TY - JOUR
AU - Rhee, Pollyanna
AB - Abstract In the middle of the nineteenth century, a new material from the British Straits Settlements fascinated botanists, industrialists, journalists and consumers with its almost endless possibilities. For its champions, the gutta percha tree was more than a just a rubber plant. Transported from the colonies to London, gutta percha could be shaped into any form and used to imitate a variety of expensive materials. This article argues that those advancing gutta percha’s applications for decorative and ornamental objects offered a sanitized version of industrial production to the public by portraying artistic skill as central to the transformation of the material from its origins as a colonial raw material. The material’s applications allowed British manufacturers to demonstrate their role in synthetizing scientific knowledge, industrial production and artistic skill. A catalogue of ornamental goods and depictions of the Gutta Percha Factory in London emphasized the skills of workers who crafted artistic objects through industrial processes. Critics decried the influence of industrial manufacturing on workers and industrial production’s detrimental effect on the arts, but others argued that these gutta percha objects highlighted the artistry and ingenuity of factory workers. More significant was the idea that these factory workers with modern industrial techniques supplanted old modes of craft and contributed to a necessary updating of artistic production. In 1854, an issue of The Illustrated Magazine of Art devoted several pages to the wonders of a material whose usefulness was discovered just over a decade earlier. The material carried interest not just for its own qualities, but as a representative specimen of the inventiveness and imagination of the day.1 Coming in the midst of technological innovations entering British life in the nineteenth century including steam, gaslight, electricity and photography, gutta percha arrival excited manufacturers and commentators for its ease of workability and diversity of applications. A species of rubber tree found in the British Straits Settlements, then a Residency under the Governor of Bengal, in present-day Singapore and Malaysia, the historian Deborah Cohen describes gutta percha as the ‘wonder substance of its day’.2 Public remarks on it during the mid-nineteenth century tended towards fervent accolades regarding its ostensibly unlimited positive qualities: it was unbreakable, malleable to almost any shape, waterproof and applicable to a range of goods from bedpans and book bindings to transatlantic telegraph cables. ‘Some substances in nature’, quipped one writer referring to gutta percha, appeared ‘expressly intended to fill a sphere of utility peculiar to themselves, and for which no substitute, or virtually none, seem capable of being discovered’.3 Now mostly remembered—if at all—for its functional applications in telegraph cables and dental fillings, for a short time in the nineteenth century, gutta percha’s applications embodied larger hopes and ambitions about Britain’s imperial and commercial achievements. Demonstrating the process of transforming gutta percha from a sap to a range of decorative items gave producers an opportunity to publicize not only their technical and industrial capacities, but also their artistic imagination. Objects with utilitarian purposes formed out of gutta percha attracted wide acclaim, but so did items noted less for their utility than their aesthetic qualities. Decorative vases, statuary and ornamental mouldings demonstrated technical and artistic skills. The spread of interest in the material from the Society of Arts to the 1851 Great Exhibition to the pages of The Illustrated Magazine of Art highlights the interactions between scientific, imperial, artistic and economic imperatives that visible across British society. This article examines the height of gutta percha’s popularity in the mid-nineteenth century through the promotion of the material for decorative objects and architectural ornaments. Journalists and writers centred much of their attention on the material’s ability to serve as a convincing imitation of more expensive substances, such as marble or wood, for ornamented goods and looked inside the Gutta Percha Company of London, founded by Dublin chemist Henry Bewley and Charles Hancock, the holder of many patents on the production of the material and brother of Thomas Hancock, a well-known innovator in the British rubber industry, to reveal industrial and aesthetic advancements at work. Around 1850, the Gutta Percha Company published an extensive pattern book with samples of the items available for decorative household purposes.4 With the objects drawn and published at full scale by an artist noted for his scientific illustrations, the catalogue titled The Gutta Percha Company’s Pattern Book of Ornament for Use of the Trade presented the results of the aesthetic and technological achievements that converted a rubber tree found in the Straits Settlements to one of any number of objects to be consumed in England. Rather than focusing on qualitative judgements regarding the objects and the mechanized processes that produced them, tracing narratives of gutta percha’s journey from a tree to a series of decorative objects worthy of prominent display in London highlights the ways that labour, knowledge and expertise intertwined and also acknowledges as art historian Ann-Sophie Lehmann writes, ‘how the complex interaction between humans, materials, tools, and technologies shapes possible meanings’.5 The decorative articles depicted in the pattern book legitimized and marketed the technologies involved in manufacturing gutta percha items.6 Documenting gutta percha’s potentially useful applications could have simply remained within the realm of scientific and technical accomplishments. But the pattern book and journalistic portrayals of visits to the Gutta Percha Company works suggest an alternate approach focused on the place of artistic skill in the development of industrial production techniques. These accounts supporting a narrative of technical and aesthetic expertise worked to distinct, but related ends. The pattern book’s high-quality production and detailed illustrations of ornamental items offered evidence of the Gutta Percha Company’s commitment to excellence in design and industrial standards, as well as its own strength as a firm with resources to invest in such a publication. Press depictions of the Gutta Percha Company’s works in London offered further evidence of this point of view. Industrial labour and processes depicted in newspapers and magazines focused much attention on the production of decorative, rather than utilitarian, objects. The reporting distinguished this type of work as noble, modern and technical. Emphasizing aesthetic characteristics and aptitude as an integral facet of industrial production reframes a common argument in histories of design. A moralizing voice