710 PEWTER AND THE REVIVAL OF ITS USE. 



DISCUSSION. 



The chairman, in moving the vote of thanks to the author, said : 



The chariu of art was never so close, intimate, and grateful as when it was 

 conferred on the familiar articles of utility about our hearths and homes. Its 

 charm infinitely transcends in value the prices of the materials on which it 

 is lavished, and can be equally imparted to the costliest substances — black 

 ebony and white Ivory, silver and gold, and precious stones — and to compara- 

 tively worthless substances— clay, iron, copi)er, tin, bi-ass, and pewter, and ordi- 

 nary woods — provided the artistic manipulation of them is sympathetically 

 adapted to the distinguishhig natural qualities — and the defects of the same — 

 of these materials and to the uses the " objets d'art " fashioned of them are 

 intended to fulfill. .Just ten years ago Mr. J. Starkie Gardner gave us his 

 scholarly paper (Journal, June 1, 1904) on "Pewter," and in it, as Mr. Lasenby 

 Liberty has told us, expressed a regret that pewter had not shared up to that 

 date in the great artistic renaissance of the reign of Queen Victoria. This 

 observation was at once taken up by Kayser, and by Lichtinger in Germany, 

 and in this country also by Mr. Lasenby Liberty, who for the past ten years 

 has devoted himself, with the enthusiasm and resolution with which he pur- 

 sues all his artistic enterprises, to the resuscitation of the ancient and once 

 flourishing and famous British art of pewtery. Mr. Lasenby Liberty to-night 

 has fully and clearly, and in the spirit of the most impartial criticism, told us 

 of all that has been attempted and done in this respect by his firm, and from the 

 specimens of tlieir work placed l)efoi'e us and the illustrations of them in his 

 lantern slides we can judge of the difficulties of the undertaking to which Mr. 

 Lasenby Liberty has set himself as a labor of love and of the measure of suc- 

 cess with which these difficulties have been overcome. What is required of all 

 such articles is that while artistic they should never lose their utilitarian and 

 homely chiiracter — that is, the character impressed upon them through untold 

 generations of rough and ready domestic service. If this character is overlooked 

 or ignored, or in any way blurred or masked, either in the form or the embellish- 

 ments of these articles, if, indeed, it is not directly indicated and emphasized by 

 their artistic treatment, the art elaborated on them has been wasted and is 

 worthless, however unencumbered by purposeless conventionalities and unsig- 

 nificant symbols or however original in conception and sincere in execution. The 

 " summam alicui rci dare " to achieve here is directness, simplicty, and balance 

 of foru), the subordination of any ornamentation to the form and to the interpre- 

 tation of its function, and the perfect adjustment of both form and ornamen- 

 tation to tlie materials of which these articles are severally framed and to the 

 human purposes they have to subserve. The decoration must not only be 

 re.sponsive to form and use, but as reticent as it is significant, and must avoid 

 all excess. There must be no straining after originality, which, unless it comes 

 of the rarest and richest genius, tends to languish under weak hands into nerve- 

 less and contemptible affectations and conceits and in strong ones to run riot 

 in violent and offensive eccentricities. In France the contortionists of I'art 

 nouveau have reached the basest .artistic degradation In the studied pruriency 

 of the nude decorative hronzettes with which the shop windows of all Europe 

 have l)een crowded during the i)ast three or four years. Compare them for a 

 moment with the exquisite modeling and tlie i)urity of conception which is their 

 animating soul, of the clay figurines of the (•f)roplasts of ancient Tanagra and 

 Thisbe, Cyme, and M.vrina and you at once n^alize the gulf fixed between the 

 inspirations of artistic genius .'ind the diabolical subtleties of merely manipula- 

 tive dexterity, Thero is, moreover, nothing new in this I'art nouveau. It is, in 



