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Introduction |
Eighteenth-Century Interiors—Redesigning the Georgian: Introduction
E-mail: hg524{at}york.ac.uk, g.riello{at}warwick.ac.uk
Key Words: domestic • eighteenth century • Georgian • historiography • material culture • style
The eighteenth-century interior has been approached from a range of different perspectives. Recent research has significantly complicated our understanding of ‘Georgian’ style, bringing new questions and new methodologies to bear on the meaning, function, and contemporary perception and use of interiors in the 1700s. This special issue brings together some of these new perspectives in order to reflect on this changing and, over the last decade, particularly buoyant field. These articles are a selection from a larger body of research presented at a two-day conference on ‘The Georgian Interior’ held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in November 2005.1 Celebrating the fifth anniversary of the V&A’s redesigned British Galleries, the ‘Georgian Interior’ event formed part of a series of conferences examining interiors from the Tudors and the Stuarts to the Victorians.
The Georgian Interior conference was orchestrated to encourage an assessment of the state of the field, convening scholarship from a range of disciplines to disseminate new research and discuss new approaches. In a broad historiographical context, the eighteenth century has long been highlighted as a time of profound economic, social and political change in Britain. Often approached as the ‘long’ eighteenth century, spanning the period from the Glorious Revolution in 1688/9 to the Reform Act in 1832, the changes routinely cited by historians include (in no particular order) the following: the engineered succession of a new royal dynasty; the creation of new financial institutions; the development of new political practices and ideologies; the discovery of new worlds and immensely profitable trade routes; the rise of commercial leisure; urban growth and an urban ‘renaissance’; the development of a ‘public sphere’ of political awareness; revisions to the social order which, in theory at least, promoted social criteria over inherited rank, and a ‘consumer revolution’ in which a new diversity of goods were available to a much more diverse section of the population. Moreover, the eighteenth century has been singled out as a distinct and central period in the history of British design, one in which—it has been suggested—the Georgian style was minted, a style that has come to predominate within our heritage industry, carefully protected and presented to the public as an exemplar of a specific stylistic moment.
All of these changes were expressed in some form within the interior, either influencing the ways in which interiors were designed or how the interior was understood, used, interpreted and occupied. Until recently, however, studies of the Georgian interior rarely extended beyond the traditional remits of histories of architecture and the decorative arts. Only now is new research emerging that examines the social and cultural functions of the interior for this period, alongside its design features. It is this new intersection of historiographies and methodologies that the conference sought to address, and which is represented here.
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What is Georgian? |
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 TOPNotes What is Georgian? Georgian interiorsMapping the field: interlinked...Conclusion |
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In 1904, visitors to the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (a trade fair held in St Louis, USA) found, situated amidst a set of period rooms, a Georgian interior, one constructed to represent eighteenth-century ‘British’ style. As the illustrated guidebook explained:
[T]he Georgian dining room [is] filled with genuine Chippendale mahogany. The clock is especially worthy of note, being more than 300 years old. The Adams room beyond is an English tea room and its furnishings are in satin wood of the celebrated Sheraton make [1].2In this context, the Georgian interior was made recognizable by a simple register of components: first, feted craftsmen and designers (Chippendale, the Adam brothers and Sheraton); second, particular categories of materials and objects (magnificent woods, the furniture crafted by ‘celebrated’ makers and a clock—notably one older than the interior in which it was displayed); third, the suggestion of precise forms of social behaviour (dining and taking tea); fourth, the conflation of English style with Britain; fifth, the implication that Georgian style meant expensive goods developed for an elite market, and, finally, a concern with authenticity. This Georgian interior was presented as a ‘genuine’, realizable interior—an interior applauded as the zenith of British style, a legacy constructed in the late-eighteenth century by an exclusive group of design heroes.
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The formula used by the 1904 exhibition to reconstruct a Georgian interior is one that has proved remarkably resilient, reiterated in many studies of eighteenth-century design and the decorative arts. Not least, it is a formulation that has much in common with the traditions of conservation and presentation in heritage and museum contexts. In such settings, Georgian is usually taken as a stylistic shorthand for the classical Palladianism of mid- to late-eighteenth-century elite properties. The survival of contemporary country seats ensures that Britain is seemingly surrounded by material evidence of eighteenth-century domestic environments. In part driven by the need to interpret and re-create the ‘original’ glory of these properties, investigations of the eighteenth-century interior have long flourished within the decorative arts. From connoisseurial curiosity about particular categories of goods, such as silver, dining equipment or Chippendale furniture, to compendia of visual sources of interior decorative styles, the domestic details of eighteenth-century British (or more accurately, English) elite properties have been painstakingly recovered to facilitate restoration and preservation.3
Yet, significantly, the concept of a Georgian Interior is something of a misnomer. It is apparent that neither the subject matter nor the literature that currently grapples with it can be clustered neatly in terms of chronology. Discussions of Georgian interiors and Georgian buildings have not always referred exclusively to properties built or lived in during the reigns of the all the Georges, from George I’s succession in 1714 to the end of George IV’s reign in 1830. Royal reigns may prove a convenient labelling device but, unsurprisingly, monarchical births and deaths do not necessarily denote major stylistic developments. Nor can the life cycles of monarchs be made to map neatly against the life cycle of properties, which may be inherited between generations, or sold, rented and occupied by many different groups for different purposes, as well as refurbished, extended or divided over time.
Therefore, any physical manifestation of a Georgian Interior is more a myth than a realizable material entity. Moreover, Georgian as a concept has changed over time and, perhaps most significantly, has not always included the interior within its interests and concerns. Indeed, it was not until the twentieth century that Georgian was deployed as a term to encapsulate an aesthetic tradition and to denote certain elements of style in the same way that more established labels such as Baroque, neo-classicism and, subsequently, modernism were used.