characterized many unfavourable assessments in contemporary accounts during the flourishing of design reform and education in the mid-nineteenth century that would soon afterward inspire the Arts and Crafts movement.7 The first issue of the Journal of Design and Manufactures founded by Henry Cole published in March 1849 had an introductory address that advocated for the commercial and moral values of ornamental art.8 That same year, John Ruskin observed a direct connection between machinery and the degradation and shackling of the worker. A machine that divided work into small pieces made it impossible for an individual to derive any pleasure or pride through carrying out a well-executed task from beginning to end. Machines, Ruskin argued, took away the ‘one thing we have in our power’—doing without the machine.9 Artist and arts administrator Richard Redgrave concurred with Ruskin observing that in the past ‘the artist was at once designer, ornamentist, and craftsman’ and ‘his hand and his mind were wrought together, not only in the design, but in every stage of its completion’. Ornaments of their day created by machines had ‘a sickening monotony, a tiresome sameness…and man himself becomes only the servant of the machine’.10 This moral critique of imitation connected with a critique of the division of labour. Decades later similar views persisted. For Sigfried Giedion, mechanization ‘permeated and transmuted’ one’s surroundings the nineteenth-century like an ‘attack…pouring in from all sides’, infiltrating the daily lives of people and confusing the human environment.11 Machinery that spilled out statuary, pictures, vases and carpets not only instigated the ‘adulteration of handicraft methods and decaying sense for materials’, but also caused a dulling and bloating of forms. For some the most pressing issue was not mechanization itself, but its deleterious consequences on human character because it destroyed ‘man’s instinct for quiet surroundings and for the dignity of space’.12 Unfortunately, criticism levelled at mechanical production of art objects could not staunch the demand for these mass-produced objects for domestic interiors. The damaging consequences led art critic and historian Nikolaus Pevsner to pointedly ask, ‘why did the machine in the end become so disastrous to art?’13 In addition to the harmful results of mechanization, Ruskin identified a related, though distinct, threat in the manufacture of imitation materials, including stamped metals, artificial stones and imitation woods. From his point of view, imitation was simply meant for preserving a record of great works and nothing more.14 The dishonesty of machine production was ‘a sufficient reason to determine absolute and unconditional rejection of it’, but the deceits represented by imitations of wood, tortoiseshell or marble violated truth and became ‘madness’. These materials simply caused people to be ‘shallower in our understandings, colder in our hearts, and feebler in our wits’.15 Despite his vitriol, other contemporaries defended the use of machinery. Instead of rejecting the products, they noted the ways that mechanization could reform through design, since these objects would not only be cheap, practical and durable, but also beautiful, therefore raising the prestige of industry.16 In addition, a market that privileged quantity over quality simply valued an object the more ornament it contained. Gutta percha’s advocates stood in contrast of the ideals articulated by Ruskin, Redgrave and others and put forward another interpretation of art’s relationship to industry. Although a piece of ornamented metal could connote inferiority and cheapness it could also represent modernity, innovation and progress.17 Gutta percha was part of what one historian has described as a ‘boon of imitative arts’ from die-stamped, cast, machine-punched, embossed and plated metal reproductions.18 In the 1830s and 1840s, new reproduction technologies included chromolithography, electroplating and cast-iron—all of which were advertised as superior to those made by hand.19 The seemingly infinite plasticity of this and other materials seemed almost magical, but it was very much a product of human thought and labour.20 Decorative objects publicized gutta percha’s value, not just for industrialists and scientists, but also for popular consumption. In this case, commercial interests did not stand outside of the goals of gaining knowledge about the natural world, but showed how scientific knowledge could have a ‘perfectly clear and calculable economic value that could be offered on the market’.21 Rather than diminishing artistic competence or traditional craftsmanship, linking proficiency in the arts and industry together produced further evidence of the nation’s capacities in those realms. By bringing readers into the factory, journalists presented industrial production and the labour of its workers as a path for innovation in aesthetic skill rather than a symbol of its decline. In making this argument, they demonstrated that the real culmination of gutta percha occurred in England rather than its native habitat. ‘Modern ingenuity’ rendered the material useful, as well as ornamental, affordable and widely available.22 The two final attributes distinguished gutta percha from natural plastics such as shellac and amber, which were considered luxury items.23 The magic of ‘infinite transformation’, as critic Roland Barthes would later write about plastics, could enter into middle-class homes in a variety of shapes.24 This approach came to an abrupt end for the Gutta Percha Company. On 5 June 1853, a fire destroyed much of the factory as well as adjacent businesses with damages estimated at £100,000.25 In its aftermath, only the raw material warehouse, tube manufactory and mechanics’ shop remained. Occurring during the weekend while all employees were away, the fire quickly spread to the nearby Regent’s Canal and threatened to extend further due to a nearby firewood works containing stacks of pine wood pallets, though a group of men stopped this by pushing the wood into the canal.26 Destroyed in the fire was the space for decorative items with the Illustrated London News reporting that ‘out of an immense number of drinking-cups, plates, fancy frames, inkstands…which were stored in the premises, nothing now can be seen but heaps of partly-consumed gutta percha’.27 Although the Gutta Percha Company continued manufacturing at the site after recovering from the fire, decorative items seemed to have taken a subordinate position to more practical and economically beneficial objectives. Small items made of gutta percha such as toys, momento mori and engraved medals continued to be produced and can sometimes be seen in museum collections, but larger decorative objects and architectural ornaments fell out of production.28 In 1864, the Gutta Percha Company merged with the Glass, Elliott, & Company to form the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company—a name suggestive of