Decorative plasterwork in Great Britain

Decorative plasterwork was created by skilled craftsmen, and for over four hundred years it has been an essential part of the interior decoration of the British country house. In this detailed and comprehensive study Geoffrey Beard has created a book that will delight the eye and inform the interested reader. For those who have sometimes been puzzled by the complexities of plaster decoration it will be a most useful work of reference on a fascinating art form, about which no book has been published for nearly fifty years. After discussing the part that patrons played in commissioning and finacing these beautiful decoration, a useful chapter is devoted to materials and methods of work and here the author describes the ingredients of good plaster; he has studied the work of present-day English plasterers and Swiss stucco-restorers in orders to establish precisely how the materials of plaster and stucco were composed and used. There are illustrations from Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (1703) of tools used in the earlier stages, and further descriptions, as armatures, moulds and methods of work grew more sophisticated. The main aim is, however, to record chronologically the history of decorative plasterwork, with a special chapter devoted to that in Scotland. A very valuable fixture of this work is a dictionary of over 300 plasterers with a chronological list of documented works and notes on firm attributions. As plasterwork is rarely signed or recorded in art-historical literature, it frequently lags behind the main stream of European decorative styles and information is therefore difficult to collect. The author has been engaged for many years in extensive archival researches, and other architectural historians have also co-operated in the documentation of this elusive subject by supplying him with information.