English Decorative Ceilings at Crewe Hall

Illustration: Decorative ceiling of the Carved Parlour, Crewe Hall, England.

Crewe Hall is a Jacobean mansion located in Cheshire, England. It was originally built between 1615 and 1636, although restored, renovated and expanded over the generations. The hall is fortunately still standing, so many have been dismantled over the twentieth century, and although altered it is still considered one of the finest Jacobean houses in England. The three examples shown here are illustrations of the decorative ceilings at Crewe Hall, some of which are the original decoration produced for the house in the seventeenth century.

Decorative ceilings have always been popular from the earliest cultures right through until the end of the nineteenth century and in some cases into the twentieth. However, despite many of the examples that are readily available from so many different periods, it was not a decorative format that was limited to the wealthy. Although stucco ceilings specifically might well have been out of the financial reach of many that did not stop ceilings of the more financially restrained showing the love of decoration and pattern. Many of the smaller cottages of England for example show evidence of painted beams, rafters and ceilings, very often seen in carved wood or using a stencilled technique, giving lively  and colourful pattern work that followed the medieval fascination with floral tendrils, birds and even fantastical animals, much of it produced on an amateur scale and on an amateur budget.

Illustration: Decorative ceiling at Crewe Hall, England.

The ceilings of Crewe Hall are a fascinating glimpse of how far decorative art could be expanded in order to encompass all levels and surfaces of an interior. Although they may well not fit in with our own limited and constrained decorative palette, they do show much of what was considered normal for the vast length of the history of decoration, such as a high level of showmanship, a projection of perceived wealth, as well as an understanding of sophistication and belonging. Much of the history of the decorative arts has been about wealth and the showing of that wealth. However, there was also a whole level of the decorative arts that often seemed almost invisible compared to the projections the aristocracy and semi-aristocracy. These two groups of individuals although dominating society seemed often to have had the most fragile egos and were dominated themselves by a sometimes acute sense of insecurity.

As stated earlier, even the relatively financially poor or socially unconnected decorated their homes as best they could, and although this may well have served the same purpose as the wealthier individuals, a projection of status, wealth and sophistication, it also must surely have had at least an element of joy in the use of internal decoration for its own sake. That these forms of decorative art were often not commented on or critiqued, says perhaps much about the stratified snobbery of both decorative art in general and the critic specifically.

Illustration: Decorative ceiling at Crewe Hall, England.

In some respects, by concentrating our admiration on the decorative elements to be found only amongst the rich, we degrade and marginalise the decorative formats adopted, expanded and reimagined by the poorer elements of society, who, through much of human history including our own, were often the majority of the society and therefore the norm.

The nineteenth century Arts and Crafts movement in England tended to concentrate not only on the ideal of the craftsmanship of the ordinary artisan, but also of the decorative work that those artisans supplied, much of it being distributed through the working and lower middle classes, rather than the aristocracy. It is easy to see why the English Arts and Crafts movement quickly took on a political rather than purely decorative stance, with Socialism being at the heart of the movement with its celebration of the working man and woman and their contribution to the creative culture of England through generations of innovation and tradition. 

 Illustration: Carved wood ornament.

The irony of course was the fact that many in the English Arts and Crafts movement who celebrated the achievements of the ordinary working artisan were selling work produced in the same vein to the rich and powerful of England not to the ordinary citizens, an irony not lost on those intimately involved in the movement and an issue that still dogs the English craft world today.

Therefore, although the ceilings as well as interiors in general that were produced for the wealthy are extrordinarily beautiful and should be treasured as some of the finest workmanship produced during their respective decorative ages, the decorative details that can also be found in the more humble homes across England should also be celebrated as equally beautiful and treasured. After all, fine workmanship is fine workmanship and all adds to the celebration as a whole of English decoration, not just that supplied to the aristocracy. 

For anyone interested, there is a good Wikipedia site for Crewe Halland can be found here.

Further reading links:

Embellishment: To Make Something More Attractive

Illustration: Embroidered velvet cover of a Bible, 1583.

In many ways embellishment is the ultimate tool of the decorator. It can be seen, with some degree of accuracy, as the heart and soul of the decorative world. To understand and accept embellishment is to understand and accept decoration. 

