Fern Ware Box, Mauchline, ca. 1900

Fern Ware Box, Mauchline, ca. 1900

Wood

This sycamore wood box is decorated with a pattern of ferns and other leaf shapes in green and red on a brown ground. It has been customised with the initials ‘E.L’, and it was probably made by the firm of W. & A. Smith in Mauchline, a small town in East Ayrshire that became a centre of wooden souvenir manufacture in the early nineteenth century.  Fern patterns were a popular finish for small items of wood ware (collectively known as treen) from the 1870s, though similar wooden items were decorated in a range of styles and finishes, including tartan and scenic views of Scottish landmarks.

Decorated wooden boxes were associated with a number of Scottish manufacturers but particularly with W. & A. Smith,which operated from 1810 to 1939. Desire for souvenirs decorated with fern motifs grew from a trend in botanical exploration that became widespread from the 1840s and reached fever pitch by the 1850s. Fern ware was the fifth most common finish for Scottish box ware in a range that included seaweed ware, tartan ware, transfer ware (mostly landscape scenes) and other motifs designed to appeal to Scotland’s tourist trade. In 1850 Smith’s published Authenticated Tartans of the Clans and Families of Scotland, in which ‘ the garb of the Highland Clans was given in all its brilliance and vibrancy’ and which showcased a technological development pioneered by W. & A. Smith.  The firm mechanically reproduced intricate tartan designs on paper that could be skilfully glued to small items of wood ware, their seams concealed with black and gold paint. Smith’s was awarded a gold medal at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 in recognition of the ingenuity of their invention.

Applying fern patterns was a skilled and complex process often carried out outside the factory by small-scale producers or as a sub-contracted cottage industry. Decorators used a reverse stencil method whereby dried fern leaves were arranged and pinned in place on a surface coated with resin before being sprayed or speckled with coloured dyes and varnish. Repeating this process in layers gave fern ware its delicate, three-dimensional quality. Reputedly ferns were collected from the Isle of Arran, though experts have noted that not all of the wood ware ferns were Scottish or even British and that many came from New Zealand, Central and South America, the West Indies or Southeast Asia.

Decoration was applied to wood ware items both large and small but fern designs were the only finish applied to items of domestic furniture. East Ayrshire Museums has examples of fern ware tables and piano stools, and other known examples include a table made by the Edinburgh cabinet maker John Taylor and Son, and cupboards and stools decorated in the workshop of Thomas Morton of Muirkirk (1859-1945).  In 1897 an inventory taken at Castle Fraser near Aberdeen notes that Fern Ware tables were used in the boudoir, the study, and the drawing room.

W. &. A Smith’s closed in 1939 when a fire at the boxworks brought an end to production, but a plaque commemorating Mauchline’s wood ware industry and workers can be found on the old factory building in Kilmarnock Road.

 

East Ayrshire Council

The Baird Institute