their new task: providing materials for transatlantic telegraph cables.29 Although utilitarian interests won out, the Gutta Percha Company’s artistic endeavours had offered a way of connecting the arts and industry with manufacturers, thus furnishing the means for giving artistic ideas physical form.30 Proponents argued that this relationship carried a wider social benefit in refining the nation’s taste and producing a new type of factory labour that was both modern and artistic.31 The right type of discovery An American government document from 1903 noted that as with ‘many other commercial products coming from Oriental lands’, gutta percha’s initial date of discovery was lost to history.32 The English discovery has a greater degree of accuracy. Most often the credit goes to William Montgomerie, an assistant surgeon to the Residency living in Singapore, in the early 1840s who had undertaken various botanical investigations and received some attention in London for his efforts in cultivating nutmeg. His interests extended to the region’s rubber plants.33 In 1843, Montgomerie’s brother-in-law, Henry Gouger, read aloud an account to the Society of Arts in London that pinpointed Montgomerie’s interest in gutta percha to a day when he noticed the material on the handle of a parang, a machete common in Southeast Asia, used by a native woodcutter. Inquiring about the material, Montgomerie learned that it could be moulded into any form by being warmed in boiling water and used to construct whips, shoes, buckets and vessels [1].34 Fig 1. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘A Branch of the Gutta Percha Tree with Flower and Fruit’, from H. W. Jewesbury, A Short History of the Introduction of Gutta Percha into Europe (London, 1883). Fig 1. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘A Branch of the Gutta Percha Tree with Flower and Fruit’, from H. W. Jewesbury, A Short History of the Introduction of Gutta Percha into Europe (London, 1883). Believed to stem from a Malay word for gum or resin (though many noted the coincidence that ‘gutta’ seemed similar to the Latin word for ‘drop’ while also lamenting that the material’s popularity spread so quickly that no English name could be adopted), Montgomerie’s was not the first British discovery of gutta percha.35 The tree had been known to the Portuguese and Dutch, as well as the English, since the seventeenth century.36 Two hundred years before Montgomerie, John Tradescant the Younger brought what is thought to be the first known specimen of gutta percha to Europe.37 In addition, Thomas Lobb and Jose D’Almeida observed and transported samples to London in the mid-nineteenth century.38 In acknowledging the multiple sources of British discovery, one writer both prioritized Montgomerie’s accomplishment over others, but noted it was not ‘very remarkable that such a substance should have two independent discoverers’.39 After some initial experiments, Montgomerie sent reports to the Medical Board of Calcutta and the Society of Arts with the conclusion that ‘if procurable in large quantities’, the material would be ‘extensively useful’.40 He also sent the Society of Arts a box of gutta percha sap and lumps of the material formed by fusing thin pieces together in hot water.41 Society members subjected the specimens to rigid examination mainly to discover whether the material was useful and suitable enough for shipping to England on a large scale.42 After discussing the results of these experiments, the Society awarded Montgomerie its gold medal in 1843. News that the material was applicable to numerous purposes led many to obtain patents and import substantial amounts of gutta percha to London. The Gutta Percha Company, for example, imported about 700 tons of gutta percha between 1845 and the middle of 1848.43 The volume of imports meant that less than a decade after the start of gutta percha’s commercial trade, the spectre of scarcity loomed. Geography played a role. Only a small segment of the Straits Settlements had gutta percha trees in large quantities and attempts to cultivate gutta percha at Kew Gardens were unsuccessful.44 The local population’s methods for extracting gutta percha from the tree exacerbated British fears. The Malay, Chinese and Dayak people who collected gutta percha went in groups to the forest, sometimes for several months, to extract sap from decades-old trees that stood at least thirty-feet high. They set out at the conclusion of the rainy season to avoid illness and also because they believed sap flowed more easily and diminished the chances of rain washing away the sap as it was being collected.45 Extraction consisted of cutting down a tree and removing the bark, which would release a milky juice that coagulated into sap [2]. Fig 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Testimonials of gutta percha from The Gutta Percha Company’s Pattern Book of Ornament for Use of the Trade, (c.1850), photograph by author, courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. Fig 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Testimonials of gutta percha from The Gutta Percha Company’s Pattern Book of Ornament for Use of the Trade, (c.1850), photograph by author, courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. Once collected, the milky sap—about twenty to thirty pounds per tree—quickly coagulated.46 Before the sap completely hardened, native women kneaded it into oblong bricks around seven and twelve inches in length and four or five inches thick.47 An observer commented that these bricks ‘made up for exportation’ were not uniform in size and due to the ‘careless’ manner of collection and a mix of bark, wood and leaves were stuck in the kneaded bricks. Moreover, the ‘fancy of the rude barbarian’ sometimes resulted in the bricks being shaped into a form, such as a bird with red berries for eyes, images of ships, quadrupeds or the ‘human face divine’.48 The shape of the gutta percha mattered little since the English bought gutta percha by weight. James Collins, a botanist with a special interest in rubber trees, indicated that this sometimes resulted in ‘cunningness’ from the collectors who would engage in ‘some of the lowest tricks of the trade’ by placing stones in the middle of a gutta percha block. He lamented that such trickery had become ‘naturalized in savage life’. At other times, collectors received advances for money, clothes, food and tools, but some never returned.49 In addition to doubts about the honesty of native labour, gutta percha’s slow growth and the volume needed to satisfy European eagerness for the material prompted fears of imminent extinction. Again, the English complained that native workers employed ‘the most destructive’ method for collecting sap since they cut down the trees and tried instead to have them adopt a system of cutting diagonal notches into standing trees to limited success. Replacing a ‘wasteful, sinful procedure’ marked by an ‘extravagant short-sightedness’ also would impart lessons of delayed gratification characteristic of ‘more civilized men’ to the ‘rude islanders’.50 The British partially succeeded in convincing the native workers to merely tap the trees rather than cutting them down and also passed laws prohibiting felling trees. Some noted that these laws only had a limited effect as they ‘never penetrated to the wild tribes of the interior where the collecting was done’ [3].51 Fig 3. