951 issue of The Woodworker magazine, and will be included in “Honest Labour,” which will be available this year. This essay is a bit different from Hayward’s Chips from the Chisel columns, but Thomas Sheraton’s story is fascinating (and a bit tragic, as Hayward notes in the title of his piece). This article also highlights Hayward’s vast knowledge of the history of furniture making and its makers, as well as his dedication to research.
1951 is the bicentenary of the birth of Sheraton, and it is interesting to recall what little we know of the man whose name has become so associated with one of our great furniture styles
It is a strange coincidence, with regard to the three greatest English cabinet makers of the eighteenth century, that no portrait of any of them, not even a rough pencil sketch, is known to exist. Thus, any enterprising film producer contemplating a presentation of one of these matters must rely solely upon his imagination –– no difficulty where Hollywood is concerned.
No name in the furniture world occurs more frequently than that of Thomas Sheraton. What manner of man was this gifted individual? Indisputably an artist, we should say, perhaps even a poet. Who else could have conceived those “elegant appurtances” of a lady’s boudoir, those dainty little cabinets and dressing tables, with their slender tapering legs, their festoons and painted medallions, their rich satinwood veneers mellowing with time to old gold like beech leaves in autumn?
Sheraton furniture forms the ideal setting for fluttering fans, brocaded hoops, powdered ringlets, diamond shoe-buckles. Its designer is the Chopin of the cabinet-making craft, with, maybe, something about him of the Chopin of the keyboard — pale, fragile, dreamy, romantic.
Alas! Such a picture is far from the truth. Woefully far! Sheraton was born at Stockton-on-Tees, of poor parents, in 1751. So that this year is the bicentenary of his coming into the world. How amazed so obscure an individual would have been at the mention of a bicentenary!
Early days. — He was apprenticed to a cabinet maker, and contrived somehow or other to pick up a knowledge of drawing and geometry and a small store of classical learning. Since he himself tells us that he never at any time received a collegiate or academic training he must have taught himself these things.
Somewhere in his thirties Sheraton arrived in London and attempted to establish himself in Soho. His trade card, issued from Wardour Street, is still preserved. It informs the public that Thomas Sheraton “teaches perspective, architecture and ornaments, makes designs for cabinet makers, and sells all kinds of drawing books.”
The only way for a designer of furniture to become known in those days was to publish a manual of design. So that shortly after the northerner’s arrival in London there appeared “The Cabinet Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book,” by Thomas Sheraton. The publication attracted some attention by reason of its novelty of treatment and expert draughtsmanship, but competition was heavy.
The 18th century books. — If our Georgian forefarthers failed to equip their homes in “the most elegant and approved fashion” it was not for lack of instruction. Never was such a spate of manuals and guides let loose on a suffering public. From Chippendale and Shearer down to plain George Smith’s “Household Furniture” they came tumbling one over another, one relentless everlasting flood.
All these publications had certain features in common; they began with long-winded, stilted prefaces which make amusing reading to-day. The authors did not scruple to condemn as utterly old-fashioned the designs of their rivals even though such designs might be no more than a year old.
As there was no copyright law, no man hesitated to “lift” the design of another and incorporate it in his own publication. So that Mr. So-and-So’s “New Guide” might be new in so far as it consisted of one-fifth of his own inventions and four-fifths of other people’s.
These manuals were circulated among provincial and country cabinet makers who could not afford the time or expense to make a journey to town to replenish their stocks. It was here that poor Sheraton started at a disadvantage with men such as Chippendale and Hepplewhite, who were the heads of established firms, able to receive and execute orders.
There was no firm of Sheraton. He may conceivably have received orders which were put out for others to complete, but in all likelihood he received none, and more astute and business-like rivals profited by his designs.
A curious mixture. — There was another reason which tended to his impoverishment. His work did not stand first with him. This may sound strange in the case of one who is now universally admitted to be a genius. Nevertheless, Sheraton’s real bent was towards religion. He was a Baptist minister, and a rabid minister at that.
Instead of making contacts which would have enabled him to build up a business he spent countless hours on the composition of verbose inflated religious treatises which nobody read, or in delivering sermons to which only a few listened.
Sheraton’s religious tolerance, however, did not extend to his business rivals. Like most frustrated characters he was prone to condemn all and sundry. The designs of his predecessor, Chippendale, he dismissed as “wholly antiquated and laid aside.” Those of Hepplewhite were “erroneous in perspective, already in decline, and likely to die in disorder.”
Finally, of Manwaring’s “Cabinet Makers Real Friend,” an excellent manual, which had achieved a considerable circulation, our generous critic declared that there was nothing in it that “an apprentice boy might not be taught in seven hours.” The tit-bit, however, occurs in his own preface where the aggrieved Mr. Sheraton denounces “the ill-nature of those who hate to speak well of any but their own productions.”
Sheraton’s last refuge in London was in Broad Street, Golden Square, where he kept a squalid little bookshop, taught drawing, sold stationery, and wrote and published his books, including those voluminous religious dissertations which now lie in obscurity in the British Museum. His last mad project was an Encyclopedia which it was intended to issue in 125 numbers, only 30 of which he lived to complete.
