History of the Antique Fireplace
Fire Places
Fireplace, hearth, grate, roaring, smouldering, halcyon-glowing. Call it what you will and describe it as you wish, where would a country inn or Georgian townhouse be without its fireplace? Not to mention the elderly dogs with nowhere to lie and the children with nowhere to hang their stockings at Christmas time. Fireplaces are such an integral part of any period interior, surely the fireplace is as old as the house? Far from it.
The Beginnings
The hearth is the heart of the home, but it has not always been so. For all but the very wealthiest, a proper fireplace was just a pipe dream right up until the time of Elizabeth I in the late 1500s. Until then 99% of Englishmen were content to live in one large room (the “hall”). If it got cold, they cut a hole in the roof and lit a fire in the middle of the floor. In this respect our Tudor domestic habits would have held no surprises for a caveman.
The typical late-medieval house would have been draughty, damp and very, very smelly. Black soot coated everything, so there was no point in trying to make your house look nice. No furniture (beyond basic benches and tables), no pictures, no rugs.
No-one read by the fire because they couldn’t see through the noxious haze. This didn’t much matter though, because hardly anyone could read. Is it coincidental that William Shakespeare and the modern hearth were born in the same century?
In most 16th century houses all cooking had taken place over the fire in the hall. Don’t like your bacon smoked? Too bad. Then came the arrival of the fireplace and its attendant chimney breast. The smoke cleared and within a hundred years the only things being cooked in middle class English living rooms were chestnuts and toast.
The seventeenth century.
In the 1660s Samual Pepys can be found closing his diary each day with the famous phrase “and so to bed”. “Bed” in a house before the hearth would have meant on the floor with everyone else in the household, huddled under blankets in the corner of a cold, draughty hall. Not really worth recording in a journal. Going “up to bed”, an innocent phrase dreaded by children, or a euphemism for more grown-up activities, came about because of the hearth and the chimney.
The hearth allowed upper floors to be inserted, with cosy, smoke-free bedrooms, supported and warmed by the chimney breast; not just the heart, but also the backbone of the house. Feather beds, carpets and curtains became something ordinary men could aspire to for the first time. Many older houses were converted by inserting a brick chimney. Peeling back the plaster ceilings in these houses today often reveals blackened timbers, the last remnant of the bad old days.
During the 17th century the hearth became such a must-have item that it gained the ultimate governmental accolade – its very own tax. Hearth tax records are now an invaluable source of historical information, and demonstrate that by the 1660s all but the meanest village hovel had been civilized by the fireplace (and often more than one), an astonishing rate of change for the period. Public health improved (barring the odd plague) and the population exploded. The story does not end there, however.
The Georgians
Elizabethan and Jacobean fireplaces were mostly designed to burn logs. They usually consisted of a sturdy chimney breast with a wide, plain fireplace opening and a wooden lintel above, that gradually developed into a mantle shelf. As urban areas began to expand it was found impractical to bring wood long distances from rural forests, and in any case the wood was needed to build the houses of the new urban centres, as well as the merchant fleets that financed them.
Coal had been known for hundreds of years, but had not been used much in domestic fires – smoky, un-chimneyed wood fires had been bad enough, coal would have been unbearable. Coal really became popular for domestic heating in the eighteenth century and was soon the primary source of heat in towns and cities.
For convenience of transport coal was usually supplied in small lumps, which meant that grates could become smaller, often made from cast iron. The overall size of the fireplace, however, had to remain unchanged. Its size was dependant on the width of the chimney breast, which had to remain wide for structural stability, and the height of the mantelpiece, which had become a place for clocks, ornaments and candlesticks. The space between the coal grate and the mantlepiece thus became a blank canvas for the next stage in the development of the fireplace.
Grand aristocratic lodgings had long had decorative fire surrounds, carved from wood or stone, sometimes painted, always fantastically expensive. Before the eighteenth century, the best the middle class yeoman could hope for was a bit of naïve carving on the over-mantel lintel. From its beginnings in the 16th century the fireplace had brought comfort and sanitation into the English home. In the Georgian period it was to go beyond simple utility to become the visual and artistic symbol of elegant middle class living.
The average Georgian townhouse is noted for the simple, elegant proportion of its design. Internally, the rooms are usually quite plain, with simple mouldings and sometimes painted softwood paneling. By far the most decorative and most expensive fitting in the typical Georgian drawing room was the fireplace, an integral part of the design of the house, and the ultimate internal expression of the external architecture. So many “modernized” Georgian houses have lost their fireplaces, reducing their interiors to meaningless boxes.
Georgian fireplaces were not simply bought off the shelf. Some of the greatest designers and architects of the period were engaged in the design of fireplaces, with G.B. Piranesi, GB Borra and Robert Adam producing series of fireplaces. The architectural style of favour for most of the Georgian period was the classical. It was natural, therefore, that the most popular decoration for the Georgian fireplace was the classical. The typical grate of the period is flanked by elegantly proportioned columns, fluted or plain; marble, stone or wood. The mantelpiece is often supported by a classical entablature or pediment. For those who wanted something a little more decorative, the marble-inlay scagliola work of the Italian Dr. Bossi, working in Dublin in the 1780s and 90s, was much in demand. His reputed involvement in the French Revolution and the subsequent curtailment of his career in Ireland, leave us with relatively few examples of his work.