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘The Gathering of Gutta Percha’, from Gutta Percha, Its Discovery, History, and Manifold Uses (London: Benjamin L. Green, 1851). Fig 3. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘The Gathering of Gutta Percha’, from Gutta Percha, Its Discovery, History, and Manifold Uses (London: Benjamin L. Green, 1851). After travelling from the Straits to London, workers relayed the blocks to a cutting machine, a large iron disk powered by steam engines, that sliced them into shavings. In order to remove dirt and other material ‘which Malay carelessness has mingled’, the slices were then placed into large tanks of boiling water to separate out impurities and soften the gutta percha.52 After a second boiling, the material was sent through a ‘rolling machine’ made of large steel cylinders to create a flattened sheet of gutta percha that was finally ready to be shaped. Various sections of the works produced different objects with boiling water, knives, moulds and presses. Some ornamented items were stamped from copper dies, but many were made from moulds. These decorative items showed ‘not only the hand of the skillful copies, but the original mind of the artist’.53 Decorative gutta percha produced in London garnered much publicity through deliberate and widespread exhibition. The Gutta Percha Company could even claim an auxiliary role for inspiring the idea for the 1851 Great Exhibition. Seven years before the Exhibition, Francis Whishaw, the Secretary of the Society of Arts and a consultant to the Gutta Percha Company, proposed to revive the Society’s annual exhibitions commencing in 1847. Whishaw had been an ardent champion of gutta percha and discussed its uses and exhibited products made from the material. In one case, he reportedly placed a one-hundred foot long gutta percha tube into a mouthpiece of a flute. While someone else held the flute and pressed the keys to the tune of ‘God Save the Queen’, Whishaw blew into the tube from across the room to produce the sound.54 Even more dramatic was a gutta percha telakouphanon or speaking trumpet which reportedly could transmit a person’s whispering voice up to three-quarters of a mile.55 The Great Exhibition offered a greater public stage for demonstrations of gutta percha’s novel applications. The Company displayed numerous items with utilitarian value such as tubing, pipes, machinery belts and linings, but also lured visitors’ attention with a large ornamented sideboard, a sculpture called ‘Deer and Hounds’, a brass chaise with gutta percha backing and a lifeboat.56 The array of goods confirmed not only the plethora of uses, but also ingenuity and creativity with no small measure of promotional instincts. Nikolaus Pevsner posited that the Gutta Percha Company could not have reasonably considered producing such items, but argued that one could ‘be sure of attention and enthusiasm if his exhibits had novelty and displayed cuteness’, so the ‘range of the articles on show reached from the most intelligent and functionally sound to the most futile’.57 The Great Exhibition’s organizers understandably emphasized the technical advancements and useful products to be displayed, but their ambitions pointed towards a loftier contribution to knowledge about the world with the exhibition framed as an ‘Encyclopedia of Knowledge’ of proportions never known before.58 Making this contribution generative meant facing the division between ‘the scientific and the operative minds of England’ who have ‘dwelt so far apart’ with no channel of communication between them. Science, ‘which in practical hands might be made productive of comfort and advantage to the world’, found itself ‘locked up for a time in coteries and classes’.59 This would not do. Scientific knowledge needed to enter the realm of production, practicality and artistry. Visitors marvelled over finished gutta percha products with little evidence of the industrial processes involved. Making the processes visible to the public would present industry as an augmentation rather than displacement of human skill. Decorative gutta percha items conveyed to the public that the results of modern industrial production could take the forms and features of an older and perhaps more comfortable tradition.60 The scientific minds of those who produced useful objects from gutta percha coupled with artistic excellence culminated in a product that offered consumers ‘facsimiles of the production of genius’. The ‘simple magic of cheapness’ placed high-quality, aesthetically pleasing items in the hands of many. While acknowledging gutta percha’s status as a ‘facsimile’, one writer considered it an asset for public consumption. The ability to produce mass quantities of products exposed large numbers of the population to ‘a new direction to the applications of machinery and skill of invention’.61 Indeed, gutta percha was only one of a number of materials used for as a substitute for another including walls painted to imitate textiles, papier maché or graining a less-expensive wood to stand in for a more prestigious variety.62 As an affordable substitute for more expensive materials, gutta percha decorative objects allowed ‘the humblest’ to achieve a level of domestic refinement that had once been the province of the wealthy.63 One historian notes that imitation and innovation in the nineteenth-century even constituted ‘correlative not alternative concepts’.64 Being an imitation of another material did not necessarily connote inferiority. Facsimiles expanded access to decorative items for a large swath of the British middle class, but their popularity did not start and end with the middle class.65 Channels of influence between the wealthy and the middle class often came through numerous publications which provided guidelines for domestic interiors through illustrations and descriptions of rooms in country estates. These works presented aristocratic tastes as the model for domestic decoration, but aristocrats did not completely avoid the economic benefits of imitations.66 When the architect Benjamin Wyatt renovated the home of the Duke of Wellington, Apsley House on Hyde Park Corner in London, he spent £400 on moulded ornaments rather than more expensive carved wood versions.67 Advocates even expressed a hope that less-expensive, imitative materials might even achieve an equal reputation to more precious alternatives. One proponent of gutta percha even claimed that ‘beautiful groups of figures, graceful in design, and admirably executed’ could be seen in ‘the most fashionable depots’, and it