This edited article about Pablo Picasso originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 680 published on 25 January 1975.

The bombing of Guernica inspired Picasso’s most famous painting which he called simply ‘Guernica’

The most influential and best known artist of this century, Pablo Picasso was born at Malaga in Spain on October 25, 1881. His father, Jose Ruiz Blasco, was a teacher at the local school of Arts and Crafts.

Picasso attended art schools in Barcelona and Madrid and early on showed remarkable talents in the field of art.

In 1903 the artist settled in Paris and from that time, spent most of his life in France. At first, he painted realistic pictures of ordinary people. He was fascinated by the life of the circus and the big city, although he painted not the gaiety of these subjects but their sadnesses.

This period of his life has been called his ‘blue period’ because he painted entirely in different shades of blue.

But it was not long before he was experimenting with different methods of painting in particular the cubism method. In cubism the artist does not try to paint recognisable pictures of actual objects, but to make pictures out of shapes such as cubes and triangles.

Later, sometime after 1918, Picasso’s paintings became more realistic again, but in 1924 there came another change in his work. Instead of using shapes and colours to give pleasure to people, he began to use them to disturb people. Distressed by the state of the world, he began to paint pictures which reflected the evil shown by mankind. Picasso’s most impassioned protest against a human act of aggression was revealed in his picture ‘Guernica’, a terrifying painting in which is seen all the artist’s horror at the bombing of the defenceless town of Guernica during the Civil War in Spain. This painting is a surrealist distortion of reality. He could have quite easily painted this picture in grotesque realistic detail in the manner of a photograph, but he chose to express his horror at such senseless inhumanity in his own individual, highly effective style.

And this brings us to the shocking aspect of Picasso’s style. By distorting reality, he shocked many people with his paintings and drawings which may sometimes seem as if they have been executed by a careless child. But Picasso was a superb artist, and could easily have painted his pictures in a realistic style. He decided to distort natural everyday things in order to make them more ‘real’ to the observer.

Few people today would dispute that Picasso has radically altered the course of art. His originality and imagination was to this century what Michelangelo’s was to his. Picasso has influenced every artist who has come after him, and today, nearly two years after his death at 91 on April 8th, 1973, his work continues to stand out among that of all others in the twentieth century.

This edited article about packaging originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 679 published on 18 January 1975.

Attractive packaging for confectionery was important for occasions like Easter, just as specific designer packaging was used to commemorate state occasions like Coronations, producing chocolate boxes, tins and of course, mugs.

If the packets we see in the shops today are a lot smarter though a little less individual than the packs of earlier generations, this could be due to the influence of professional package designers.

Such designers were almost unknown before the late 1920s, when they came into their own in America and in Germany. In England they were unknown until the early 1930s.

The first package design course in any English art school was included in the 1932-3 syllabus of Goldsmith’s College, London, and it was the first of many.

The designer of packs nowadays is concerned with the size and shape of the package, the choice of materials for it, the way it opens and closes, its colours, and its layout and lettering.

At times he has to compromise between his own idea of what is good design, what his client the manufacturer insists on having, and what the market researchers tell him is “what the public wants”. So a degree of similarity in many present-day package designs is only to be expected.

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This edited article about pottery originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 678 published on 11 January 1975.

Mr Ross’s showroom in Bishopsgate Street which purveyed ceramic storage jars and pots

and more decorative glassware

Pottery is the last thing you think of when packaging is mentioned. Cardboard boxes, cans or plastics are more likely to spring to mind. Yet pottery, in all varieties from stoneware to porcelain, has been used for packaging a variety of products, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.

Some present-day “pots” turn out on close examination to be made of plastics or opaque glass. But in mid-Victorian times transfer-printed pots and pot lids were among the most colourful of package designs. They were even spectacular, by the standards of their day.

Examples are now eagerly sought by collectors, who will pay more pounds for an empty pot of this kind than their great-grandparents paid in pence for the same pot, when it was full of good things.

