Excerpt from The Decorative Arts in England: 1660-1780

The Wallace Collection at Hertford House is, of course, far larger, but what the Wallace Collection has effected for French decorative art, the collection here described has - up to the limit of its size - fulfilled for English. A difference, however, is that whilst at Hertford House we see specimens with the character and style of which we are already well acquainted, few of us were aware that English work had reached the high standard of the objects here illustrated. Both collections embrace the work of the same period, the late 17th and the 18th Centuries, and it was then that decorative surroundings such as are aimed at to-day reached perfection. A collection of objects of that period, therefore, possesses far greater educational value than if - as in so many Museums - the earlier work is almost exclusively represented. Surely the primary objects of a Museum of Decorative Art are to improve taste and to be a guidance and help to the designers of articles for modern requirements? Oak credences and settles, Gothic tapestries, mazer bowls, etc., however interesting to the antiquary, possess little value for practical purposes.

Every great movement in art has been primarily due to the patron; artists and craftsmen have always appeared to carry out the demand so created, and the history of ancient Greece and Rome, 01 the mediaeval Church, of the Burgundian Princes and of the diverse development of the Renaissance in districts of Italy, of the wealthy Dutch traders during the first half of the 17th Century are independent illustrations of this truth. Therefore, in endeavouring to understand any period of art, it is an advantage to realise the patronage which induced it.

With the downfall of the Constable of Bourbon in the reign of Francois I, there disappeared the semi-independent great French noble; and from that time till the latter part of the 18th Century the peers of France became more and more dependent upon and subservient to the King, and the fashions of the Court were slavishly followedby them. The patronage of the French Kings and their courts has dominated the decorative arts of that country since Francois Ier introduced the Italian Renaissance into France to the time when Napoleon desired that the art of the Caesars should be modernised to reflect his Imperial ambitions.

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