Journey back with me and discuss the Victorians

Factual Questions
1

i rediscovered–and have been lost in the abyss of–shorpy.

i live in an antique store and sometimes deal in them, have my place decorated in mostly antiquey stuff…but i’m still always amazed at the over-the-top splendor of the Victorian aesthetic.

looking at this building, for example, a lot of questions come to mind.

how were the Victorians able to create so much amazing stuff…? as in, what elements were present that enabled this extravagance that are missing from the modern era?

was turn-of-the-century America more rich with consummate craftsmen in every facet of employment, thus enabling more beautiful, ornate [everything]* to be made at normal prices?
*(i would say “architecture”–but it’s literally everything. their dang floor heaters are pretty as modern jewelry. hell, i’ve seen Victorian ornate toilets that are art).

i realize a lot of advancements in manufacturing occurred in this period, enabling the Victorians to cast glazed terracotta stonework and mass produce various other ornate elements–but to that end, those methods exist in much greater, more efficient forms today, yet everything is so plain. and if you *do *want something neo-victorian done, it’s $$$.

surely it’s not a matter of there being more money to fritter away on extravagant building facades back in turn-of-the-century america…

my best hypothesis is that more typical Americans were trade laborers and learned more industrial arts, so on average, more artisans existed per capita in each city, allowing builders to go crazy in their designs and elements. the building above was the cotton trade building–a typical building of typical splendor. it gives me the impression anyone who had funds to build a building at all could decorate the hell out of it for negligibly extra money.
maybe i’m wrong…?

so what allowed for this explosion of extravagance…?

2

Coal and other mineral resources, industrial machinery and cheap labour.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, stuff was individually crafted by skilled, artistic people - the means to mass-produce things arrived suddenly, while the artistic ethic of the craftsmen was still prevalent - and by comparison to the former methods, it was really cheap and easy.

And they were building an Age Of Wonder - and part of that wonder was how majestic and impressive everything looked when it was richly decorated.

3

A big reason for over-decorating a building like that is to prove just how wealthy you are.

4

Very few buildings even then had such fancy facades, but the pictures of what ordinary buildings looked like are dull and no one looks at them. Making something like *that *was exactly like a corporate glass and steel skyscraper in the 1970s, or a green-belted corporate headquarters park today. It was a way of showing off how successful and serious the business was.

5

Consider your life of wealth and ease, compared to the much more squalid and difficult life of your typical Victorian peasant. What sustains this? Only a much higher price on the labor of human beings, which can only be sustained by the fact that the things and ordinary services we consume can be produced with far smaller amounts of human labor than in the past. Consider how much less human labor goes into building a car now than in 1905, or a house, or a street, electric lamp – or building.

It is this fact that allows the average man’s labor in 2012 to “buy” considerably more material goods than the average man’s labor in 1902, and why we are in an absolute sense on average much wealthier than the Victorians.

However, as a side-effect, anything which is truly labor-intensive — like fancy decorating on a building – has become extremely expensive, and rarer. In 1905 it cost very little more than the price of the basic materials and basic construction to pay some stone masons to carve gargoyles all over the outside, because the price of human labor was low. In 2012, this is not the case, so it won’t be done for any but the most extravagant of buildings.

6

The difference is the price of (skilled or unskilled) labour. Current building practices make an effort to use uniform, easy-to-assemble pieces because that is cheaper. In many cases, buildings today are designed around available materials rather than having those materials custom-made for just that job. (I.e. let’s say, our steel beams come in 10, 12, 15, 20, or 25-foot lengths.)

The Victorians had just gone over that hump into the industrial age. They still had the design ethic inherited from the Baroque which said “over-decorate every inch”. Note the baroque era had roughly the same economic impetus, only the riches to pay for the decoration came from colonial profits, whereas the Victorian profits came from the returns on industrialization.

There was also the new materials - cast iron decor; pressed tin ceiling decoration, for example, so the middle class could pretend to the same carved-plaster ceiling as a baroque lord’s mansion.