was ‘not impossible’ that ‘some future Stowe may number its productions among its works of art, and every rustic villa will consider itself wanting in taste without possession of some specimens of elegance, utility, and economy in its grounds, formed from this remarkable substance’.68 Arranging artistry The Gutta Percha Company produced its own organ for publicity around 1850 when they commissioned Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a well-regarded scientific illustrator, to provide drawings for 102 plates worth of designs of decorative objects available for purchase. Printed by T. Wells & Company located in the City of London, the Gutta Percha Company’s Pattern Book of Ornament for the Use of the Trade was addressed to ‘Upholsters, Cabinet and Picture-Frame Makers, Decorators, and Others’ for the purpose of easing their ability to select patterns for clients. The pattern book did more than facilitate purchases—it bolstered the reputation of the material it was selling. The catalogue’s introduction noted that gutta percha’s merits had been long acknowledged by ‘competent judges’ for decorative purposes and confirmed by steadily increasing demand for the goods.69 To substantiate that claim the pattern book included loose-leaf inserts with several pages of testimonials from satisfied consumers of more practical gutta percha products such as shoe soles and hearing aids. These supplements reassured consumers and supported gutta percha’s reputation as a material worth trusting [4]. Fig 4. Open in new tabDownload slide The Gutta Percha Company’s Pattern Book of Ornament for Use of the Trade, (c.1850), photograph by author, courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, AA1525 G98 FF. Fig 4. Open in new tabDownload slide The Gutta Percha Company’s Pattern Book of Ornament for Use of the Trade, (c.1850), photograph by author, courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, AA1525 G98 FF. The plates in the pattern book offered further evidence of gutta percha’s sound characteristics and scientific foundations. An illustrator such as Waterhouse Hawkins could be employed by several firms at once to publish their work in catalogues since very few companies actually employed designers. Waterhouse Hawkins began his career in scientific illustration in the 1830s drawing specimens brought back to England from abroad including plates of fish and reptiles for Darwin’s Zoology of the Voyage of the HMS Beagle.70 By the time he created the illustrations for the Pattern Book, he had also worked as head of the fossil department at the Crystal Palace under reconstruction in south London. The drawings in the Pattern Book were presented at full scale and detailed in a manner characteristic of botanical illustrations. The ornamental objects severed the connection between the gutta percha tree found on the other side of the world, its productive sap and its role as a commodity in England. Like many botanical illustrations, the objects were stripped of their context and placed on a blank page. Designs for decorative mouldings arranged on a plate included section views to indicate their widths, but for the most part, the drawings only hinted at being three-dimensional objects. In some cases, the decorative application was unclear. One plate included a large image of a Highland cow head surrounded by musical instruments including bagpipes and draped with a tartan. Above and below this centrepiece were four different designs for holly leaves. Although it was meant for members of the trade to peruse and purchase items, prices were unlisted and each page had very little description besides a corresponding number and generally few, if any, details about the designs on each plate. Rather than focusing on a particular style, the designs evinced a pluralistic approach. The plates depicted a wide variety of possible forms from lion and unicorn motifs, Scots tartans, floral arrangements, animals and Roman Catholic imagery, such as crucifixes. The variety of forms reflected the diversity of public tastes, instead of attempting to sanction particular aesthetic choices. Several of the designs, such as those for mirror frames, had only recently become affordable for the middle class. The proliferation of mirrors for domestic use followed new methods for manufacturing plate glass in the 1840s and the repeal of the glass tax in 1845. Members of the middle class used the ornamented mirror to indicate status, which then entered into the domestic spaces of the working class. Styles once popular among the wealthy of the eighteenth century could be purchased by the middle of the nineteenth-century by a growing and prosperous middle class—only with objects made by machines.71 If a material like gutta percha was unfamiliar enough to give a potential customer reason for hesitation, especially if one discerned a measure of exaggeration in the testimonials about its wondrous qualities, then other methods could help allay those concerns. In noting that pattern books came from a long history of guides to the crafts and trade, Anne Puetz notes that they acted as both a catalogue of wares for sale and a platform to display aesthetic achievement and mastery over a material.72 That the Gutta Percha Company took the time and resources to create this pattern book and employed a well-regarded illustrator was itself evidence of their solid standing. The sheer number of plates and depicted designs, many of which were minor variations of a motif, gave visible evidence of their ambitions. Minor variations offered a type of individual touch, suggestive of hand carving, indicating the company could provide design alterations for customers as a result of the material’s mouldability [5]. Fig 5. Open in new tabDownload slide From The Gutta Percha Company’s Pattern Book of Ornament for Use of the Trade, (c.1850), photograph by author, courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, AA1525 G98 FF. Fig 5. Open in new tabDownload slide From The Gutta Percha Company’s Pattern Book of Ornament for Use of the Trade, (c.1850), photograph by author, courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, AA1525 G98 FF. Into the vortex Trade and popular journals contributed to claims of industrial invention to a large audience of potential consumers by publishing descriptions of visits to the Gutta Percha Company’s works on City Road, known as ‘one of the busiest localities in London’.73 These ‘days at the factories’ articles offered a glimpse into the ‘wondrous inventions’ made possible by industrial techniques, encouraged confidence in industrial processes and emphasized the human skill required for production.74 Evincing what design what design historian Glenn Adamson calls the ‘theatricalization of knowledge’, these narratives generally began on London streets.75 The stories took readers through urban environments to the ‘midst of the tan-yards of Bermondsey’ and then to a place a hundred yards or so from Finsbury-square’ where Gutta Percha