In Elizabethan times, small ointment pots and pill pots, often decorated with blue rings or stripes, were made in Britain in some numbers. But these could hardly be called packaging, as they had no inscriptions or distinctive symbols on them. The truly commercial use of pots for named products cannot be traced back further than the second half of the eighteenth century.

From that period, there survive – mostly in museum collections – a few examples of pots for Wyatt’s mustard, Singleton’s eye ointment and Stewart’s “Pomade – for restoring decayed hair”.

Another hair dressing, which was packed in a variety of interesting-looking pots over a century or more, was bear’s grease. To modern ears it sounds an unattractive product. But at the time when wigs went out of fashion, both men and women took to the use of bear’s grease as a way of adding lustre to their locks. The earliest known bear’s grease pot, over two hundred years old, is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. It has a picture of a bear on one side, and on the other the wording “prepared by T. Townshend and sold only by C. King Chymist Haymarket”.

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This edited article about box-making originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 676 published on 28 December 1974.

Making match-boxes was sweat-shop labour for many children in Victorian times, by Peter Jackson

Now that many things from cereals to washing powder and tea-bags to typing paper are sold in cardboard cartons of one sort or another, it is not surprising that carton-making is a large and important industry. What is surprising is that it began a long time ago, and that several firms who are prominent in this industry today were already making boxes a hundred years ago.

In its early days, however, box-making – as the trade is known – was different in many ways from box-making today. At first, boxes were not included in the price you pay for the contents, as they are today; they were bought individually by people who wanted containers in which to store their possessions. There were large boxes for clothes generally, and smaller ones for hats, ribbons, jewellery, and collars.

It was said:

But a box for hat and cap -
‘Twill keep them safe from all mishap.

This was a familiar London street cry in the eighteenth century; and long before that, in 1635. Sara Jerom and William Webb had applied for a patent for an “engine for cutting timber into thin pieces or scales for making boxes”.

This pinpoints another of the differences between early box-making and modern practice – that in the early days the box-maker’s raw material was not cardboard but wood, in the form of thin chips or scales. This made good sense at the time. Wood was a natural material and it was available in most parts of Britain, whereas cardboard had to be manufactured. It was not until the 1800s that cardboard, or even paper, could be made by machine. Before then, it simply was not produced in the large amounts or at the low cost which its use in packaging would have demanded.

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This edited article about pantomime originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 676 published on 28 December 1974.

‘Dick Whittington’  is a popular pantomime, by Richard Hook

What makes a good pantomime? Catchy songs? Spectacular scenery? Certainly knock-about comedy, and at least the outline of some well-known fairy story, of which “Cinderella” is the outright favourite. Though it is essentially a Christmas entertainment, pantomime also has more to do with the old fashioned summer pierrot show at a seaside resort, than the “pier” on which it is acted.

For pantomime has a long history, and many learned books have been written about it. At different times “pantomime” has meant very different kinds of entertainment, some of which bear practically no resemblance to a modern performance of that name. Yet nearly all of them have contributed something to the entertainment which, even today, fills our theatres as nothing else can.

“Pantomime” is really a pair of old Greek words meaning “Let’s all pretend”. It began as a kind of play without words, in which masks were used to represent different people and their moods. Many modern pantomimes make great use of disguises in their stories – giants, fairy godmothers, witches and wolves, for example. Cinderella is full of them, just like those Greek “pantomimes” of 2000 years ago.

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This edited article about bottles originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 675 published on 21 December 1974.

The Milkman

Can you imagine a world without bottles? In spite of temporary shortages, it’s hard to visualise a way of life without any bottles at all; and it would have been very hard for our ancestors to have done so at any time in the last 300 years or so.