The down side, is of course that originality and custom building cost, and as the price of labour goes up, that is the first economy to implement. You don’t want the same gargoyle as your next 3 neighbours, or the famous building next bl;ock over.

We have in the last 20 or 30 years become so cost-conscious that builders try to skim every last dime - so paying extra for decoration instead of plain flat material is an unnecessary extravagance in the age of the efficiency expert. Finally, all that wonderful carved exterior adds weight and more points of failure; and decoration above the 10th floor is usually lost on people, unless it is the large scale designs like the peak of the Chrysler building. Those glass skyscrapers are a reaction to the fact that the gass is lighter and simpler to install than concrete panels, and since it’s just facade not structural anyway, the lightest is the idea. If it lets in a whole lot more light - bonus!

Finally, the modern era brings a new esthetic - we adorn plain and simple as elegant. My guess is that this is a reaction to manufacturing technology. I suspect baroque or victorian non-stop decoration was initially done to hide the fact that it was almost impossible to create a long, plain flat wall or large clear sheet of glass. So, break up the wall with faux pillars and decorations; make decorative glass windows out of smaller pieces. Can’t cast or stamp out mirror-smooth pieces of metal for utensils? Add a relief decoration so the flaws are not noticeable.

Once clean and smooth was possible, the designs that used it became popular as the herald of a new era. Nowadays that tech is routine and we get tired of it, look for lines and reliefs to break up the monotony.

7

so what about the baroque period? baroque/rococo stuff is just carved to death, over done and then gilded.

i realize most people in positions of power had wealth, but did they also have the power to disproportionately hire (or demand) the artisan labor?

i have a hard time believing that before the renaissance, skilled laborers were proportionately paid…
maybe i’m wrong…

8

The cost of a skilled labourer was rather low. Master carftsmen would run shops, and a large job like a mansion or palace would hire a master craftsman or dozens, and their stable of apprentices and helpers. The craftsman would lay out the pattern, helpers would do the rough work, the apprentices could do some of the finishing, and the exact and fine details would be left to the master or his best apprentice.

Sometimes they cheat. I remember Holyrood Palace at the base of the Edinburgh hill (I think?). I particularly noticed the fine carved dark oak doorframe; I realized that first it had been shaved to a consistent outline, a curved pillar shape. Then the pillar shape had been carved into a very simple repeating motif of oak leaves, so the curve resulted in curved oak leaves. The carving was not as graceful. What we have is local craftsmen trying to imitate the finest, more skillful (and better paid) craftsmen from the cultural center of the continent.

Someone once was talking about this in relation to “Provincial” and “Colonial” furniture designs of the 1700’s era. The lord would go to Paris and se the latest design, then go home and ask a local craftsman to duplicate it. The Paris mastes were experts on wood, had the choicest materials and best knowledge about wood and structure. The locals were less skilled, so to avoid their furniture breaking they made the same design (curved legs, filigree carvings, etc.) but the legs or arms or whatever would be thicker to avoid breakage.

The best-paid might be the artists, who would be the rock stars of the time; in Blenheim Palace, for example, IIRC the Lady in charge of the initial decoration got into a dispute with the artists over pay rates, to the point where nobody would work for her. So the first few stately rooms the walls and ceilings are full of the standard angels, cherubs, and allegorical myths, and the last celing inside the plaster oval is blank white - never finished.

You get what you pay for.

9

I noticed that your pictures seem to be mainly Edwardian, rather than Victorian.

This would mean lighter and less overbearing decoration. If you look around and see which older buildings have survived, you’ll probably find that its mainly the Edwardian ones, and far fewer true Victorians buildings.

The late Victorians and Edwardians were heavily influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, post impressionism, and Art Nouveau.

It should also come as little surprise that this was the age that also inspired Peter Pan, The Hobbit, etc…

Result is that there was a rich new innovative imagery with which to display wealth.