Company stood. Despite the widespread presence of industry in London, these pieces addressed the fact that members of the general public mostly passed through major streets and thoroughfares and would likely have little sense of the industrial world where ‘coals, and lime, and culm, and building materials’ were constantly unloaded from ‘queer-shaped vessels, and where numerous manufactures are being carried on’.76 In the middle of this world, the Gutta Percha Company’s tall chimney beckoned readers toward a hidden ‘vortex of industry’.77 Throughout these accounts, gutta percha’s innovative qualities, inventive modes of production and potential to transform the lives of consumers took centre stage. Entering from a modest doorway with a painted sign, visitors became ‘speedily aware that a branch of manufacture of which we hitherto knew next to nothing is being carried on within’. Before seeing anything in particular, a smell ‘something like a tan-yard, something like old cheese, something like half-dried clothes in a laundry’ primed visitors to expect something completely original. The sight of ‘novel machines, strange processes, and odd-looking tools’ fulfilled those expectations. The material itself constituted only one part of an ‘incessant course of invention’ that created more than simply ornamental designs, but also imitations of wood grain, papier-mâché textures or a substitute for leather.78 Making high-quality replicas of other materials required extensive study and experimentation. Imitation required innovation. Within the works, presented as a clean and efficient space, visitors first examined utilitarian objects before entering the ‘most interesting department of all’ where ‘the nicer and more delicate articles are constructed’.79 George Dodd, a well-known journalist and writer, argued that discovering ‘ornament from utility’ was neither ‘needed nor to be wished’ since the two should be linked.80 Softened gutta percha easily took the shape of a mould or stamp ‘with delicate precision’ by hydraulic pressure or hand press producing an overwhelming number of items including ‘bread trays, biscuit trays, cotton or work-table trays, counter or card-table trays, pen trays…work baskets and hand baskets, flower vases and bouquet holders, plates and platters’.81 One visitor had the self-proclaimed good fortune of witnessing the creation of a complete dessert service of ‘the most chaste and elegant platter and in imitation gnarled oak’. The service was ‘surprisingly beautiful, light, and incapable of being broken by a fall or a blow. Plain gutta percha arriving in London as irregular bricks and stuck with grass could in the matter of hours resemble the ‘choicest carved or gilded oak, rosewood, or mahogany’ with ‘remarkable fidelity’.82 Frames with borders ‘exhibiting every appearance of the finest carving’ demonstrated the ‘most sumptuous workmanship, and possessed a sharpness and finish which the hand of man could scarcely accomplish’.83 These objects were ‘pressed out with some rapidity; but not without great manual labor’. As a result, ‘hundreds and thousands of beautiful frames’ could be made without the ‘usual expense of artist-work’ and with the added benefit of being nearly unbreakable.84 A factory manager displayed the last quality by throwing flower vases on the floor and watching them bounce back. Writers of these pieces ranged from anonymous scribblers to well-known journalists, such as George Dodd, but their stories had remarkable degrees of similarity in tone, such as marvel over the process and quality of the ornamented goods, and narrative. Much like publicity materials produced by the Gutta Percha Company, these articles emphasize the combination of innovation and artistry on display, blurring the line between reportage, editorializing and advertising.85 Industrial proponents believed that obviating the arduous work of hand carving did not necessarily diminish workers’ skills. In contrast to those who believed in mechanization’s injury to labour, supporters argued that it stood to benefit workers more than any others. Industrial technologies meant that artistic influence would spread to manufacturing and thus defend against the ‘excessive division of labor’ and ‘necessarily raise the wage of labor’.86 Producing gutta percha decorative items required human skills, and writers stressed the combination of human hands and mechanical means to yield honest and improved craftsmanship. By creating objects such as a stag’s head with ears that almost looked real, workers displayed ‘ingenious’ capacities. Together these articles presented industrial production and labour as a path for innovation in aesthetic skill rather than a symbol of its decline. Demonstrations of this knowledge in the grasp of industrial workmen labouring in the Gutta Percha Company as well as trained artists and scientists proved that specialized skills permeated all positions of society. The proof was in the process. Revealing progress Engravings by noted illustrator W. H. Prior that accompanied an account of the company published in the Illustrated Magazine of Art in 1854 depicts the cycle of gutta percha production and adds a further claim to innovation. One full-page illustration contains several different aspects of the process. The top of the illustration portrays men and boys working inside the Gutta Percha Company. On the bottom, a gentleman in a coat and top hat engaged in a conversation with a worker while around them men held paddles to wash and boil gutta percha. Tall gutta percha trees take up much of the centre with a caption, ‘Gutta Percha in Its Native Woods’. In the foreground, a native crouches in a canoe while another stands on land with an axe in his hand. On the other side of the body of water a small group of people sitting in the shadows collect sap from a fallen gutta percha tree. On either side of this image are drawings of available gutta percha objects including a decorative basket with leafy details, an ornamented tray, and a pitcher and wash basin [6]. Fig 6. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Gutta Percha in Its Native Woods’, The Illustrated Magazine of Art 3, no. 17 (1854). Fig 6. