[Illustration: Ye Olde Four Swans·in Waltham Cross·England·1260·]
Signs wrought in iron seem to have been rare in England, the art of forging being less developed there than in the south of Germany. Curiously enough the South-Kensington Museum in London, an enormous storehouse of old works of arts and crafts, contains not a single English sign, but a very beautifully forged iron sign from Germany, dated 1635,--a baker's sign, as the great crown and the heraldic lions reveal to us. A friendly assistant at the Museum showed us another German sign dating from the end of the seventeenth century, charmingly carved and gilded, representing the workshop of a shoemaker. These two were the only signs that the Museum possessed.
The old London signs have all found a very dismal refuge in the dimly lighted cellar of the Guild Hall. Some of them are stone sculptures of considerable size like the giant sign "Bull and Mouth." Here too we find certain technical curiosities, as, "The Dolphin" of 1730 painted on copper, and more unusual still, "The Cock and Bottle," a neat and dainty design composed of blue-and-white Dutch tiles. The foggy and damp climate has often injured not only the carved woodwork of the signboard, but still more the painting on it. The beam on which it hangs might be very old; the painting itself is always of recent date even if the artist, following an old tradition, sometimes produces quaint effects. As an example of how quickly the work of the sign-painter darkens beyond recognition, we may cite "The Falstaff" in Canterbury. It was not a year since the landlady had hung out this picture of the blustering knight in a bold fencing-pose that we saw it last, and it was already very difficult to distinguish the details of the composition; while another painting--the immediate predecessor of the sign in the street--which the friendly Dame showed us on the staircase was as black and bare as a slate. Sometimes the frames of the pictures are carved and allow us to guess the date of their origin; but, as a rule, the perfectly plain signboard hangs out on a strong beam. A typical example is "The Falcon" in Stratford-on-Avon.
The higher the artistic value of the painting on the signboards was, the more we have to regret that so much art was wasted on such a perishable production. In the eighteenth century the coach-painters, whose craftsmanship on old equipages, sledges, and sedan-chairs we still admire in many a museum, used to produce most elegant signs and received for their work astonishingly high prices. Shaken by winds, whipped by rainstorms, their beauty was soon gone. Nowhere have we found them either in collections or in the light of the street. Only in literary tradition does there still live a part of the charm of all these burned and weather-killed things of beauty.