In what might be regarded as a successful branding exercise, architectural historians of the 1920s, such as Roger Fry and Francis Yerbury and, in the 1940s, John Summerson, used ‘Georgian’ as a shorthand for a particular architectural and design moment. ‘Georgian’ in this context was claimed as an architectural tradition that was associated with clean lines and cohesive interior and exterior schemes, a stylistic precursor to modernism. Summerson’s Georgian London (first published in 1945) crystallized the term as a distinct category. Integral to his survey was an examination of the emergence of a newly unified (largely Palladian) architectural scheme which, even if only as a façade, provided uniformity and regularity to London’s streetscape. The shambling maze of seventeenth-century London was gradually replaced by a metropolis in which streets, avenues and squares formed ‘an emphatic, martial, uniform criss-cross’ and a more complete urban form.4 It was this marshalled uniformity which lay at the heart of Summerson’s interpretation of Georgian.5
Summerson, like other architectural historians, was concerned primarily with the exterior of buildings and paid little attention to their interiors. In many ways this academic perspective can be seen to correlate with the format of an architectural plan, in which the interior is detailed only in terms of spatial organization whereas the exterior is privileged and subject to a full elevation [2]. Moreover, architectural history traditionally cast interiors as too malleable and too marked by their occupiers to reveal a historic reality or the artistic skills of the architect.6 Even the subject of decoration—classically associated with the domestic—was presented by Summerson mostly in terms of exterior ornaments such as sash windows, iron railings and parapet roofs [3]. Of course, a key component of Palladian theory was a cohesive relationship between interior and exterior. Yet on the whole this is as far as early twentieth-century architectural historians ventured into the eighteenth-century home. Interiors were deemed relevant only as the space that sat behind the façade, of interest only as a contributor to the shape, proportion and ‘harmony’ of architecture.7 Very little importance was given to what lay behind a Georgian door and even less consideration was given to the ideas, thoughts and everyday acts and actions of those people who lived in such buildings.8
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By the 1940s, the Georgian had emerged as an umbrella term particularly favoured by art and architectural historians to demonstrate the subtle links between the material manifestations of buildings, works of art and objects of craftsmanship and the growth of modern Britain. In the second half of the twentieth century, like a Chinese whisper, the category of Georgian came to be freely deployed by successive generations, but was distinctly (albeit often unwittingly) recast with each repetition. The rigid architectural emphasis was shaken off, but in so doing the term lost its conceptual clarity and was rendered ever more generic. Using it as a descriptive adjunct, decorative arts studies of the 1950s and 1960s referenced the ‘Georgian façade’, the ‘Georgian tympanum’, ‘Georgian silver’ and many other Georgian features. Notably, in this usage, Georgian was deployed to categorize a particular aesthetic most frequently expressed in surface textures.9 When referring, for example, to a Georgian tympanum, Georgian is the adjective that stands for a specific form or shape of tympanum.
This reformulation of Georgian is partly expressive of developments in research disciplines. As silver, upholstery, textiles and, most notably, furnishing became important and distinct fields of enquiry, scholars struggled to incorporate these disparate categories of material objects into the unit of the interior.10 One result of this, however, is that at a time when ‘Georgian’ has become a much used and well-known label, routinely deployed by the media and familiar to the general public, historians have found it increasingly difficult to pinpoint its precise components. The opening of many eighteenth-century country houses and an unprecedented investment in eighteenth-century public displays in museums across the country (and in particular in the capital) have on the one hand rendered the Georgian style a truly national one. The enthusiasm for this stylistic labelling was, for example, expressed particularly in the neo-Georgian Revival in the 1980s, in which revisions to domestic architecture was included amidst a broad fashion movement that adopted elements categorized as Georgian.11 Not least, the Georgian Group (first established in 1937 and now celebrating its seventieth anniversary) has maintained a steady presence, protecting Georgian architecture, categorized by the Group as buildings dating from 1700 to 1837. Yet, whilst Georgian appears regularly on museum labels, reflecting a mainstream interest in eighteenth-century design, social historians and art and design historians based in academic environments have less readily examined the remit and conceptual boundaries of the category. In recent years an alternative academic environment has been developing. Historians are increasingly keen to adopt new methodologies of analysis and start conversations with museum curators, restorers and experts. It is within this research climate that the Georgian Interior conference was held.
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Georgian interiors |
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TOPNotesWhat is Georgian?Georgian interiorsMapping the field: interlinked...Conclusion |
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This issue brings together examples of new and developing approaches. As a whole, this special issue is particularly concerned with the definition, redefinition and reinterpretation of Georgian interiors that has taken place at various historical moments. The articles focus not only on the eighteenth century but also on the specific formulation of Georgian in more recent history. The interpretation and meaning attached to Georgian design is as much a modern and current preoccupation as it is a matter of investigating the priorities and values ascribed by eighteenth-century figures to the interiors and aesthetic codes of their age. The concerns of the twentieth century have had a lasting impact on our assumptions about the 1700s. Therefore, whilst in the issue the articles feature in chronological order, here it is helpful to introduce them in reverse order, starting with the modern conceptualization of the Georgian.