A pen portrait. — It was in connection with this publication that Adam Black, the Scottish publisher, then a young man in London, called on Sheraton in the hope of finding employment. Black’s unforgettable picture of the man and his surroundings has so often been quoted that one may be excused from repeating it at length.
“He lived in an obscure street,” says Black, “his house half shop, half dwelling-house, and looked like a worn out Methodist minister with threadbare coat.” The writer goes on to say how one afternoon he took tea with the Sheraton family, and found that there were but wo cups and saucers in the house. Mrs. Sheraton drank out of the child’s porringer.
Black stayed with them for a week, writing articles and putting the shop in order, for which he received half a guinea. “Miserable as the pay was,” he adds, “I was half ashamed to take it from the poor man.” It was the old story of Jack-of-all-Trades, as Black’s closing words show. “Sheraton’s abilities and resources are his ruin,” he asserts. “In attempting to do everything he does nothing.”
The end. — Sheraton died in 1806 in his fifty-fifth year, leaving a destitute family behind him. The man who had designed some of the most beautiful and graceful chairs in English domestic furniture gave utterance to these pathetic words: “I can be well content to sit in a wooden bottom chair myself, provided I can but have common food and raiment wherewith to pass through life in peace.”
— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, June 1951
Exekias’ signature (ΕΧΣΕΚΙΑΣ ΕΠΟΙΕΣΕ) as potter, rotated 90° anti-clockwise, detail from a scene representing Herakles and Geryon. Side A from an Attic black-figure amphora, ca. 550–540 BC.
I have often wondered what period of time must elapse before a good craftsman becomes an outstanding one. Was he born that way, needing only the requisite skill to develop his genius? Or did he evolve stage by stage like other men, but having the courage to take his work a stage further, perhaps many more stages than other men will venture.
Yet that may only imply the virtue of persistence, not that he is outstandingly gifted. What is the secret? We can add together the small perfections which make up the quality of a first-class man but, even so, something eludes us, something in the very essence of his work which defies analysis.
There is an old Breton proverb which says: “Qui aime son métier, son métier l’aime.” It may be this puts a finger right on the spot. That there has to be love between a man and his work, something which each gives to the other, which acts and interacts upon his skill before craftsmanship becomes the superlative thing that is created beauty.
Probably many more men than we can possibly estimate, working at the handicraft they enjoy, are producing work of this kind today, to be seen by few people, but to some of those few communicating that little thrill of pleasure which only superlative work can give. When we think of the amount of wastage there has always been right down through the ages by reason of material change and decay, the destructiveness of wars, accidents, sheer stupidity and thoughtlessness, the marvel is the amount of creative beauty which must have been produced by unknown men in every age for so much to have survived into our own, infinitesimal in comparison with what has been lost.
Furniture, of its nature, cannot date back many centuries, as much, perhaps more, through neglect due to changing fashion than from the perishability of wood. But ancient records and wall paintings have yielded up a great deal of information about the furnishing of kings’ palaces and the like, and many ancient craftsmen’s masterpiece has been described in meticulous detail, which still seems to retain the sense of wonder of those who had seen the work and the proud sense of possession of the monarch who had owned it. Very occasionally, by one of the freakish chances of history, the name of the craftsman will have survived while that of his noble patron is forgotten. A strange reversal in values.
In some cases, conscious that this work of his was good, the craftsman has inscribed his name on some obscure corner, to be discovered years afterwards by men who came to admire. It is not often the craftsman inscribes a friend’s name as well as his own, yet this is what happened when, between two to three thousand years ago, a Grecian artist wrote his signature in tiny, crabbed Greek script: “Exekias made it,” on the lovely vase he had made and painted, and then in a burst of pride and affection: “Handsome Onetorides.” And so the name of his handsome friend has been passed down through the ages in somewhat unsual confirmation of Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
Had the maker instinct of immortality when he inscribed his friend’s name on the lovely thing he had just completed? Exekias himself was known as the finest Athenian vase painter of his day, and the vase is the famous one painted with a panel in which with consummate skill he shows the two Homeric warriors, Ajax and Achilles, seated at an improvised table playing a dice game. The two figures, painted and incised in black upon a red ground, are bearded and every line of their bodies as they bend forward shows a kind of eager intensity, but there is nothing to suggest that the handsome Onetorides was a model for either. No, the inscription seems to have come out of the fullness of the artist’s creative joy, knowing this work of his hands to be good and wishing to associate with it the name of the friend he admired. Rarely has a dedication been made with such simplicty and rarely has any dedication lasted so long.
Probably when we come to the word “dedication” we come to the crux of the whole matter. The man who is going to do outstanding work in any craft has himself to be a dedicated man. He must be sensitive to beauty wherever he sees it and in whatever form and have the instinct to turn to beautiful accomplishment the handicraft he has made his own. He has to have skill so sure and informed that it will carry him faithfully through his undertakings, enabling him to tackle new kinds of work with the confidence of experience.