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Gutta Percha in Its Native Woods’, The Illustrated Magazine of Art 3, no. 17 (1854). This illustration both acknowledges the central role of the British colonies in the production of decorative objects and also diminishes that contribution. Producing the decorative products arrayed on either side of the image of gutta percha in its native habitat required the intervention of British industrial methods. Left in its native territory, gutta percha’s potential remained unfulfilled. The world of new possibilities for gutta percha was visible its final products—perhaps especially in the decorative objects. Its lifecycle came to full fruition in London through the participation of scientific investigators, men of industry and common workers. These accounts emphasized that a common labourer in London possessed talents that skilled natives of the Straits could not achieve. The illustration not only acknowledged the distant sources of the material, but also underscored necessary innovations at home that made its utility and enjoyment possible. Marking out gutta percha’s origins not only made clear the transformation from sap to decorative object, but also distinguished colonial and metropolitan work, technology and knowledge. Progress not only occurred over time, but was visible in contemporaneous places with the Straits Settlements on one end and the Gutta Percha Company in London on the other. ‘Modern ingenuity’ rendered the material useful and ornamental.87 Gutta percha’s origins as a tree circumvented some of possible criticisms of its manufactured status, but some looked forward to the handiwork’s decline. They argued that machine works actually improved aesthetic qualities. Gutta percha decorative items, one writer claimed, were ‘exquisite’ and these ‘recherché productions have more than the appearance of having emanated from a master hand than from machinery’.88 The ire of traditionalists, the writer declared that anxieties about existing manufacturers were unfounded and even foolhardy regarding the inevitable advance of technological innovation. ‘Most great inventions necessarily injure’, the writer stated as a matter of fact. He continued to elaborate this assertion by noting that old trades, ‘like old governments, must concede something to the progress of the age’ and ‘ancient prejudices must … give way to modern improvements’.89 Industry paved the way for art’s future. Pollyanna Rhee is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research and teaching focus on modern landscape history and environmental thought, particularly in the USA and UK. She is revising a manuscript, Natural Attachments: Localism and the Development of Modern Environmentalism, on the relationship between ideas of home and environmental awareness. Her research has been supported by a number of institutions including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, Dumbarton Oaks and the Huntington Library. She was previously Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. She received her PhD in History and Theory of Architecture at Columbia University in 2018. Footnotes 1 ‘Manufacture of Gutta Percha’, The Illustrated Magazine of Art 3, no. 17 (1854): 355. 2 D. Cohen, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 42. 3 ‘Gutta Percha’, Littell’s Living Age (28 August 1847), 402. 4 The Gutta Percha Company’s Pattern Book of Ornament for the Use of the Trade (London: Gutta Percha Company, c.1850). 5 A. Lehmann, ‘Showing Making: On Visual Documentation and Creative Practice’, Journal of Modern Craft 5, no. 1 (2012): 10. 6 J. Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xii. 7 A small sample of work on the design reform and Arts and Crafts movements, see T. Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); E. Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); E. Bonython and A. Burton, The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole (London: V&A Publications, 2003); T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, The Arts and Crafts Movement (Hammersmith: Hammersmith Publishing Society, 1905); E. Cumming and W. Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991); L. Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); J. D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 8 ‘Address’, Journal of Design and Manufactures 1, no. 1 (March 1849): 1. 9 J. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: George Allen, 1880 [1849]), 174. 10 R. Redgrave, Report on Design Prepared as a Supplement to the Report of the Jury of the Exhibition of 1851 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1852), 8. 11 S. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Norton, 1969), 344. 12 Giedion, op. cit., 345–346. 13 N. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 43. 14 J. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. II (London: JM Dent & Co., 1907), 170. 15 Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, 166. 16 P. H. Simpson, Cheap, Quick, and Easy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 144. 17 Simpson, Cheap, Quick, and Easy, 52; ‘The Applications of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts: Gutta Percha’, The Art-Union (1 February 1848), 39. 18 Wosk, op. cit., 109. 19 Wosk, op. cit., 20–21. 20 G. Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 75–76. 21 Smith and Findlen, op. cit., 17. 22 G. Dodd, The Curiosities of Industry and the Applied Sciences (London: George Routledge & Co., 1852), 13. 23 W. E. Bijker, ‘The Social Construction of Bakelite: Toward a Theory of Invention’, in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, eds W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes and T. J. Pinch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 159–187. 24 R. Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 97. 25 ‘Destructive Fire at the Gutta Percha Company’s Works’, The Morning Chronicle (6 June, 1853), np. 26 ‘Destructive Fire at the Gutta Percha Company’s Works’, The Morning Chronicle (6 June, 1853), np. 27 ‘Great Fire at the Gutta Percha Company’s Works’, Illustrated London News (11 June 1853). 28 Examples of decorative items can be seen in the Science Museum in London, including a pen tray and moulding. In addition, the Economic Botany Collection at Kew Gardens has samples of raw gutta percha and a decorative tray. 29 The Telcon Story, 1850–1950 (London: The Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, 1950), 54. 30 W. Cooke Taylor, ‘The Mutual Interests of Artists and Manufacturers’, The Art-Union (1 March 1848), 69. 31 Cooke Taylor, ‘The Mutual Interests of Artists and Manufacturers’, 69. 32 P. L. Sherman, Jr., The Gutta Percha and Rubber of the Philippine Islands (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1903), 7. 33 For context on Britain’s relationship between botany, research and its empire, see R. Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World; W. Beinart and L. Hughes, Environment and Empire; R. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860; B. Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1820 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 34 ‘Gutta Percha’, Illustrated London News (30 October 1847), 288; The Telcon Story, 1850–1950 (London: The Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, 1950), 10; R. Hunt, ‘The Application of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts’, Art-Union (February 1848), 37; ‘Gutta Percha’, Illustrated London News (30 October 1847), 288; ‘Gutta Percha’, The Aberdeen Journal (26 January 1848); The Discovery, History and Manifold Uses of Gutta Percha (London: Benjamin L. Green, 1851), 6. ‘Remarks on the Gutta Percha of Southern India, noting also the History and Manufacture of Gutta Percha of Commerce’, The Athenaeum (22 November 1855), 4; H. W. Jewesbury, A Short History of the Introduction of Gutta Percha into Europe (London: Hayman Brothers and Lilly, 1883), 7–11. ‘Gutta Percha’, Illustrated London News (30 October 1847), 288; ‘Manufacture of Gutta Percha’, The Illustrated Magazine of Art (1854), 355. 