For the bottle is one of the oldest forms of container. Egypt and Mesopotamia had glass bottles about 2,000 years ago, but even if we ignore them and think of Europe, English glassmaking dates back to Tudor times. Medicine bottles were being made then by glassmakers in the well-wooded Sussex Weald. There they could obtain the wood which was the necessary fuel for their ovens.

Tudor bottles were of irregular shape – no two were exactly alike – because they were not blown in moulds. It was only when the craftsmen began to blow the soft molten glass in moulds that it became possible to turn out quantities of bottles of identical size and shape. Even then, for many years, only the bodies of bottles were “mould blown”; the necks were made separately and stuck on by hand.

In England, the seventeenth century saw glass bottles replacing stoneware and traditional leather bottles, especially for wine. Wine bottles were often marked with a prunt or seal – a misleading term because this did not seal the bottle in the ordinary sense, but was a glass circle applied to the shoulder of the bottle, with the owner’s initials or badge moulded in it.

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This edited article about furniture makers originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 672 published on 30 November 1974.

Thomas Chippendale’s workshop in St Martin’s Lane

Over the centuries, woodworkers in Britain have developed their fine skills in the craft of furniture making. Many years before the Norman conquest, woodmen, shipwrights and carpenters were extending their knowledge of working with the timber found in the many forests and woodlands of the countryside. From the days of the Medieval makers of chests and benches to the close of the Georgian period, furniture design in Britain reached a standard which has never been equalled.

It was during the Restoration period that craftsmen began to direct their skills to the production of beautiful, finely-made furniture and these men were called cabinet makers. The famous makers and designers of the 18th century, Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Adam and Sheraton made such magnificent pieces, that the period became known as the finest age of English furniture.

At the beginning of the 19th century, during the reign of Prince Regent (later George IV), a light and elegant style of furniture, called Regency, was made. Gradually, as machines began to take over the work of craftsmen, there were a great many changes in furniture making.

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in old, beautifully made furniture and in Britain the firm of Bevan Funnell was set up to manufacture reproduction period furniture. The furniture is made on modern machinery but old fashioned hand carving and hand waxing is carried out in the finishing processes.

This edited article about glass originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 671 published on 23 November 1974.

An Ancient Roman glass factory by Severino Baraldi

The art of glass making is thousands of years old, and was carried out in the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Babylonia. It developed as it spread throughout Europe and reached a peak of skill and artistry in fifteenth-century Venice. The knowledge and experience of the Venetian glass makers finally reached England, where, in 1567 a glass maker called Carre from Lorraine set up London’s first glass house. He engaged one of the greatest of the Venetian glass makers, Giacomo Verzelini to assist him. These two men, Carre and Verselini, were the founders of the modern glass industry in Britain.

Towards the end of the 16th century, a scientist called Frederick Ravenscroft discovered that glass could be made more brilliant by mixing lead oxide and salts with sand.

It was the most important single discovery ever made in the long history of glass making. This process of making ‘crystal’ glass was kept a secret for generations and soon, British glass makers earned a reputation of being among the finest in the world. The new British crystal lead glass became even more popular than Venetian glass.

It was in 1827 that a young orphan, Frederick Stuart, went to his first job to begin a career that was to make his name famous throughout the world. It took him thirty years to learn and master the skilled art of glass making, and at the end of his life, was able to pass his company, Stuart and Sons, to succeeding generations of his family. The craft of fashioning Stuart Crystal at the company’s factory has changed very little since Frederick Stuart carried out his life-long work more than two centuries ago.

This edited article about Royal Worcester porcelain originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 668 published on 2 November 1974.

A Victorian advertisement for the Royal Worcester Christmas Bazaar at Perry and Co in Foregate Street, Worcester

Since the earliest times, Man has always had to make containers for his possessions, and pots and utensils for cooking purposes. Many pieces of pottery are, therefore, useful everyday objects like plates, cups, and saucers, but pottery also includes many kinds of beautiful and ornamental pieces such as figures and vases.