Julius Bryant’s closing case study of the V&A’s British Galleries shows how the interpretation of eighteenth-century interiors has been influenced by the academic categories of the twentieth century and also by the more recent revisionist approaches and changing cultural context of the twenty-first century. Bryant notes that although the historic interior (whether classed as Georgian, eighteenth century or something else) might be conceptualized in particular ways by social historians and historians of art or of the decorative arts and design, it is in fact the general public that is the final judge.12 By discussing changes in the British Galleries’ displays, from their creation in 1951 to their redesign for the 2001 reopening, Bryant charts the influence of recent scholarship on the role of interiors within the museum setting. Whilst the present galleries progress through a sequence of themes, problems and types of objects (presented largely through the use of display cases), half a century ago the British Galleries were constructed as a series of ‘perfect interiors’ each of which captured ‘British life’ at a specific point in time. Bryant reflects on the role of a museum in reshaping the concept of Georgian according to new curatorial practices and innovative historical scholarship.13
Elizabeth McKellar’s research has unpacked the early twentieth-century architectural traditions that generated a particular preoccupation with the Georgian.14 Her contribution to this issue looks in detail at the Georgian Revival. Focusing on the design, architecture and decorative arts publishing industry in the hitherto under-researched period 1890–1930, McKellar provides a new context for understanding how the formula of the Georgian interior became so entrenched in the twentieth century—when the interior was often considered in isolation from its ‘architectural’ shell. By considering not so much the creators or users of Georgian interiors, but the methods of analysing and illustrating Georgian houses in publishing, McKellar maps the fracturing of the interior into detached parts (determined by types of materials and ornament or elements such as doorways, chimney pieces and ceilings) which were separated both from the built exterior and from a unified whole. McKellar demonstrates how architecture became divorced from ‘design’ and exteriors became conceptually separated from interiors.
Whilst Bryant and McKellar investigate the manifestations of the Georgian in the twentieth century, other contributors to this special issue return to the eighteenth century to consider how the interior was constructed, represented and experienced in its own time. Malcolm Baker focuses on the complexities of one rarely examined element of eighteenth-century interiors: sculpture. Whether as chimney pieces or as portrait busts in libraries, sculpture figured prominently in many Georgian elite interiors.15 Reproduced as multiples on a smaller scale in relatively inexpensive materials, such objects were newly available to a wider market for personal consumption and display in the home. Yet sculpture has more often been approached in art history as a public mode of representation and a form of ornamentation usually associated with the exterior. Baker’s study demonstrates how what might be cast as straightforward divisions between exterior and interior and civic and domestic (and the favoured distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’) were, in fact, far more blurred and indivisible. His study of sculpture reveals the eighteenth-century domestic interior to have been significantly informed and infiltrated by concerns that historians have more usually categorized as characteristic of a non-domestic setting.
Kate Retford’s article examines the rise in the function of the conversation piece as a domestic genre of painting. Conversation pieces have been deployed as evidence of the appearance of an eighteenth-century interior, used to trace the incidence of certain forms of furnishings, their position in the home and the precise decorative details of a domestic property.16 As Retford suggests, however, such portraits were not necessarily commissioned or completed to record the specifics of a ‘real’ interior. Instead such domestic scenes are better regarded as idealizations of how an eighteenth-century concern with politeness, taste and gentility was best expressed within the interior—not within the sitters’ own interior per se, but within an idealized framework realized in a painted form. In this context, conversation pieces appear more as a register of ideals rather than a stable template for the re-creation and preservation of the eighteenth-century home.
Studies of the eighteenth-century interior have proliferated in recent years. Given the diversity of current research, the remainder of this introduction will briefly survey the literatures which address the eighteenth-century interior, to contextualize the more specialist contributions that follow. Echoing present debates, many of the themes raised here will prove familiar to those currently working in the field. Whilst in no way comprehensive, the following survey is primarily intended as a reflection on the development of different methodological traditions, relating developments in design history and the decorative arts to the social and cultural histories relevant to the interior and vice versa. Our aim is to find a way through the dense definitional thickets that surround the literature in order to examine the development, restrictions and possibilities of the current historiographical framework.
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Mapping the field: interlinked historiographies |
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TOPNotesWhat is Georgian?Georgian interiorsMapping the field: interlinked...Conclusion |
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Whilst opinion differs as to whether an overarching emphasis on change masks significant continuities, there is consensus that eighteenth-century Britain witnessed new political, economic and social institutions that had profound implications for everyday life at all social levels.17 It is argued that such changes affected Britain (and specifically England) more than any other part of Europe. The country was transformed from a rather undeveloped nation to the heart of a new late-eighteenth-century European industrial world with material conditions and cultural vitality unimaginable just a century earlier. The historical analysis of these developments has focused on concepts such as sociability, politeness, civic culture and broader models of eighteenth-century cultural and economic change.18 Nonetheless, these methodological approaches have little in common with those deployed in the analysis of interiors and, least of all, in studies of the decorative arts. Whereas social history was principally concerned with an emergent eighteenth-century notion of a vibrant public culture, and middling urban life and their ‘modern’ implications, the decorative arts remained preoccupied with the realm of the isolated, elite country seat.
One of the most pronounced narratives in eighteenth-century studies is that which identifies the century as witnessing the birth of the modern British ‘consumer society’. The multiplication of new products and new markets has been well documented, and the intersections between the things that people owned and the new social and cultural ideals of the period have become mainstream in historical literature.19 This historiographical interest in manufacturing and personal possessions would seem fertile ground for exchanges between socio-historical, art historical and decorative arts methods and concerns, and particularly for work on the interior. Yet, despite the increase of research into the range of consumer practices in this period, the focus of social history has tended towards the individual consumers and their personalized purchases, either at the point of sale or at the point of dispersal at the end of their owners’ lives.
