A Brief History of the Picture Frame
The word "frame" is derived from two old English words: framian, to profit, be helpful, make progress, and fremman, to help forward, promote. The etymology could not be more apt. For an artist, a frame both helps and promotes the art it surrounds, providing support, protection, and enhancement.
Early European picture frames were usually carved from the same panel as the painting they surrounded. Most art was religious, commissioned by the Church, and picture frames echoed the arches and buttresses of the cathedrals in which they were displayed. In the dimly lit churches of southern Europe, heavy gilding was used to capture candlelight and dispel the gloom of the shadowy interiors. In contrast, in northern Europe, where the churches had bigger windows and better light, frames were less likely to be gilded, and instead, featured interesting woods and finishing techniques.
The fifteenth century heralded an expansion of the art scene. Paintings were becoming popular objects of decoration, not only for public buildings, but also in private homes. Renaissance Italy was prosperous, and wealthy aristocrats acted as patrons to the arts. Cabinetry was flourishing too, and it is likely that the first moveable picture frames were devised by furniture-makers. By the mid-sixteenth century, cassetta frames, ("little boxes" in Italian) featuring a flat centre panel and raised edges, were ubiquitous, and offered endless possibilities for embellishment. All the carving, gilding, and exotic woods cost money, and by the end of the sixteenth century, picture frames in fashionable homes were often more expensive than the paintings they surrounded.
In the seventeenth century, economic superiority shifted from Italy to France, where the courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV set the standards for art and fashion throughout Europe. Ostentatious displays of wealth were the sign of the times during the Baroque period. Rooms were decorated thematically with matching furniture, draperies, and objets d'art. Paintings were popular; the frames were usually gilded, with elaborately carved leaf, branch, and floral motifs on raised profiles.
Eighteenth century fashion favoured deeper, concave profiles, with the carving concentrated at the corners and centres of the frames. The organic forms of the seventeenth century Baroque, evolved into a style known as Rococo, marked by ornate, curvilinear forms, and naturalistic decoration. The carving extended beyond the profile of the frame in ear-like scallops or "auricles." Elaborate detail was greatly admired, but since every flower, shell, or leaf that the buyer chose as embellishment had a price tag, a picture frame could be a huge extravagance. Gilding continued to be the most popular finish, and canny framers offered three different price options. The least expensive was to finish the frame in silver and then lacquer it to look golden. If however, the customer chose to go with the more costly gold leaf, he could still opt for "oil gilt" instead of the time-consuming and expensive water gilding.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the ruined cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were unearthed, and the Neo-classical period was born. Although they had their origins in Italy, picture frames from this period are often referred to as being in the style of Louis XVI, since their appearance coincided with his reign. In contrast to the curving, naturalistic lines of the Baroque and the Rococo periods, Neo-classical frames were more architectural, with straight sides, flat profiles, and motifs inspired by Greco-Roman architecture. The decoration extended around the entire perimeter of the frame in uniform lines of finely carved beading, and deeply incised foliage, reminiscent of Napoleon's laurel wreath.
Carving such a frame demanded skill, since any irregularities in the continuous pattern were painfully obvious. For those framers who were not master carvers, the uninterrupted lines of decoration were a challenge to reproduce. Enter compo. Compo was a mixture of whiting, animal glue, rosin, and linseed oil, that when cooked together created a stiff dough that could be moulded, dried, and finished to look like carved wood. Its popularity with framers caused disgruntled carvers to claim fraud, but in 1722, the French court declared that if compo embellishments were identified as being cast, they could be used legally. Initially, most compo work was quite crude. The carved wooden moulds produced rough edges and fuzzy detail. But in the mid-eighteenth century, Robert Adam, a Scottish architect, discovered that boxwood made smooth moulds and produced finely detailed casts. Decorators, framers, and cabinetmakers everywhere feted his find, and by the end of the century, compo mouldings were being mass-produced and advertised in pattern-books throughout Europe and the Americas.
By the nineteenth century, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, picture frames no longer had to be so costly. Steam-driven machines could spit out mouldings in quantity, and at speeds previously unimaginable. In less time than it had taken an eighteenth century craftsman to plane one side of a frame, thousands of feet of picture frame mouldings could be milled. The Victorian penchant for pattern dominated all aspects of fashion in the nineteenth century. Rooms were busy with wallpaper, draperies, upholstery, heavy furniture, and picture frames. Machine-milled moulding was available in a huge assortment of profiles, and everything from fine art to embroidered samplers was put in a frame. Gothic, Rococo, Neo-classical, or a combination of several styles, all were popular. Picture frames had always been symbols of wealth, however, by the mid-nineteenth century, thanks to the marvels of industrialization, bank clerks, as well as bank presidents could afford them.
In the 1860's, Tokyo harbour opened to trade with the west. Suddenly, everything Japanese was immensely popular. The hand-polished natural woods, and the simple lines of Japanese furniture were a startling contrast to the overabundance of Victorian decoration, an anachronistic "sight, for sore eyes."
This new fashion trend arrived in Europe around the same time that candlelight was being replaced by gas. The huge gilded picture frames, which for centuries had served to reflect and refract candlelight, looked different under the stark glare of gas jets. Artists complained that the weighty, gold mouldings detracted from their work. Some began creating their own frames, experimenting with the duller finishes of pewter, copper, and naturally stained woods. New schools of painting were appearing, and each group favoured different profiles. Artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, fascinated with notions of romantic chivalry, designed frames that mimicked the tabernacle frames and gothic arches of the middle ages. The Impressionists, in love with the new colours of their palettes, favoured simple mouldings in whites and pastels. In reaction to the thousands of shoddily made picture frames and furniture flooding the markets, the Arts and Crafts movement advocated a return to pre-industrial standards of craftsmanship. Fine joinery created its own aesthetic, and Arts and Crafts design celebrated the production as well as the final product. This philosophy evolved into one of the design mantras of the twentieth century. First stated by the Bahaus movement, the message was simple: form follows function.
In the 1920's, a few years after this Bahaus dictum was pronounced, Piet Mondrian introduced an entirely new type of picture frame to the art world. Designed by the architect, Le Corbusier, it consisted of little more than a platform and a strip, both of which were screwed directly into the stretcher bars on the sides and the back of the painting. This minimalist approach seemed the best solution for framing the abstract art proliferating in galleries everywhere. Since then, variations on the original Mondrian frame have been cropping up each year.
In 1960, the Museum of Modern Art introduced an extruded aluminum frame with welded corners. Created by Robert Kulicke, its simplicity and innovative design were heralded as a framing breakthrough. Aluminum was strong enough to support the large canvases favoured by the abstract expressionists, and yet it was light enough to allow for easy transport. Within a few years, corner hardware devised for custom profiles replaced welded corners, and the custom-made aluminum frame was launched.
Today, picture frames are available in every sort of profile and material, from cherry wood, to foil-covered plastic. Robert Kulicke once said that "the single function of a picture frame is to present a work of art in the most sympathetic possible manner;" and now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the choice of styles spans the entire history of framing, with options for every artist and every pocketbook.
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