But all this the really good craftsman can have. If he wants to go further still, it can only be for the love of it, something which will bring an element into his work which no school can teach, a heightened degree of skill, a suavity, a finish, which can only happen when, as the Bretons say, the work loves him back.
Currier & Ives. Happy New Year. 1876. New York: Published by Currier & Ives. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002695831/.
“True taste is for ever growing, learning, reading—”
It is well-nigh impossible to begin a New Year without some stirring of the pulse. Anything may happen to us, for good or ill, during the coming year. There is a certain sense of adventure in the air until the year is well launched and the same old pattern begins to repeat itself and the same old routine threatens to submerge us. But need it? Sometimes I think that, in an age which is pre-eminently one of change and experiment, we are often very slow as individuals to become interested in either. Most of us at heart do not like change. What we most dread about war is the major uprooting it makes in our lives, and rightly we dread it, because that is the kind of change over which we have no control. But when it means setting ourselves against new ideas, new methods, simply because they are new, then we are in danger of closing our minds to much that is interesting and stimulating in the world to-day. And a very good resolution for many of us for the New Year might be to take down the shutters from our minds, the self-imposed iron curtain by which we try to shut out the changing world.
***
Behind it we accumulate a somewhat formless litter of preconceived ideas, cosily familiar tenets and shibboleths and judgments, acquired many of them during schooldays and early youth, which have become a great part of our mental make-up. As such they will limit and cramp us unless we are determined to keep our vision clear, our minds receptive, by deliberately looking out upon the world with the eyes of maturity, noting and comparing the new with the old, and prepared to find interest and pleasure in whatever is good in both. In this way we shall remain mentally alert, and in fair way to become men of trained judgment and good taste. Which, for the woodworker who wants to become a first-class craftsman, is essential. For it is the habit of really looking at things for their own sake with intelligent, seeing eyes, and a habit of comparing and contrasting, which teaches us the difference between mediocre and fine work wherever we may find it. And not only in furniture. We can draw inspiration from anything that man has made when the work is good.
***
The great difficulty is how to hold the balance between a readiness to seek out the best in what is new and yet not to be led astray by the vagaries of fashion. We all know how from time to time a change of fashion can inundate the furniture world, so that wherever we turn, in every shop window, our eyes are caught by a new style. Whatever our first reaction may be, the fact remains that when we have seen it sufficiently often our critical faculty becomes dulled. We find ourselves liking it simply because it has become familiar. “It grows on one,” we tell ourselves, and any plans we have for making furniture can be influenced for better or worse. How are we to learn to discriminate, to keep on the one hand an open mind that is prepared to learn, on the other hand not to be led away by every passing eccentricity?
***
I fancy that there are no easy rules. That the answer can only be found in that gradually maturing judgment which comes through continued, thoughtful, observation, a weighing-up of points which, as experience accumulates, becomes an instinctive habit of mind. Ruskin who, amid a welter of words, can be relied upon for flashes of golden insight, sums it up thus: “The temper by which right taste is formed is characteristically patient. It dwells upon what is submitted to it. It does not trample upon it, lest it should be pearls, even though it looks like husks. It is a good ground, soft, penetrable, retentive; it does not send up thorns of unkind thought, to choke the weak seed; it is hungry and thirsty too, and drinks all the dew that falls on it. It is an honest and good heart, that shows no too ready springing before the sun be up, but fails not afterwards; it is distrustful of itself, so as to be ready to believe and try all things, and yet so trustful of itself that it will neither quit what it has tried nor take anything without trying. And the pleasure which it has in things that it finds true and good is so great that it cannot possibly be led aside by any tricks of fashion, or diseases of vanity; it cannot be cramped in its conclusions by partialities and hypocrisies; its visions and its delights are too penetrating, too living, for any white-washed object or shallow fountain long to endure or supply.”
***
Life so lived ceases to be the drab kind of affair that subordination to routine would make of it. For there need be no subordination of the mind except to what is true and good. And a habit of constant, eager observation will show us that “every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest.” Once such a spirit is kindled within us life becomes something vital and glowing, full of new interests and potentialities. “True taste is for ever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, lamenting over itself and testing itself by the way that it fits things,” says Ruskin. “And it finds whereof to feed, and whereby to grow, in all things.” Which is a pretty heartening thought to take into the New Year.
Oct. 27, 1968: A few stars are showing. A light breeze coming up and 26°.
A day for small chores. I mixed up a batch of wood glue very thin and painted the runners on my sled. Tomorrow it will be ready to kick out the door. If I only had a pet caribou to pull it. Snow picking up – big flakes and lots of them.
“Dick’s lightweight sled is held together with 48 mortise-and-tenon joints, a few nails and his thin copper-coated electric fence wire. He put the sled to heavy use each winter, to haul firewood and occasionally meat from wildlife he found.”
This is an excerpt from “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke” by Monroe Robinson, which we are happily and fully immersed in right now. The italic portion is from Dick’s journals. The quoted portion is commentary from Monroe. — Kara Gebhart Uhl