This conceptual framework stands distinct from decorative arts and history of design approaches, which more usually privilege the designer as a creator and innovator, looking to consumers only as patrons and supporters (but not necessarily proactive agents) in the development of aesthetics and interior styles.20 Moreover, the elite nature of many surviving museum collections and protected properties has ensured that, within decorative arts at least, elite-orientated artistic achievements and models of taste have tended to predominate. Yet social and cultural histories more broadly have explicitly sought to recover the consumption choices of the non-elite.21 In consequence, a tension has emerged between the necessarily elite focus of the decorative arts (concerned with understanding and interpreting objects which survive today) and the more plebeian consumer practices which have concerned other disciplines of history.22
Against this background of divisions and tensions there exists a certain body of scholarship, completed from the 1970s onwards, which has attempted (with varying degrees of success) to recast the narratives. Seeking to extend the study of the built environment beyond the confines of a narrow architectural specialism and to engage a broader readership, major publications by scholars such as John Cornforth, John Fowler, Mark Girouard, John Harris and Peter Thornton attempted broader chronological surveys, detailing ambitious stories of change over time across a century or more.23 These shifted the focus away from the specifics of single elite properties and their claims to ‘high’ design and sought instead to consider the intersection of social, cultural and political contexts and their relevance for developments in both architecture and interior ornamentation. Girouard’s Life in the English Country House (first published in 1978) remains one of the leading surveys. Girouard’s explicit concern with the changing occupation and use of properties (by owners, visitors and servants), rather than merely a property’s design and build, represented a major turning point in the literature, opening the field to social historical methods as well as traditional architectural history.24 Together, Fowler and Cornforth’s painstaking and prolific investigations of interior schemes, Girouard’s subsequent look at cityscapes as well the countryside, Harris’s investigations of the ways in which country houses and estates are portrayed in paintings and Thornton’s sweeping surveys of visual representations of interiors provided a body of literature (and, importantly, identified a vast catalogue of source material) which has underpinned subsequent research in this area. From this well-mapped ground, more recent enquiries have addressed issues such as the traditions of country house visiting and have developed critical investigations of the place of the country house in national heritage, thus creating a wider and more nuanced field of enquiry.25
Design history’s emergence in the 1960s (and in particular the adoption of cross-disciplinary approaches in the 1980s) has also played a central part in the expansion of a literature detailing the eighteenth-century interior. A particularly influential wave of design history practitioners looked to the economic, social and cultural histories being written in the 1980s, rather than simply to art history and the decorative arts. It was in this context that Charles Saumarez Smith completed his study of the eighteenth-century interior, marking another shift in the way the history of the interior was conceptualized. Rather than looking exclusively to the materials comprising the interior, the furnishings it housed and its spatial organization, Saumarez Smith considered how changing conceptions of the meaning and use of interior space can be traced through a changing history of visual representation, including the emergence of the conversation piece, pronounced shifts in the conventions of architectural drawings and the development of the narrative scene [4 and 5].26
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Similarly, the interior appears as a key category in Adrian Forty’s work on the history of design since the industrial revolution, albeit one amidst other categories such as machinery, tools and manufactured objects designed for both domestic and non-domestic use.27 Forty’s work can be positioned as part of a historiographical move to integrate the study of the interior within design history and a history of consumption. Nonetheless, whilst the eighteenth century has long been at the centre of classic narratives of British consumption history, and the closing decades of the century cited as key in the traditional chronology of the industrial revolution, design history more broadly has tended to look forwards and away from the 1700s to consider the experience and expression of modern design and ‘mass production’ in the period from 1850 onwards.28 This is not to suggest that no new work on eighteenth-century Britain has been completed from the ‘design history school’, but rather that a seeming preoccupation with the more recent past has left the 1700s more as the starting point from which change first sprung, rather than a period for detailed study in its own right.29
Another influential strand of recent historiography contributing to the theoretical and methodological framework for studies of interiors has been undertaken over the last decade by historical geographers and by a new generation of architectural historians.30 The work of Miles Ogborn, Jane Rendell, Elizabeth McKellar, Dana Arnold and others has prompted historians to rethink the role of space as a material and mental category.31 Space complements time in the understanding of historical dynamics: it is not simply the stage in which historical events take place or the background on which people and things mutate over time. It is a historical construction, the expression of specific social and cultural circumstances.32 Both historical geography and a ‘new’ architectural history have primarily considered space as an exterior rather than an interior category, mapping the development of streets and squares, the use of urban markets and pleasure grounds and so forth. Subsequent studies have since extended this remit to consider inns and clubs, the social life of neighbourhoods and the contemporary perception of such arenas, all of which have provided a more nuanced methodological basis for current studies of the interior.33
Issues of space and location have also long been central to debates in women’s, gender and family history. Lawrence Stone cited the emergence of conversation piece paintings (with their pronounced domestic genre) as evidence that the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of an affectionate, emotionally satisfied ‘nuclear family’.34 Stone’s assertion that the 1700s witnessed a vital shift on the nature of ‘family’ echoed Philippe Aries’s thesis that the eighteenth century founded a concept of childhood.35 Implicit to both is a notion that the celebration and defence of privacy became an organizing force and that the family became a self-contained unit, accommodated within a house that had specialized rooms for different uses and family members, all of whom were collectively embraced within a ‘home’ separated from a public world of work, commerce and non-kin acquaintances.36
Whilst Aries and Stone suggested the 1700s as the time of change, it has been within the literature on Victorian England that a perceived division between public and private spaces and lives has underpinned major historical narratives. Domesticity, it has been argued, became the lingua franca of the nineteenth-century woman’s experience, and the so-called ‘rising middle class’ found a cohesive social identity in a model of domestic life wherein women reigned in a ‘private sphere’ of home, distinct from a man’s ‘public sphere’ of professional work.37 In this context the domestic interior became central to women’s history as here, it was hoped, a history of women was to be found.
