Compo.(Books about Antiques)(Book Review)

Composition ornament--compo to the initiate--was used by the ancient Egyptians to embellish mummy cases and furniture, then by Europeans in the Middle Ages to beef up paintings, in the Italian Renaissance to decorate picture frames, and by Robert Adam in the 1770s to produce yards of decorative ornament in his discreet and repetitive style.

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Compo starts off as a malleable glop, neither too stiff nor too liquid, which can be shaped in a mold, where it hardens. Formulas have varied through the ages to include white lead, chalk, or whiting mixed with binders. In Adam's day, which is the beginning of the period under consideration in Utility and Beauty: Robert Wellford and Composition Ornament in America, the ingredients were generally whiting (very pure lime, ground fine), pitch or resin, and animal glue. When exposed to moist heat the animal glue softens, allowing the compo to be bent to curved surfaces before rehardening.

The remarkable undercut carving of Grinling Gibbons and the asymmetry of rococo ornament are not suited to duplication in compo, unlike the regular patterns and low relief of the neoclassical idiom. Adam realized the economies possible with compo, and, perhaps because he was a Scotsman, he attempted to gain the monopoly of its production in England. He bought patent rights to some of the materials used in compo, and in 1776 he engineered an act of Parliament (of which he was a member), giving him the exclusive right to sell compo. This monopoly was naturally challenged and within a few years evaded by the development of a different recipe for compo.

Composition ornament was first recorded in the United States in 1788 and soon became a staple of the Federal style, which relied heavily on Adamesque designs. Its most prominent proponent here was Robert Wellford, an Englishman who settled in Philadelphia in 1797. He had apprenticed with John Jacques, a London carver, gilder, and above all maker of composition ornament. By 1801 Wellford had his own shop, and in addition to selling compo he helped the American Philosophical Society "Repairing, Bronzing, Packing etc a [plaster] Bust of Doctr. Benj'n Franklin" for shipment to the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston. His own house and shop were stuffed with compo ornament, constituting "a three-dimensional catalog of his work and a sampler of ways compo could be used in a house." Much of this ornament is preserved in the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware.

Wellford's first handbill, too prolix to be squeezed into a newspaper advertisement, appeared in 1801. It takes the reader from the carving of ancient Greece and Rome to composition, which, "in the drying ... becomes hard as stone, strong, and durable, so as to answer most effectually the general purpose of Wood Carving, and not so liable to chip." He goes on to state that because the modestly priced composition "resembles ...