Interior decorating in nineteenth-century France

The visual culture of a new profession

Anca I. Lasc

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526113405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

This book explores the beginnings of the interior design profession in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on a wealth of visual sources, from collecting and advice manuals to pattern books and department store catalogues, it demonstrates how new forms of print media were used to 'sell' the idea of the unified interior as a total work of art, enabling the profession of interior designer to take shape. In observing the dependence of the trades on the artistic and public visual appeal of their work, the book establishes crucial links between the fields of art history, material and visual culture, and design history.

1

The collector as taste advisor and interior decorator: popular advice manuals and the orchestration of the private interior

In or around 1892, the architect and decorator (architecte décorateur) Georges Rémon (c. 1853/1854–1931) proposed the inclusion of a reproduction after Venus de Milo (a late second-century BC original) right next to one after the Florentine sculptor Giambologna’s Mercury (original of c. 1565) within a room decorated in the style of the Renaissance (Plate 1).¹ Reproduced in Rémon’s pattern book Intérieurs d’appartements modernes, the “Salon d’attente Renaissance” was positioned close to a Louis XV bedroom, an Oriental smoking room, and a Gothic library, all decorative themes already well-established within the revivalist canon characteristic of the nineteenth century’s historicist aesthetic.² A student and nephew of Alexandre-Eugène Prignot (1822–87), who himself had studied under the chief decorator of the Paris Opéra, Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri (1782–1868), Georges Rémon was in all likelihood the son of Henri Alphonse Rémon (1819–c. 1900). Born in Hampstead, United Kingdom, in or around 1853/1854, at the time when Henri Alphonse was working on the decoration of Cliveden House near Windsor, Georges Rémon appears to have contributed designs of interiors to various publications up until 1931, the year in which he probably died.³ Throughout his career, the artist published more than a dozen books and exhibited watercolors at the 1885 and the 1891 Salons, the 1889 Paris Exposition universelle, and the various exhibitions of the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs.⁴ In 1900, together with his brother Henri Rémon, Georges became the official decorator of the Musée centennal du mobilier et de la décoration (Centennial Museum of Furniture and Decoration) at the Paris Exposition universelle.⁵ How could a respectable decorator such as Rémon, responsible for the Musée centennal and the historically accurate period rooms installed therein, engage in such “decorative blunders” as placing an antique sculpture hidden and unknown until 1820 within a Renaissance decorative scheme?⁶ While a reproduction of Giambologna’s bronze sculpture Mercury of c. 1565 seems a reasonable choice for such an interior, how can one explain the presence of Venus de Milo in the same room?

This chapter studies the new theories about collecting and interior decorating that developed in France in the second half of the nineteenth century to understand the appearance of model interiors such as Rémon’s. A new interest in the decoration of upper- and middle-class homes led a variety of authors to share their ideas about ideal house décor with the public at large. Their work, published in collecting and interior decorating advice manuals often dedicated either to men as collectors or women as house decorators, outlined a firm set of guidelines that were expected to govern the interior decorating practices of upper- and middle-class Parisians.⁷ Rather than eclectic, as they might appear to an untrained eye, the model interiors proposed in these publications were, in fact, carefully orchestrated decorative ensembles guided by the rules of historical revivalism and themed décor, which attempted to create a collection of different times and places through interior decoration.

The new discourses about the proper appearance of the modern, private interior and the arrangement of objects displayed therein supported the development of a new, themed aesthetic that took history as its starting point and continued earlier forays into the revival of styles from the past. This new aesthetic presupposed a mastermind who would supervise the organization of each interior decorating ensemble within the upper- as well as the middle-class private home. Increasingly more decorated in the aftermath of the industrial and consumer revolutions, interiors were organized around a pre-established “principle” or decorative theme, thus paving the way for the work of later interior decorators at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The chapter concludes with an examination of the work of the “furnishing architect” (architecte d’ameublement) Édouard Bajot (1853–1900s) to understand how the theoretical tenets put forth in writing by collecting and decorating advisors assumed visual form in this designer’s interiors.

The rise of historicism and the consumer revolution

Private interiors during the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe and the US have traditionally been seen as assemblages of unrelated objects of radically different aesthetic values and backgrounds, amalgamated in one setting without rhyme or reason. “Too much of anything from anywhere in the same space” is how scholars such as Rémy G. Saisselin have defined the so-called “bourgeois style” of the nineteenth century.⁸ Displaying an “accumulation” of things, from valuable art objects to mass-produced fakes, imitation furniture, and decorative items, private interiors have generally been described as “cluttered.”⁹ “Oriental” objects set in neo-medieval or neo-Renaissance settings or ancient artifacts dis-played in Renaissance-themed interior environments have been seen as characteristic of a bricabracomania thought to have been on the rampage at the time. As a consequence, the bourgeois interiors that housed them have been described as eclectic.¹⁰

The nineteenth-century home was the direct result of the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century and the accompanying consumer revolution of the nineteenth. As cultural historian Rosalind Williams has explained, starting with the second half of the nineteenth century, many more people had “considerable choice in what to consume, how and how much” and also had the “leisure, education and health to ponder these questions.”¹¹ The steady increase in purchasing power was matched by technological changes, which lowered the cost of existing consumer goods and provided entirely new ones.¹² Cheaper items produced under the new factory system, or with new machines, proved irresistible to a new society which was both financially and intellectually ready to consume for the home. Yet the wide availability of objects and decorative choices also installed among contemporaries the fear that the French were no longer able to judge between good and bad art, or between successful and unfortunate decorative effects in their homes.