These sweeping assertions and rigidly gendered divides have since been subject to extensive revision and criticism.38 Amanda Vickery’s critique of the ‘separate spheres’ thesis and her detailed study of the full range of women’s experiences within the eighteenth-century gentry suggested a number of alternative categories that could be applied to eighteenth-century domestic culture, such as ‘propriety’, ‘prudent economy’ and ‘civility’, all of which carry gendered implications but circumvent the rigidity of previous models. Whilst current women’s and gender history extends far beyond a preoccupation with the domestic, a lingering reliance on separate spheres nevertheless continues to echo in some of the most recent literature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic properties.39 Concepts of space, both domestic and non-domestic, have also proved central to the new history of the body and sexuality. For example, Karen Harvey’s work on eighteenth-century erotica demonstrates how interior spaces were deployed as metaphors for the female body. New research by Peter McNeil argues that interior decoration was also an important expression of homosocial bonds, as in the case of Walpole at Strawberry Hill.40 The intersection between history and literature has been a further fertile terrain of rediscussion and reconceptualization of the boundaries between presentation and representation of and self-presentation within domestic interiors in not only the eighteenth but also previous centuries.41
As social historians have criticized the elitist perspective of many traditional studies of eighteenth-century interiors, new research has begun to uncover in more detail the experiences of the non-elite, their place in the developing domestic ideologies of the period and also their agency over the mores of taste and style so strongly associated with the age.42 The expression of agency, personal taste and cultural and intellectual affiliation through interiors has also emerged in recent years as a key topic of investigation.43 If histories of consumption and material culture have pointed to the increasing availability and variety of new objects during the eighteenth century, historians are still debating the overall meaning and impact that this ‘rise in material culture’ had on people’s lives, in particular within domestic settings [6]. The Georgian interior is therefore continuing to develop as an important field of study, not just a material category per se, but as a barometer of social and material changes, including: the search for comfort; the embodiment of politeness; new mores of respectability; and new manufacturing and industrial processes.44
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The study of the function and use of interiors has been accompanied by studies on the relationship between human agents and material objects. The last decade has seen an unprecedented ‘return to the artefact’ not so much on the part of art historians or decorative arts historians (who never deserted the very material object of their study) but of historians tout court. ‘Material culture’ has been seen as an appropriately loose label to include studies on different aspects of the relationship between people and things and the construction of ‘meaning’ for artefacts and the spaces in which they are contained. Some of these studies have privileged the agency of the object, adopting a ‘biographical’ approach to the life of artefacts much in vogue in Renaissance quarters; others have more predictably developed Appadurai’s ‘social life of things’ by observing the agency of people and the position of objects within specific social and cultural milieus ranging from tea and coffee drinking to the meaning of walking [7].45 Others, again, have tried to integrate clothing, architecture and furniture or to enter into the more ambiguous aspects of furniture use and design, as in the case of furniture with secret drawers and other devices for concealment.46
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Collectively, this varied literature and the developing approaches included within it address far broader themes, categories and questions than those relating to the interior alone. Nonetheless, they occupy a central place in the historiography that has given rise to the research published here, influencing how the interior (and its place in social and cultural histories) has been conceptualized. Of course, domestic interiors continue as a predominant heritage concern. Although the ‘period room’ no longer occupies centre stage as it once did, presentations of domestic experiences, preservation of furnishings and the re-creation of aspects of the domestic lives of the past continue to be a focus of major exhibitions.47
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Conclusion |
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TOPNotesWhat is Georgian?Georgian interiorsMapping the field: interlinked...Conclusion |
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The Georgian Interior conference, from which this special issue of the Journal of Design History has been generated, was attended by over 300 delegates, testifying to the continued popularity of this topic in a broader public setting. One comment raised from the floor criticized a move away from examining surviving interiors in favour of debating representations, strategies and more fluid manifestations of domestic lives. This is a difficult issue that relates to changes in the scholarship as underlined above. We feel, however, that the preoccupation with re-creating a fixed Georgian interior overlooks the varied and changing nature of interiors in the eighteenth century. It is precisely this changing nature that made the interior a powerful cultural signifier [8].
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Modern divisions between civic and domestic contexts also fail to acknowledge the rich complexities of domestic cultures of the past, and particularly those of the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century interiors, as examined here, were not simply the material manifestation of a Georgian style that was popular at some points and under certain circumstances between the 1710s and the 1830s. In the eighteenth century, as today, the making of an interior was not simply about the adoption of the right elements within a certain vocabulary of taste that preferred, for instance, columns to arches, Wedgwood creamware to Rococo elements or Adam’s neoclassical motifs to medieval Gothic. The design of eighteenth-century interiors was the outcome of a complex relationship between technology, aesthetic ideas and the availability of materials and finished goods. Interiors were also shaped and reshaped by social practices, individual choices, everyday use, upkeep and repair. Finally, the interior is also a historical construction, an association of terms, classifications and categories that have had a complex—and sometimes troubled—existence.
In response to the burgeoning research on histories of interiors being undertaken in all these contexts, both within museums and within academic institutions, the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (CSDI) was established in 2001 with the intention of bringing together divergent historiographical strands, mapping the field, as well as pursuing new research into the use, representation and meaning of homes. A collaboration between the Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway, University of London, the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum, the CSDI ran a series of research projects, conferences and workshops to further the study of the domestic interior from the sixteenth century to the present. Whilst the V&A’s Georgian Interior conference was not formally part of the CSDI’s programme of events, it was strongly informed by the Centre’s research endeavours and particularly by the eighteenth-century British history projects.48 Not least, as former CSDI post-doctoral fellows, our own historiographical and research engagement with the eighteenth-century interior was undertaken under the auspices of the Centre.49
Overall, collective research activities, conferences and workshops dedicated to the interior have multiplied in the last few years, producing a healthy debate among not only social historians, art historians, architectural and design historians and curators, but also historical geographers, anthropologists and ethnographers. It is from this research context that the 2005 Georgian Interior conference and the present special issue have take shape.
