The Gordon Journal

Declared He Could Make His Living
at Any Trade Save That
of Hanging

"Little Korea, now being urged by its leaders to use only articles of Korean manufacture," says Horace B. Cheney, "is advocating nationalism in art and industry today just as Charles I did during his reign.

"The Jacobean period of decoration has been called the most distinctly national of the English periods: for while largely inspired by Low Country models, it was yet developed originally by English craftsmen. And these had displaced the foreign workers of Elizabethan times.

"The Jacobean period was ushered in with James I. 'The Wisest Fool in Christendom,' but not until the times of Charles, 'saint and martyr,' were its possibilities of beauty fully developed.

"Charles was the spirit of its efflorescence. He, like Francis I and Lorenzo the Magnificent, loved beauty for its own sake. Indeed, he was himself a craftsman, saying of himself, I believe I could make my living by any trade save that of making hangings."

The friend of Rubens, the patron of the brilliant Van Dyck, a connoisseur who was also a king—and yet a king, alas, 'who knew all the arts except the art of governing.'

In his reign, the turned and twisted woodwork of his father's day came to softer, more delicately crafted beauty, and the characteristics of modern renaissance ornament manifested themselves in geometrically patterned arrangements and a growing use of inlay. The great hall (still the most important feature of the majestic English home), was then indeed a thing of stately splendor—rich with tapestries and hangings, warm with paneling, exquisite with ornamental ceilings, mantelpieces and lofty bay windows."