While potters in Europe were developing their processes of pottery making, the potters in China were producing some of the most beautiful porcelain ever made. The beauty of Chinese porcelain fascinated people in Britain, and potters set out to discover how it was made. In about 1675 the French potters succeeded in making a kind of porcelain, called “soft paste” and a factory for its manufacture was set up at Sevres. Gradually, other countries adopted the process, and in England the most important factories making porcelain were at Chelsea, Bow, Derby, Coalport, Lowestoft, and, of course, Worcester.

The factories at Chelsea and Bow have long since disappeared, but Worcester survived to become the largest maker of china in Britain, and established an international reputation.

The Worcester Royal Porcelain Company was founded in 1751 by a group of fifteen men to manufacture porcelain in the city of Worcester. Doctor Wall, who headed the group, bought up a small porcelain factory at Bristol where high quality pottery was being made which, unlike other English porcelain, did not crack when used for hot liquid. Equipment, craftsmen and manufacture at the Bristol company was transferred to a new factory in Worcester and the move was completed by 1752.

About thirty years later King George III and Queen Charlotte became the first Royal visitors and granted the Company permission to use the title Royal which succeeding monarchs have granted ever since.

Since then, the Worcester Royal Porcelain Company has manufactured tableware in fine bone china, and the most outstanding of the firm’s present productions are the special edition models of birds, animals and figures.

In recent years a great deal of modern equipment has been installed into the factory, including gas-fired tunnel kilns and power operated cup, plate and bowl making machines.

Many thousands of visitors from home and overseas visit the Royal Porcelain works at Severn Street in Worcester every year. They are able to see, in the Dyson Perrins Museum, the finest and most comprehensive historical collection of Royal Worcester porcelain and china in the world.

This edited article about the violin originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 667 published on 26 October 1974.

A gypsy fiddler helps the Hungarian recruiting officer by Peter Jackson

One of the most beautiful instruments in the world is the violin, a descendant of the much older stringed instruments used in the Middle Ages called viols. Its immediate ancestor was the lyra da braccio of Renaissance times which was similar in shape to the violin.

The first violins were made in Italy during the 16th century when three famous craftsmen, Salo, Amati and Maggini, carried out their work on the development of the instrument. This meant that the violin arrived just in time to be used by the Florentine composers who, in that century, were making important innovations in the development of musical composition.

Though the violin is only a small, light object, it contains eighty-four different parts. The main pieces are the fingerboard where the four strings are positioned, and the case of wood called the soundbody or belly. It is this which increases the volume of sound. A bridge made of thin wood carries the strings from the end of the fingerboard to the tail piece. The strings on the violin are made of catgut or finely spun metal. There are two sound holes on the middle of the belly, and these are shaped like the letter f. To play the instrument, the violin is held under the chin by means of a chin rest and with the fingers of his left hand, the violinist alters the length of the strings by stopping them, or pressing them down. At the same time he draws the bow across the strings on the open section of the violin and does this with his right hand.

We have already mentioned the names of the earliest violin makers, but perhaps the most famous of all violin craftsmen is Antonio Stradivari (? 1644-1737). This man, together with Nicolo Amati, and Guiseppe Guarneri, produced the best violins that have ever been made. Stradivarius violins are so much in demand by collectors that one recently sold for £84,000 at the London auction rooms of Sotheby’s. Makers of violin bows have also been important and the most famous of these is the Frenchman Francois Toure (1747-1835).

Although it is generally agreed that the best violins have been made in Italy, some fine instruments have been made in other European countries including Britain, where the family firm of Hill have been making violins since the 18th century. This company, with its shop in Bond Street, London, has been internationally famous since it was founded and was often mentioned in the Diary of Samuel Pepys. One entry in the diary, dated February 1660, reads: ‘In the morning came Mr Hill and I consulted with him about ye altering my lute and my viall.”

Today, the firm of W. E. Hill and Sons is still a family concern, and the present partners, like those in the past, are all active violin makers.