Beauty Lent: An Exhibition of Works from the Horne Foundation

One of Herbert Home's bookplates Photo by Lisa Webb Beauty Lent: An Exhibition of Works from the Home Foundation William U. Eiland Director, Georgia Museum of Art Tell him that beauty is but lent So long as, neither brief desire Be quenched through glut, nor yet be spent By lack ofthat, which feeds itsfireA BY 1900 HERBERT PERCY HORNE (1864-1916) had for all practical purposes abandoned London for Florence. Yet he did not so easily rid himself of the passions of his past. Already he had made a name for himself in several fields, to the extent that, today, he wears the singularly oxymoronic description, so beloved of historians of art, of "major minor master."2 So catholic were his interests that his accomplishments seem diffuse, all diminished somehow in service to the grandest of his many mistresses, Art. His greatest achievement may well be his study of the painter Botticelli, but long before he completed that work in 1908, he had distinguished himself as an architect, a designer of books and type, a poet, an editor, a literary historian, a critic, and a collector of note. Born in 1864, the son of an architect, Home began early to fashion himself into a Renaissance man. He never studied at a university, yet, like his contemporaries W. B. Yeats and Arthur Symons, educated himself at an early age in the arts. He was self-consciously an aesthete, one of those disciplined and able students who goes from apprenticeship to mastery in fairly short order. So it was with his work for the designer and architect A. H. Mackmurdo, with whom he eventually formed, along with the designer Selwyn Image, the Century Guild. This loose association of craftsmen and designers believed in the unification of all the arts. By the age of twenty Home was Mackmurdo's partner, and the two 453 ELT 36:4 1993 designed buildings that were "all striking, fresh, imaginative, comparatively simple, and representative of a new style that did not simply ransack the past."3 Those buildings were nearly all destroyed in World War II, but Mackmurdo and Home designed interior decorations for them that have survived: furniture, hardware, wallpaper, and even tapestries. From 1884-1894, the two men co-edited4 The Century Guild Hobby Horse, a journal of the arts devoted to the idea of total design in the service, primarily, of literature. Along with articles of artistic and antiquarian interest, the editors published the "new" poetry. They believed that the journal itself had to be a work of art, that each element in its production and presentation should be of the highest standards of craft and design. Each page was to reflect a coherent aesthetic from type to margins to illustrations, all on hand-made paper. Thus, Home himself became expert in book production, from layout to editing, as well as a contributing poet and The Hobby Horse's resident authority on furniture , musical instruments, and the visual arts, especially eighteenthcentury English painting. In 1894 he wrote The History of Bookbinding while designing books for Belgian and English authors. He had already invented three type fonts and published his own volume of poetry, Diversi Colores of 1891. He became an architectural historian, with articles on Christopher Wren, James Gibbs, and Inigo Jones. His reverence for Dante Gabriel Rossetti is clear from his studies of the Pre-Raphaelites, published in The Hobby Horse; in addition, Home admired and attempted to emulate the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick, an edition of whose JTesperides he published in 1887. The next year he joined Arthur Symons, A. Wilson Verity, and Havelock Ellis in editing a collection of seventeenth -century plays; his contribution was the Jacobean play Nero of 1624.5 Among his friends and acquaintances were James Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert, Oscar Wilde, Roger Fry, Max Beerbohm , Yeats, and Arnold Dolmetsch, a musician devoted to the concept of playing older music on recreated ancient instruments and for whom Home not only painted a harpsichord but arranged concerts as well. Early in his life Home had become a student of Walter Pater with whom he later became friendly. It is not surprising then that his interest in...