Picking up a dictionary, Collins English, the easy definition of the word embellish is:

to make something more attractive by adding decorations

or

to make a story more interesting by adding details which may not be true

Collins Thesaurus makes an addition to the word embellish by adding: decorate, enhance, adorn, dress, grace, deck, trim, dress up, enrich, garnish, ornament, gild, festoon, bedeck, tart up, beautify.

 Illustration: Decorative iron work from the doors of Notre Dame, Paris, 13th century.

To make an addition to, or to enhance the sum of, seems to be an integral part of human nature. We have always felt the need to embroider, using the word in its loosest term, whether that be through design or craft, or indeed through fact or fiction. In this we are as one species, as no matter what culture or era we think of, all used decoration to enhance and embellish most elements of the artificial world that they created around them. 

Textiles in particular has a long and full tradition of embellishment. Additions to fabric can take the form of nearly anything, from the addition of pure stitching to other fabrics, beads, metals, wood, glass, precious stones, animal products, and so on.

Embellishment can also take many forms, with pattern work following the suggestion of nature, the geometrical abstract, fonts and lettering. It can be perceived as a subtlety, the changing of colour, line and texture, or it can be much bolder, using large-scale shapes and patterns. Whatever the technique or suggestion for composition, the end result is always nearly the same, to make something more than it was, to add decoration to enhance its attraction to the individual.

 Illustration: Henry William Arrowsmith. Decorative design, 1811.

However, embellishment was by no means limited to textiles. Ceramics, glass, metal, wood in fact all the major and minor decorative arts used embellishment as a legitimate tool in which to decoratively enhance their results and it was seen by generation after generation as an integral addition to the skills base of the discipline, rather than as a filler or by-product of the main event.

This relatively intense and symbiotic human attraction to the decorative is something that Modernism, on the whole, failed to take into account. In many respects, Modernism saw one of its tasks as the declaring of war on the traditions of human nature and human decorative art, seeing decoration and pattern as the addition of extraneous embellishment through dishonesty to the form and function of the product. To be fair this does have some merit, embellishment can well be seen as a form of tarting up, a disguise or distraction of the practical purpose of the product if you will, even to the point of the deflection of the truth, anyone who has bought a frozen pizza in a box will know exactly what I mean. Even the second definition of the Collins English dictionary stated above, although being an application towards fiction and story-telling, does make the implication clear as far as at least a proportion of embellishment is concerned: adding details which may not be true.

 Illustration: Decorative ornamental detail, 1826.

Having said that, was it strictly necessary to have a near iconoclastic crusade against the world of embellishment, decoration and pattern? Probably not. A number of minimal Modernist enthusiasts had frankly disturbing ideas as to where they stood in the time frame of the decorative arts, compared to those who embellished. Many of those ideas and analogies bordered on cultural bigotry, with traditional decoration being seen by many as belonging to a world of the non-sophisticated and the culturally backward. It is perhaps an unsavoury aspect of some of the twentieth century theories on design and decoration, theories which are often stripped of their more contentious aspects by today's world.   

In many respects, the iconoclastic approach the Modernists took to decoration had a mixed result, at least on the level of the removal of pattern. The twentieth century history of textile pattern work is just as rich, if not more so, than the previous nineteenth century. However, embellishment is not quite what it used to be. We have no arabesques or curlicues to embellish our phones, TVs, cars, laptops, building exteriors, pavements. We live in an environment where embellishment is often limited and contained, leaving much of our artificial world often with a stark and plain prospect. In some respects, is it any wonder then that graffiti, apart from the sanctioned graffiti of the advertising world, is often the only outward appearance of colour, intensity and expression, and even this is frowned on as a departure from the norm, in other words an attack on the minimal by the decorative. 

 Illustration: Transylvanian embroidered woman's winter jacket.

There is always more than one way of looking at things and there are of course merits within the decorative and non-decorative worlds. However, personally I would be more than happy to own a piece of technology that favoured the flamboyant, and would love to walk down a high street that favoured pattern through tessellation, rather than grey flagstones and tarmac. In other words, long live the human capacity for embellishment.

Futher reading links: