ABSTRACT
This chapter considers early examples of female decorators and discusses the role of businesses such as Minton in promoting the decorative artwork of females. It then explains how the well-known Garrett sisters learnt the decorating and designing trade and set up business on their own account. Puritanism arose with grim visage, turning all beautiful things to stone. From it was bequeathed to us a race of artisans who had lost the sense of beauty. A reaction came, in which the passion for external beauty displayed itself in an intemperate outbreak of gaudiness and frivolity. Feudalism and Puritanism have alike left to us just as much of the styles of their ages as the peoples need – enough to give, as it were, a fair fringe to the appropriate vestment of to-day. The real purpose of the glass can never be safely forgotten in its decoration: it is to keep out the cold while admitting the light.