This was largely before mainstream photography, or any electronic media, so you also had a great number of talented sign writers, drafts-men and artists to generate fantastical ideas, provide the imagery and the cheap but highly skilled artisan workforce to turn these ideas into practice.

At the apex of all this were the wealthy who had the means to commission these works, and added to all this were great outbursts of civic pride which used the money from the city corporations to make statements about their national importance.

Civic pride was so much more than perhaps people would think today, just look at the great public buildings in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds - these were all very wealthy cities that had only recently become so, and their wealth was built almost exclusively on manufacturing.

These cities were effectively replacing the older militaristic and ecclesiastical cities of previous generations, and these forms of decoration were signs of progress, it was about putting these cities on the political map - power transferring from the landed classes toward the industrialists.

So what you have really is the use of what was then a modern vernacular translated into buildings, art, even entertainment and science - and the means to make it happen - cheap but highly skilled labour was also there.

If you want to know more then you could look up some of the works of Asa Briggs who has written extensively on the values and make up of Victorian and early Edwardian society.

10

if i understand things correctly, this is what led to the Arts and Crafts movement–a sort of backlash against extravagance and…for lack of a better term…artistic abuse? no?

morris, stickly, roycroft, etc, sort of revolted against the disproportionate labor-to-pay and against the industrial establishment as a whole, again, if i understand correctly.

wasn’t arts and crafts a sort of “get back to the artists and craftsmen making things in their small, boutique establishments” rather than industrial style production…? ie “craftsman style?”

simple lines. exposed tenons. medieval utilitarianism. it’s such the opposite of Victorian (and yes, technically Edwardian) style.

11

Victoria died in 1901. Edward died in 1910. Fussiness continued long after.

There were a couple of reasons for the fashion. The incredible cheapness of labor compared to today is the major one. The working classes were paid next to nothing. That’s how ordinary middle class families - of whom there were far fewer then - automatically expected to have several servants running their houses. The rich had squadrons of them. Skilled labor was paid somewhat more but still tiny amounts. Even that somewhat more was important by comparison. Trade labor ran back generations in most European countries and immigrants brought their trades with them to America. If it gave them even a partial leg up, it was well worth it.

Because of this long tradition of cheap labor, people expected to see the evidence of what they paid for. Invisible quality was good; visible quality was far better. People liked fussiness in every aspect of fashion - furniture, clothing, picture frames, anything you can think of - precisely because it showed their ability to pay for it. Plainness was cheapness. (Or a religious sect like the Quakers or Amish.)

There were some people who argued that plain lines for buildings were better. Lewis Sullivan influenced Frank Lloyd Wright, e.g. But for every building created in their image, a hundred was done in Richardson Romaneque.

The Arts and Crafts movement was a reaction to ornateness, but not a major architectural style in the U.S. and limited even in regards to furniture. It was one of several contrary design movements, none of whom had more than limited penetration. Some design movements, especially Streamline Design hit their peak in the 30s - fewer lines meant lower manufacturing costs - but didn’t take over the industry. I’d argue that the virtues of plainness didn’t take hold until after WWII, when modernism really started to be dominant in architecture. You can find individual examples earlier, but the halt in building because of the Depression and war meant that it couldn’t take hold as a movement. Deco monuments like the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings - whose interiors were showplaces - were far more popular until the glass box took over.

In short, the Victorians didn’t create ornate stuff because they were doing great art; they were creating ornate stuff because that’s what they thought bling should look like. For a while in the 20th century everybody hated that look; now it’s coming back; sometime in the future it may be hated again. And only the best stuff has survived. The bulk of it was ugly and tacky, just as the bulk of everything is. Maybe in the future everybody will pant over decorated iPhone cases.

12

Good post-I am amazed at the quality of of Victorian-era woodwork-these guys were artists..and it was all done with hand tools! As was pointed ot, these artisans don’t exist today, because nobody can afford such work. That is why old furniture is in such demand-it is better made than the crap made today.
My wife bought a mahogany coffee table at a yard sale-it is solid wood-I doubt that mohaghany is even available today.