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Acknowledgments |
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Acknowledgements: We would like to thank for their kind advice Julius Bryant, Jane Hamlett, Elizabeth McKellar, Peter McNeil, Kate Retford, Catherine Richardson, John Styles and Amanda Vickery.
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Notes |
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TOPNotesWhat is Georgian?Georgian interiorsMapping the field: interlinked...Conclusion |
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If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org and access this article. There is a facility on the site for sending email responses to the editorial board and other readers.
1 The conference was generously supported with grants from by the British Academy and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. 
2 This extract is included in the ‘Domestic Interiors Database’, available on www.rca.ac.uk/csdi (ID code: RP153). Anonymous, The Greatest Expositions: Completely Illustrated Official Views of the Louisana Purchase Exhibition (1904), p. 24. The emphasis is ours.
3 There exists a prolific range of decorative arts studies of particular categories of goods. Recent publications examining silverware include P. Glanville & H. Young (eds.), Elegant Eating: 400 Years of Dining in Style, V&A Publications, London, 2002; W. Guthrie, Dundee Silver 1750–1850, Dundee, 1994; J. Lomax, British Silver at Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall: A Catalogue of the Leeds Collection, Maney, Leeds, 1992; broad survey texts, such as P. Glanville, Silver in England, Unwin Hyman, London, 1986, covered the history of materials and products across more than a century. A recent important contribution which combines decorative arts studies with a business and social history is H. Clifford, Silver in London: The Parker and Wakelin Partnership, 1760–76, Yale University Press, London, 2004. Other categories of goods are covered in publications such as G. W. Beard, Upholsterers and Interior Furnishings in England 1530–1840, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1997; C. Gilbert, A Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture 1700–1840, Furniture History Society, London, 1996; A. Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture: The Work of Thomas Chippendale and His Contemporaries in the Rococo Taste, c. 1745–65, Faber, London, 1968. Texts celebrating the achievements of particular architects include E. Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001. The classic survey of visual sources is P. Thornton, Authentic Décor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1984; C. S. Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration. Design and the Domestic Interior in England, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1993, was initially classed as a ‘sourcebook’ even though he was pioneering a reinterpretation seeking to complicate the narratives and to position visual representations of the interior in a broader social and cultural history. It was only later published as a standard monograph, alas with few of the original images. See C. S. Smith, The Rise of Design: Design and the Domestic Interior in Eighteenth-Century England, Pimlico, London, 2000.
4 J. Summerson, Georgian London, Harmondsworth, 1945, pp. 1–9.
5 M. Rosso, ‘Georgian London Revisited’, London Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, 2001, pp. 35–50; E. McKellar, ‘Popularism versus Professionalism: John Summerson and the Twentieth-Century Creation of the "Georgian"’, in Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture, B Arciszewska & E McKellar (eds.), Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004, pp. 35–56.
6 This was a point raised and recognized during the ‘Architectural History: Where Next?’ symposium held at the Yale Centre for British Art in November 2006. In particular, comments made by Alice Friedman and Peter Guillery drew attention to the conceptual limitations of architectural history as traditionally framed and called for greater consideration to be given to the interior.
7 J. Summerson, op. cit., pp. 148–9.
8 P. Borsay, ‘Why Are Houses Interesting?’, Urban History, vol. 34, 2007, p. 338.
9 This topic has been dealt with by P. McNeil, ‘Rarely Looking in: The Writing of Australian Design History c. 1900–1990’, Designing Australia: Readings in the History of Design, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2002, pp. 14–29.
10 See, for instance, the Furniture History Society’s journal Furniture History, started in 1965, and the Pasold Research Fund’s journal Textile History started in 1968.
11 J. M. Robinson, The Latest Country Houses, Bodley Head, London, 1984.
12 The resonance of Georgian as an appealing category embraced by a much broader public has also been noted in the work of Steven Parissien. At the Georgian Interior conference, introductory remarks by Parissien reminded us that Georgian became a staple design motif of new build homes in the twentieth century, but, increasingly, came to stand for conservatism rather than modernity. Our thanks also to Peter McNeil for his reflections on this topic.
13 As work by Ian Gow and Stana Nenadic on the Scottish interior reminds us, ‘British’ does not always encapsulate a cohesive stylistic form and fails to account for the wide variety of regional distinctions which are equally central to understanding domestic interiors and experiences in the eighteenth century. I. Gow, The Scottish Interior: Georgian and Victorian Décor, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1992; S. Nenadic, ‘Middle Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720–1840’, Past and Present, vol. 145, 1994, pp. 122–56.
14 E. McKellar, The Birth of Modern London: The Development and Design of the City 1660–1720, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, especially introduction and her article ‘C. H. B. Quennell (1872–1935): Architecture, History and the Quest for the Modern’, Architectural History, vol. 50, 2007.
15 M. Baker, Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture, V&A Publications, London, 2000.
16 Conversation pieces are used in this way in P. Thornton, op. cit.
17 The portrayal of the eighteenth century as a key moment of social and political change is summarized in Langford’s concept of a ‘polite and commercial society’, see P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989; and ibid., Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991. Jonathan Clark, however, has argued that eighteenth-century England remained an ancien régime society, marked as much by continuity as change, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985. Clark’s thesis has been extensively criticized but a recent reappraisal is offered by Frank O’Gorman in the Institute of Historical Research’s online ‘Reviews in History’, see http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/reapp/frank.html.
