Home is where the art is
Jonathan Clark
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY DECORATION: DESIGN AND THE DOMESTIC INTERIOR IN ENGLAND by Charles Saumarez Smith Weidenfeld, £50, pp. 407 This book modestly claims to be a visual record of 18th-century English interiors. It is really much more: a guide to the battlefields of England's style wars. Why were they fought ? Why did they turn out as they did?
The casual student of 18th-century art could be forgiven for absorbing a simple scenario of the relation of art to life. We begin with the stiff, formal interior of the late 17th century (Samuel Pepys's library), all bare boards, hard little chairs, and Grin- ling Gibbons woodcarvings. Soon we see the impact of growing commercial prosper- ity in the early 18th century, symbolised in the tea ceremony — silver teapots denoting affluence, china tea sets as evidence of overseas trade; large families formally posed in group portraits, those conversa- tion pieces without conversation, signifying the rigid social conventions of pre- modernity.
These wooden groups by very minor artists like Charles Philips and Arthur Devis look so characterless that the can- vasses seem to write their own credentials as accurate reportage. We assume that society must have been like that. Then industrialisation and romanticism get into their stride, and via Robert Adam and Johann Zoffany we arrive at the cosy, domestic interior which seems to link the sober family life of George III with the padded proprieties of Jane Austen.
Affective individualism and better fire- places somehow seem to go together: modernity arrives via domestic comforts and over-dressed, under-employed middle- class women being kind to children and animals. George Morland's canvases of country cottages, where essentially the same themes seem to be acted out in a more rustic simplicity, only prove the inno- cence in low life of the manners which Thomas Rowlandson half persuades us were vicious in high life.
It is this scenario which Saumarez Smith's book begins to break down. First, he argues that 'the appearance of interiors does not evolve according to fixed stylistic rules'. There was no inner logic which urged style down certain channels. On this, he builds the claim that artists for artistic rather than naively representational rea- sons were adjusting 'the conventional idea A chinoiserie saloon designed by Timothy Lightoler, 1757. of what paintings ought to depict'. There was, in other words, no outer logic either. His book therefore becomes a study of 'changes in artistic consciousness' by analysing as art the conventions which artists employed, and progressively adapt- ed, for the depiction of interiors.
The most influential genre of painting has, after all, been not the landscape (farm- ers never took these as models, whatever Capability Brown did inside his employers' parks) or the heroic battle-scene (generals learned nothing from visually stunning can- vasses like Benjamin West's 'The Death of Major Pearson'). It was the influence of art on the domestic environment, the private space, the relationship between individuals and their material setting — tiles, wall-coverings, furniture — which proved the power of the man with the palette.
If so, perhaps what we witness in 18th- century England is the conquest of the home less by consumer culture than by artistic design. Yet this runs counter to a powerful school of historical scholarship which, since the 1970s, has located the nov- elty of 18th-century culture exactly in its experience of 'consumerism', that craze for inventing, refining, producing, advertising, distributing, marketing, promoting, enjoy- ing and fashionably superseding the thou- sands of small products which we term consumer goods.
'Consumerism' flourished as a school of explanation as the old positivist economic history — all those diagrams of spinning jennies and statistics of coal output — fell into decline, qualified, scaled down and robbed of its triumphalism by the new, quantitative economic history. Yet, under- neath, consumerism was often nearly as reductionist as its predecessor. Even as consumption was acknowledged to be theo- retically as important as production, the consumer was normally depicted as the dupe of the producer. In this book, con- sumerism is significant as choice and as individual affirmation, not as capitulation to the material world. The old scenario, from Devis to Zoffany, was not wholly wrong; but this book gives it a quite new significance.
It takes sophisticated art history to liber- ate us from these assumptions and show us what freedom is restored to the past when mimeticism is turned into 'codified repre- sentation', to be interpreted as carefully as any text of political theory. Changes there were in 18th-century England, but what Saumarez Smith records are changes in 'the dynamics of style' and 'the language of artefacts'.
Indeed, the hidden presences in this book are the philosophers — Locke, Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Hume — whose sense of the material world and our experi- ence of it are held to shape style. Perhaps, in future centuries, some art historian will take up this theme and explain how our visual taste was shaped by Nozick, Rawls and Dworkin. It is a chilling thought.
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