Archaeology was in its infancy in the Georgian period, but discoveries in Greece and Italy had already added hugely to the ornamental vocabulary of the architects and designers of the period. In the same way that such ornament appeared on Wedgewood ceramics and Hepplewhite furniture, so Grecian urns, vinescrolls and swags filled in the unadorned spaces between the grate and the surround in Georgian fireplaces.
The Victorians
The basic coal-burning layout of the English fireplace remained essentially unchanged from the beginning of the Georgian period. By the late eighteenth century influences other than the classical had come into play. Gothick, Moorish, Rococo and Egyptian influences all had their revivals as the Georgian became the Regency. Trend-setting buildings like the Prince Regent’s Brighton Pavillion brought a new eclecticism to design.
Such grand one-off designs were really the realm of the wealthy, but as the Georgian era gave way to the Victorian industrialized production methods brought a new variety to the fireplaces of normal homes. Just as before, the fireplaces of the Victorian era reflected the architecture in which they were housed. Different styles were combined and juxtaposed with all the exuberance and eclecticism of the architects of the day.
All these different styles were now available “off the shelf” from a plethora of manufacturers and retailers. Nowadays mass-production of anything usually leads to a drop in quality. The opposite is the case with Victorian fireplaces. Where the Georgians might use faux marble (usually painted wood) for a fire surround, the advent of the steam ship meant that the very best marble could be imported directly from the continent. Advances in casting technology meant that the cast iron inserts were now less prone to cracking and could be made with far more intricate and decorative designs.
The style of the Victorian period is renowned for being heavy and unsubtle. In truth, the huge variety of revivals and new styles during the second half of the nineteenth century mean there really is something for everyone, and all manufactured with the benefit of the Victorians’ technological know-how.
Almost as a reaction against the hi-tech of Victorian manufacture, a new movement grew up that was to have a profound affect on the appearance of the fireplace. The well-known designer William Morris, along with the architect Philip Webb and a number of other prominent artists felt that something had been lost with the demise of the old hand-made cottage industries. The “satanic mills” of Blake’s Jerusalem were at their zenith, and Morris began an artistic movement that sought to redress the art/industry balance. This movement became known as “Arts and Crafts”.
Under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, imported marble and cast iron went out, to be replaced by un-painted native oak, hand beaten copper and wrought iron. All of these materials displayed the marks of the craftsman’s tools in order to emphasize the fact they were not made by machines. Another material popularized by the Arts and Crafts movement was the encaustic tile, often hand-made, providing pattern and colour where there had previously been just black iron.
Of course, as soon as the aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts movement caught the public imagination, all of these techniques were taken on by the industrial manufacturers and cunning methods were devised for reproducing the hand-made look in factory-produced fireplaces.
The Twentieth Century
The Victorian era had left us with a bit of a stylistic muddle. The Arts and Crafts style had fed into the Aesthetic and Art Nouveau movements around the turn of the century. These were soon joined by a period of great stylistic revivals: the Regency Revival, the Rococo Revival, the Queen Anne Revival, all of which were going on almost concurrently. Then came the First World War.
The War once again asserted the strength of industry and the strength of the machine. Famous artistic movements like the Futurists and the Vorticists had their genesis around that time, inspired by the possibilities of new materials and new kinds of building. It is during this time that Modern architecture (note the capital “M”) made its appearance on the scene.
An important factor about Modern buildings was that many of them were centrally-heated. To the minds of the great architects, the hearth as the heart of the home was dead. Mies van der Rohe described the Modern house as “a machine for living in” – no place for old open-fire technology there.
In the main, Modern architecture in its purest sense was seen in public buildings, corporate buildings and the homes of the very wealthy. Joe Public continued to make do with much more traditional buildings, and took his Modernism in a much more palatable form: the Art Deco.
The 1930s suburban semi still required fireplaces. Even as recently as that very few people had any form of central heating. The 1930s household did, however, demand one luxury that very few Victorians had had, and it was a luxury that the traditional fireplace was easily adapted to provide: running hot water. A “back boiler” was set into the back of the chimney breast above the grate, using the heat from the fire to heat water in the tank that would then rise up to another tank at the top of the house. The fireplace had first enabled us to have upstairs bedrooms in the sixteenth century. Now, in the twentieth century it was providing us with upstairs bathrooms as well. Many houses still retain their back boilers, left to rust in the chimney breast long after they were superceded by more modern alternatives.
As with most things during the inter-war period, the style of the moment for the fireplace was the Art Deco. The colourful, decorative and revivalist fashions of the Edwardian Era were swept away. Art Deco was interested in surfaces and planes; in a word, sculpture. Corners were beveled or rounded off; flat surfaces were moulded into simple, repetitive patterns. Art Deco was inspired by the most hand-made of all art forms. It took sculpture, with its instant tactility and texture and adapted it for the machine age.
Very few Art Deco fireplaces are hand made. There was little point in trying, since Art Deco had finally devised a style that was better made by machines than by hand. The perfection and poise of the Art Deco is well represented in many mundane domestic objects of the period. The best bakelite telephones and radios have a classic style to them that makes them desirable collectors items today. And so it is with Art Deco fireplaces.
This fascination with shape and surface made it difficult to build fireplaces from the traditional materials of wood and stone. This is why Art Deco fireplaces are often made from ceramic. Ceramic is, of course, heat resistant; tiles fired at a thousand degrees in a kiln are not going to be phased by a domestic fire. Ceramic fireplaces are also very easy to dismantle and move, as well as easy to clean. These virtues meant that, although thought rather new-fangled at the time, ceramic fireplaces quickly took over the market and became the best sellers of the 1930s.