18 P. Langford, ‘The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., vol. 12, 2002, pp. 311–13; and ibid., ‘British Politeness and the Progress of Western Manners: An Eighteenth-Century Enigma’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., vol. 7, 1997, pp. 53–72; L. E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994; ibid., ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal, vol. 45, no. 4, 2002, pp. 869–98; P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989.
19 See, for instance, M. Berg, ‘New Commodities, Luxuries and Their Consumers in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850, M. Berg & H. Clifford (eds.), Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, pp. 63–85; J. Styles, ‘Product Innovation in Early Modern London’, Past & Present, vol. 168, 2000, pp. 124–69; D. L. Porter, ‘Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth Century Fashion and the Aesthetic of the Chinese Taste’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, 2002, pp. 395–411; M. Berg, ‘Asian Luxury and the Making of the European Consumer Revolution’, in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, M. Berg & E. Eger (eds.), Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2003, pp. 228–43; D. Ormrod, ‘Cultural Production and Import Substitution: The Fine Decorative Arts in London, 1660–1730’, in Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London, P. K. O’Brien et al. (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 210–30.
20 A number of essays in the recent collection, J. Styles & A. Vickery (eds.), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and American 1700–1830, Yale University Press, London, 2007, seek to rectify such limitations. Amanda Vickery, for example, explores choice, issues of taste and the relationship between consumer and interior decorative styles in her study of Trollope & Sons, wallpaper order and letter book, and Ellen Hartigan-O’Conner and Claire Walsh examine the experience of shopping (and particularly the role of the proxy-shopper) in consumer practices in eighteenth-century America and Britain. See also P. Borsay, op. cit., pp. 338–9.
21 There has been a rejection of the emulative models of consumption which originally structured the history of consumption, complicating the emphasis placed by historians on elite models of taste. See in particular the critique of McKendrick's bottom-up theory of emulation (N. McKendrick, J. Brewer & J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth Century England, Europa, 1982) by Weatherill, Fine and Leopold and Overton et al.: L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760, Routledge, London, 2nd edn., 1996; B. Fine & E. Leopold, ‘Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution’, Social History, 1990, vol. 15, no. 2, 1990, pp. 151–79; M. Overton, J. Whittle, D. Dean & A. Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750, Routledge, London, 2004.
22 For recent studies of plebeian experiences, see chapters by J. Styles and J. White, in J. Styles & A. Vickery (eds.), op. cit.
23 J. Fowler & J. Cornforth, English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1974; M. Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1978, 1994; J. Cornforth, English Interiors 1790–1848: The Quest for Comfort, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1978; J. Harris, The Artist and the Country House: A History of Country House and Garden View Painting in Britain, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1979; P. Thornton, op. cit.
25 M. Girouard, Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985; D. Cruikshank & N. Burton, Life in the Georgian City, Viking, London, 1990; D. Arnold, The Georgian Villa, Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1996; P. Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, Yale University Press, London, 1997; D. Arnold, The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape and Society, Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1998; A. Tinniswood, The Polite Tourist: Four Centuries of Country House Visiting, The National Trust, London, 1998; N. Cooper, Houses of the Gentry: 1480–1680, Yale University Press, London, 1999; C. Christie, The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000; J. Ayres, Domestic Interiors: The British Tradition 1500–1850, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003, first published as The Shell Book of the Home: Decoration, Design and the Construction of Vernacular Interiors 1500–1850, 1981); J. Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors, Yale University Press, London, 2005. Notably, in his historiographical review of a selection of country house publications from the late 1990s, J. V. Beckett argues that whilst there has been increasing raft of interest in the use and function of the country house by contemporary occupiers, there remains a distinct lack of critical enquiry about the role and meaning of the same country houses as they are preserved in our modern society. Beckett suggests that a culture of publishing country house books as ‘coffee table’ publications for a tourist market stunts the field and notes the continuation of an ‘uncomfortable divide between the scholarly and the popular, between the social and the architectural historian’. See J. V. Beckett, ‘Country House Life’, Historical Journal, vol. 45, no. 1, 2002, pp. 235–44.
26 S. Smith, op. cit., Eighteenth-Century Decoration and Rise of Design.
27 A. Forty, Objects of Desire. Design and Society, 1750–1980, Thames and Hudson, London, 1986.
28 John Styles critique of design history's concern with mass production. J. Styles, ‘Design for Large-Scale Production in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, 1988, pp. 10–16: and ibid., ‘Manufacturing, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Consumption and the World of Goods, J. Brewer & R. Porter (eds.), Routledge, London, 1993, pp. 527–54.
29 For example, a recent collection of history of design essays exploring the interior includes a chapter on eighteenth-century interiors as its starting point: K. Sharpe, ‘Women's Creativity and Display in the Eighteenth-Century British Domestic Interior’, in Interior Design and Identity, S. McKellar & P. Sparke (eds.), Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2004. Notably, in this collection the eighteenth-century study examines the role of the ‘amateur’ and influence of ‘craft’ on the home, in contrast to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century professionalization and institutionalization of domesticity suggested in other contributions to the volume.
30 E. Fernie, ‘History and Architectural History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 13, 2003, pp. 199–206.
31 M. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies, 1680–1780, Guildford Press, New York, 1998; J. Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London, Athlone Press, London, 2002; D. Arnold (ed.), ‘The Country House: Form, Function and Meaning’, The Georgian Country House. Architecture, Landscape and Society, Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1998, pp. 1–19; M. Ogborn & C. W. J. Withers (eds.), Georgian Geographies: Essays on Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2004.
