Search

In England from the 1730s onwards, demands were increasingly made for the improvement of the design of nationally manufactured goods. Improved design was regarded as an essential prerequisite to the ability to compete on equal terms with rival, and especially French, producers of luxury goods. Proponents of such improvements tended to concentrate their efforts on the provision of drawing instruction for artisans, and a variety of schemes for the establishment of a public educational body for the 'arts of design' were (unsuccessfully) put forward. In the absence of an official policy and institution with control over design education for the applied arts, the 'market' stepped in to satisfy the need far instruction (in the form of private drawing schools and a variety of differently motivated publications including drawing and model books, treatises and engraved ornament), and provided the forum for debate. Two distinct periods (the 1740s-1768 with a sub-period of the 1750s-1763, and post-1768 to the early decades of the nineteenth century) and the respective industries of greatest contemporary concern or visibility (textiles, woodcarving and furniture, furniture and interior decoration) serve as the basis for a more detailed analysis of the different drawing skills that were taught in the period, as well as of the various, and at times contending, meanings of the term 'design'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the different picture frames used for various rooms at Ham House. The earliest frame at Ham is the small tondo, which is said to be from the late sixteenth century. In the Restoration period, gilded frames were said to be favored for portraits, such as the Sunderland frames in the Long Gallery at Ham, while mythological paintings used carved oak frames. In the 1670s, various rooms at Ham, such as the Queen's Bedchamber and Queen's Closet used gilded frames, whereas other rooms used grained or marbled frames to conform with the panelling. The frames at the staircase and the Inner Hall are of carved stained oak, which is said to complement the carvings on the staircase.

A set of cedarwood panels in the British Museum from the church of al-Mu⊂allaqa in Old Cairo, elaborately carved with crosses and feast scenes, is here reconstructed as the sanctuary screen doors to the baptismal chapel of Saint George at al-Mu⊂allaqa. Their iconography and style point to a date ca. 1300, confirmed by the building history of al-Mu⊂allaqa, and to a dependence on feast scenes in other media, especially templon icons. The tight soteriological program presented by the panels is interpreted as appropriate to a baptismal chapel and complementary to the Adventus iconography of the early medieval al-Mu⊂allaqa lintel, which surmounted a door in the parallel funerary chapel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]