The Carthusian's review of the museum displays a particular understanding of peasant art, and it is interesting to note that Gertrude Jekyll had loaned some of the items.
"Of the Loan Exhibitions which have been held in the Museum,
the present is not the least remarkable – in some ways the most remarkable –
though not so likely to appeal to the general taste as some which have gone
before,’ for example the delightful Watts and Cecil Lawson Exhibition of a few
years back. If novelty goes for anything
then so far as that goes, we suspect that there were four visitors to whom the
Peasant Art of Europe was not almost entirely new.
The 700 objects brought together in the Museum
and Lecture Room were the loan of Mr. Girdlestone, Miss Gertrude Jekyll (our
kind neighbour of ‘House and Garden’ fame) Mr. J. W. Marshall, Miss Moss, Mrs
Robertson, and the Rev. G.S. Davies, and it is not too much to say that out of
that large number of homely objects which came from the hand and brain of
humble and uninstructed peasants between the years 1400 and 1902 there was
scarcely one which did not repay examination. Indeed the fault of the show was that it demanded rather too much from
spectator.
Amongst the designs were a
large number of very great beauty, and it would not be easy to point to a bad
one: - it would, we think, be quite impossible to point out even one in which
the ornament interfered with the proclaimed use of the article or in which the
ornament was rendered invisible while the article was being put to the proper
use. And here you have the very first cardinal
principle of all applied art – a principle which is almost always violated by
the amateur decorator; and even by the professional decorator who makes his
goods to sell. The peasant, happily
untrammelled by any law of art, follows his healthy instinct and produces an
object which is at once beautiful, sensible and honest..."
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