Indeed, France saw a period of frenzied historicism beginning in the 1830s. A new regard for and understanding of the past resulted in a better grasp of earlier decorating styles, to the extent that many attempted to perfect the reproduction of a specific period style within their homes by making all the objects in a room belong to that style. The past served as the basis for novels, theater plays, and new museum settings; and French people of disparate social backgrounds developed a taste for this past and its material culture. Before such works of fiction as Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) were published, or such coherent displays of antiquities as Alexandre du Sommerard’s collection in the ancient town house of the Abbots of Cluny were formed (beginning in 1832), curiosities from the past had not been objects of retail in the country.¹³ In fact, following the 1789 Revolution and the monarchy’s subsequent fall, a rejection of everything that had to do with the ancien régime had caused the large-scale destruction of royal castles, aristocratic mansions, and church holdings. Homes and monasteries were stripped of their decoration, furniture was burned, paintings were sold at foreign auctions, while gilt decoration and bronze sculptures were melted down to make new money for the nation and weapons for the army.¹⁴ In contrast, starting in the 1830s and during the newly formed July Monarchy, King Louis-Philippe himself would encourage the recreation of historically accurate decorative schemes in the former royal palaces that he had restored, including Fontainebleau, Compiègne, Pau, Trianon, and Versailles.¹⁵ As art historian Rainer Haaff explains, “from about 1830/40 to the turn of the 20^th century, Historicism developed as a series of stylistic reversions to, and borrowings from, earlier period styles.”¹⁶ By the second half of the nineteenth century, the neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance, neo-Classical, and neo-Rococo had become common decorative trends in France, and the material culture of the country’s pre-revolutionary past had found a new audience.

If upper-class Frenchmen, including the new, so-called “triple aristocracy of money, power, and talent” (or “of the bank, the ministry, and mass media”), could afford historically themed design schemes for their private homes, the common understanding until now has been that the middle and the lower-middle classes did not partake in themed interior decorating, lacking either the knowledge or the financial means to do so.¹⁷ Indeed, the removal of the Bourbon branch of the royal family from power and its replacement by the Orléans branch following the Revolution of 1830, with King Louis-Philippe d’Orléans assuming the French throne, catalyzed the emergence of a new upper class (“la vie élégante,” as Balzac famously called it) from a peripheral position to the center of Paris’s high society.¹⁸ A new social class that had no blood ties to the old French aristocracy, la vie élégante of the July Monarchy (1830–48) enjoyed substantial wealth and could afford to hire architects and other decorators to design and organize its private homes. But a plethora of publications on how to obtain the desired furnishing and decorative effects with less rather than more means, which developed in the first half of the nineteenth century and exploded during the second half, together with a growing market in antiques and reproductions after antiques, shows that less wealthy patrons could achieve similar interior decorating schemes in their dwellings. Old fabrics, old pottery, and especially old furniture, for example, were sold “aged and dismembered,” including “panes and cornices, a head, a foot, the top without the bottom, the door without the cupboard or the cupboard without its door.”¹⁹ Starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, when original objects from the country’s monarchical past had become even more scarce and their prices had risen too high, the growing interest in national antiques would allow for such restored fragments, repurposed pieces, and even semi-fake antiques to replace complete objects of ascertained provenance. When not even these restorations and adaptations sufficed, the Parisian furniture industry delved into outright copies of antiques, thus permitting even more people to acquire furnishings in the historical styles of their dreams.²⁰

Illustrated journals and auction houses provided a context in which to see and understand the various objects resurfacing from the past. Published for the first time in 1859, the Gazette des beaux-arts vouchsafed to become one of the most important sources of information regarding all matters of art and taste that were of direct relevance to the amateur collector, including the new archeological discoveries, the new masters from the past that were gaining fame, the latest art objects recently acquired by both private and public collections, and, last but not least, the holdings of the va...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The collector as taste advisor and interior decorator: popular advice manuals and the orchestration of the private interior
• 2 The inventor of interiors: old professions in search of a name
• 3 Private home, artistic stage: the circulation and display of interior dreamscapes
• 4 The image of furniture: department stores and the trade in interior decoration designs
• 5 Beautiful disorder, exception to the rule: the development of a new design aesthetic
• Epilogue: The presentness of historicism: the Musée centennal du mobilier et de la décoration and the legacy of proto-interior designers
• Bibliography
• Index