32 For a useful overview, see M. Ogborn, ‘Georgian Geographies?’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 218–23.
33 See, for instance, E. McKellar, ‘Peripheral Visions: Alternative Aspects and Rural Presence in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London’, Art History, vol. 22, no. 4, 1999, pp. 495–513; J. Marriot, ‘The Spatiality of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century London’, in The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, T. Hitchcock & H. Shore (eds.), London, 2003, pp. 119–34; J. Schlarman, ‘The Social Geography of Grosvenor Square: Mapping Gender and Politics, 1720–1760’, London Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2003, pp. 8–28.
34 L. Stone, Family Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1977. K. Retford offers a more nuanced reading of domestic portraiture in The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006.
35 P. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Vintage Books, New York, 1962.
36 For a revisionist interpretation, see N. Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001.
37 The seminal text was L. Davidoff & C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, Hutchinson, London, 1987. See also, M. Hunt, Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996; R. B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres?, Longman, London, 1998.
38 A. Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History’, Historical Journal, vol. 36, no. 2, 1993, pp. 383–414; L. E. Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 1995, pp. 97–109; K. Gleadle, ‘"Our Several Spheres": Middle-Class Women and the Feminisms of Early Victorian Radical Politics’, in Women in British Politics 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat, K. Gleadle & S. Richardson (eds.), Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2000. Karen Harvey has argued that the history of men needs to be reintroduced to studies of the home if a more rounded picture of eighteenth-century domestic culture is to be attained: K. Harvey, ‘Domesticity and Authority: Writing, Men and the Home’, paper presented to the British History in the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, 31 January 2007.
39 T. Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; D. Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006; M. Ponsonby, Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors 1750–1850, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007. A nuanced reading of the concept of ‘privacy’ within the home is being developed by Amanda Vickery as part of a major new research project on the eighteenth-century home. A. Vickery, ‘An Englishman's Home Is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House’, paper presented at ‘History 1680–1850’ seminar, University of Oxford, 25 January 2007. A body of current research may well finally debunk the separate spheres legacy, including J. Hamlett, ‘"Nicely Feminine yet Learned": Student Rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Women's History Review, vol. 15, no. 1, 2006, pp. 137–61; and ibid., ‘Materializing Gender: Identity and Middle-Class Domestic Interiors 1850–1910’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Royal Holloway University of London, 2005.
40 K. Harvey, ‘Spaces of Erotic Delight’, in op. cit., M. Ogborn & W. J. Withers (eds.); and ibid., ‘Eroticizing the Interior’, in Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance, J. Aynsley & C. Grant (eds.), V&A Publications, London, 2006; P. McNeil, ‘Crafting Queer Spaces: Privacy and Posturing’, paper presented at the conference ‘Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries’, University of Technology, Sydney, 20–21 February 2007.
41 See in particular the special issue of the journal Home Cultures, vol. 2, no. 3, 2005, on the domestic interior in British literature edited by C. Grant; C. Richardson, ‘Home, Household and Domesticity in Drama in Early Modern London’, and C. Grant, ‘"One's Self and One’ House, One’ Furniture": from Object to Interior in British Fiction, 1720–1900’, both in J. Aynsley & C. Grant (eds.), op. cit.; C. Richardson, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England, The Material Life of the Household, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2006.
42 P. Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London: A Social and Architectural History, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004; J. Styles, ‘Lodging at the Old Bailey: Lodgings and Their Furnishing in Eighteenth-Century London’, and J. White, ‘The Laboring-Class Domestic Sphere in Eighteenth-Century British Thought’, both in J. Styles and A. Vickery (eds.), op. cit., pp. 61–80. On clothing, see J. Styles, ‘Involuntary Consumers? Servants and Their Clothes in Eighteenth Century England’, Textile History, vol. 33, no. 1, 2002, pp. 9–21; ibid., ‘Custom or Consumption? Plebeian Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Berg & Eger, (eds.), op. cit., pp. 103–18.
43 See, for instance, J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1997.
44 On comfort, see J. E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort. Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000. On politeness, see Langford, op. cit., and Brewer, op. cit. On respectability, see W. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800, Routledge, New York, 2002. On manufacturing, see M. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Oxford University Press, 2005.
45 A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Pespective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986.
46 See in particular L. Auslander, ‘Regeneration through the Everyday? Clothing, Architecture and Furniture in Revolutionary Paris’, Art History, vol. 28, no. 2, 2005, pp. 227–47, and the recent research by Carolyn Sargentson on eighteenth-century French furniture and secrecy.
47 Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, available on http://www.moda.mdx.ac.uk/; the Geffrye Museum, alongside its period rooms, has run a series of exhibitions examining ‘home and garden’ from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, available on http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk; the Yorkshire Country House Partnership Project, available on http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/cecs/ych.htm, has included themed exhibitions on domestic lives including ‘Maids and Mistresses’ (2004) and ‘Work and Play’ (2007); The ‘At Home in Renaissance Italy’ exhibition, held at the V&A Museum (October 2006–January 2007) presented renaissance art and architecture in a domestic context, M. Ajmar & F. Dennis (eds.), At Home in Renaissance Italy, V&A Publications, London, 2006. For a review of the social and cultural histories that underpinned the V&A's remodelled British Galleries, see M. Snodin and J. Styles, Design and the Decorative Arts, Britain 1500–1900, V&A Publications, London, 2001.
48 The collection Gender, Taste and Material Culture formed one of these strands.
49 H. Greig, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Interiors in Image and Text’, in J. Aynsley & C. Grant (eds.), op. cit., pp. 102–27.
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