35 For background on the Straits Settlements, see L. A. Mills, British Malaya, 1824–67 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1966); C. D. Cowan, Nineteenth-Century Malaya: The Origins of British Political Control (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); L. H. Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); A. J. Stockwell, ‘British Expansion and Rule I, South-East Asia’, in Oxford History of the British Empire, eds J. Brown and W. R. Louis, vol. IV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 371–377. 36 W. Dalton, Gutta Percha: Its Discovery, History, Remarkable Properties, Vast Utility, and Application to Scientific and Ornamental Purposes, Also Its Economy and Importance as a Sanatory Agent (London: J.O. Clark, 1848), 7; The Discovery, History and Manifold Uses of Gutta Percha, 6. 37 E. F. A. Obach, ‘Gutta Percha’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts XLVI, no. 1353 (1897): 97; J. Tully, The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 124; Sherman, op. cit., 7. 38 Dodd, op. cit., 11; Sherman, op. cit., 7. 39 Dodd, op. cit., 11. 40 ‘Gutta Percha’, The Aberdeen Journal (26 January 1848). 41 ‘On the Gutta Percha Contributions to the Great Exhibition’, Illustrated London News (26 July 1851), np. 42 ‘The Application of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts: Gutta Percha’, The Art-Union (1 February 1848), 38. 43 ‘Manufacture of Gutta Percha’, The Illustrated Magazine of Art 3, no. 17 (1854): 358; The Telcon Story, 12. ‘On the Various Applications of Gutta Percha’, American Journal of Pharmacy 14 (1848): 318. 44 ‘On the Gutta Percha Contributions to the Great Exhibition’, Illustrated London News (26 July 1851), np. 45 J. Collins, ‘Gutta Percha: Its History, Commerce and Supply’, The India Rubber and Gutta-Percha and Electrical Trades Journal 1, no. 8 (1885): 197. 46 ‘Gutta Percha’, The Aberdeen Journal (26 January 1848), np. 47 ‘Manufacture of Gutta Percha’, The Illustrated Magazine of Art (1854), 355. 48 ‘The Application of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts: Gutta Percha’, The Art Union (1 February 1848), 38. 49 J. Collins, ‘Gutta-Percha: Its History, Commerce and Supply’, The India Rubber and Gutta Percha and Electrical Trades Journal 1, no. 8 (1885): 197. 50 Dodd, op. cit., 12; W. Dalton, Gutta Percha, Its Discovery, History, Remarkable Properties, Vast Utility, and Application to Scientific and Ornamental Purposes and its Economy and Importance as a Sanatory Agent (London: J.O. Clarke, 1849), 6. Despite such efforts, Deborah Cohen notes that by the 1890s gutta percha was nearly extinct since the British eventually began cutting down trees rather than tapping the sap. Cohen, op. cit., 43. 51 Sherman, op. cit., 16. 52 The Discovery, History and Manifold Uses of Gutta Percha, 11. 53 The Discovery, History and Manifold Uses of Gutta Percha, 17. 54 ‘On the Various Applications of Gutta Percha’, American Journal of Pharmacy 14 (1848): 321. 55 Dalton, op. cit., 10. 56 N. Pevsner, High Victorian Design: A Study of the Exhibitions of 1851 (London: Architectural Press, 1951), 40. 57 Among other objects were trays in different patterns, pincushions, an inkstand, a drinking cup in the shape of a fox’s head, a bracket in the shape of a stag’s head and fringe for a mourning coach. The Telcon Story, 19–22. 58 ‘The Great Industrial Exhibition’, The Athenaeum (10 May 1851), 500. 59 ‘The Great Industrial Exhibition’, The Athenaeum (10 May 1851), 500. 60 J. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York: Penguin, 1977). 61 ‘Gutta Percha Works’, New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian, 4; ‘The Application of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts: Gutta Percha’, The Art Union, 39. 62 S. Muthesius, The Poetic Home: Designing the 19th-Century Domestic Interior (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 65. 63 Dalton, op. cit., 15. 64 H. Clifford, ‘Concepts of Invention, Identity, and Imitation in the London and Provincial Metal-Working Trades’, Journal of Design History 12, no. 3 (1999): 249–251; A. Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 90–100. 65 K. Ferry, The Victorian Home (Oxford: Shire Publications, 2010), 27. 66 J. A. Neiswander, The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home, 1870–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 13–15. 67 S. Jervis, High Victorian Design (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1983), 28. 68 Dalton, op. cit., 14. 69 Gutta Percha Company’s Pattern Book of Ornament for the Use of the Trade (London: Gutta Percha, Co., c.1850). 70 V. Bramwell, ‘The Life and Times of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’, in All in the Bones, eds V. Bramwell and R. M. Peck (Philadelphia: The Academy of Natural Sciences, 2008), 9–15. 71 Neiswander, op. cit., 3. 72 A. Puetz, ‘Design Instruction for Artisans in Eighteen-Century Britain’, Journal of Design History 12, no. 3 (1999): 221. 73 ‘Gutta Percha Works’, New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian, 4. 74 G. Tweedale, ‘“Days at the Factories”: A Tour of Victorian Industry with the Penny Magazine’, Technology and Culture 29, no. 4 (October 1988): 888–890; I. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 75 Adamson, op. cit., 57. 76 The Gutta Percha Company also seems to have had a showroom on New Bond Street in London to display their ornamental goods, which included a column representing the gutta percha tree. The Telcon Story, 24. 77 ‘Manufacture of Gutta Percha’, The Illustrated Magazine of Art 3, no. 17 (1854): 358. 78 Dodd, op. cit., 13. 79 D. W. Bartlett, London by Day and Night, or Men and Things in the Great Metropolis (New York: Hurst, 1853), 58. 80 Dodd, op. cit., 23. 81 Dodd, op. cit., 23–24. 82 Bartlett, op. cit., 58; ‘Gutta Percha Works’, Reynolds’s Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, Science, and Art, 229. 83 ‘Gutta Percha Works’, Reynolds’s Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, Science, and Art, 229; Bartlett, London by Day and Night, 58. 84 Bartlett, op. cit., 58. 85 G. Lees-Maffei, ‘Studying Advice: Historiography, Methodology, Commentary, Bibliography’, Journal of Design History 16, no. 1 (2003): 7–8. 86 Taylor, op. cit., 70. 87 Dodd, op. cit., 13. 88 Dalton, op. cit., 14–15. 89 Dalton, op. cit., 15. © The Author(s) [2020]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Industrious and Imitative Art: Manufacturing Artistic Expertise in Nineteenth-Century Britain
JO - Journal of Design History
DO - 10.1093/jdh/epaa050
DA - 2020-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/industrious-and-imitative-art-manufacturing-artistic-expertise-in-QpeYaaa704
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -