clothed, and trained for four years. The priest of the parish, and, I believe, the heads of the asylum, take over-charge of these apprentices to secure their being well treated, and, by a late regulation, the masters are obliged to allow the boys two hours a-day for attendance at the School of Design. The bulk of the Dieppe carving is done in the winter and in the cold bleak months of spring. When the monster hotels are shut and boarded up, and the wintry wind howls in the channel, then, if you are lucky enough to have the entrée into the atélier of M. Hue, or of Madame Veuve Farge-Herbert or M. Binet, you will be made cheerful again by the sight of the earnest, lively workers with which they are filled. With the scrupulous cleanliness and order of both workshop and workmen, you will be alike struck. Workmen in white blouse, and with whiter fingers, bend over their respective vices ranged in front of long flat windows, such as are seen in weavers’ houses in Spitalfields, and in the stockingers’ houses in Leicester and Derbyshire. The masters, men, and the apprentices are all working and talking together; miniature-like tools are strewn about; bright dainty files, gouges, and saws lie on his bench at the elbow of each workman, and bowls of water stand here and there. These bowls contain the roughly sawn pieces of ivory lying to soak before the carver begins his operation. In front of some of the less expert men lie their designs drawn out on paper, from which they are working, but the cleverer carvers simply sketch their idea on the piece of ivory, and work it out as they go along. Some of the older men—excellent carvers in certain departments—know nothing of drawing, and say they should find it difficult to sketch their intention at all. In these atéliers they work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., from which, of course, they have time allowed for their “second breakfast” at 11 o’clock, and their dinner at 5. A good deal of work is done “by the piece” by many workmen at their own homes,—this often proves to be carving of the best quality.
The general run of wages is from two to four francs a-day, though first-rate men have been known to earn as much as twelve by a day’s work. When women do the carving it is by the piece—not in the atéliers—but there is a prejudice against their doing much at it; it is thought to be too sedentary, and to produce consumptive tendencies. Spite of this opinion against it, some exquisite carving has been done by women. Madame Binet has worked successfully, and her husband readily acknowledged the superior sculpturing of her roses to that of his own, or that of any of his men, and exhibited specimens to me even before his wife, pointing out at the same time the delicate turn of a petal, which he averred, in true Frenchman style, “gave quite a sentiment to the flower!” The first time I was in their shop, I was struck with Madame Binet’s taste and pleasure in the carving, and I now remarked that Madame seemed to have a great love for the work. “Oh, yes,” she replied, “she did a little whenever the affairs of her house allowed her time;” and in confirmation pointed to a little block of ivory and some tools lying on a table in her little sitting-room opening from the shop, where she had been working before my entrance.
In visiting these domesticated atéliers, it occurred to me that here, as in the workshops of the artists of the middle ages, the son might be found inheriting at once his father’s tools and his talents. In answer to my question if it were so, I was told that, though not common, it certainly had been so in the case of the Farge family. They had been earnest and successful carvers for two or three generations. Parents, brothers, and sisters worked together and had a common love of the cold ivory, and each excelling in the execution of its delicate sculpture. The industry and ingenuity of this family, is to this day notorious among their fellow townsmen, and I was told that the quantity of carving left by the father alone, was, at his death, a few years ago, sufficient to stock a shop for years to come. Of late a taste for the extremely fine work has grown into a fashion, and poor Mr. Farge’s more simple designs are no longer regarded so highly as they once were. At one time this family employed thirty workmen. The carving done in Dieppe is much finer than that done elsewhere, and the Dieppe workman is esteemed more highly than any other. This is by many of the masters held to be owing to the quiet and somewhat primitive system of working, which, as we have said, is done very much at the workmen’s own time and in their own houses, preparing in the winter months the articles which they sell during the gay summer season. They can regulate their labour by time and their own fitness for work. A Dieppe carver is sometimes tempted by the offer of high wages to go to Paris, where the system of contract prevails, and there working hurriedly to complete a great deal in a given time, such a carver, it is said, has frequently been known to lose entirely in the course of six months that very care and delicacy of execution for which he was before distinguished. The sculptors perhaps are, what the great art critic of the day would call too “servile” in their copy of nature; they perhaps do too merely imitate nature whenever they use flowers or leaves, and their execution of the blooms of a spray of lilac, for instance, is extraordinary in its exactness and minutia, but that higher artistic feeling, the exercise at once of fancy and restraint, the power over their subject and idea, shown in conventionalising leaves and sprays, you look for in vain in most of the articles sold in the shops. But to those who feel interest in the worker as a man not as a mere tool, and who believe that in so far as the worker is allowed to preserve his love and pride in his work, and to keep his own characteristic way of doing it, in so far the work he does will be more lovely and interesting to the beholder—to such the carving at Dieppe will be found so far satisfactory, that it may be regarded as an art, not as a manufacture, for men can work out their own ideas if they have any to express, and their individuality need not of necessity be lost in toiling year after year at but one part of their work only.
To particularise the names of all, or half indeed, of the articles which this ingenious people contrive to shape out of an elephant’s tusk would be to make an endless catalogue, from Cupids and
