INTERIOR DESIGN IN THE WEST

Interior design in the West Renaissance to the end of the 18th century The Renaissance was a revival of the old classical styles, and it is not surprising that it first showed itself to a marked degree in Italy. The Gothic style had made comparatively little headway in Italy, where it was regarded as barbarous except in some of the more northerly towns, such as Milan and Venice. The style had more or less coincided with a period of primitive commerce. With the Renaissance the complex commercial organization of ancient Rome began to be revived by the towns of Tuscany, especially Florence. Feudalism disappeared, and the bourgeois merchants and financiers of the town rose to power and influence. Money began to circulate, banks were established, checks and bills were honoured over long distances, factories were opened, and men grew rich enough to buy and commission works of art for interior furnishing from those who owned their own workshops, employed assistants, and were no longer reliant on a system of patronage. With the rise of the town and the invention of gunpowder, the fortified country house became obsolete. In and around Florence the new commercial civilization was most highly organized. The old Greek and Roman manuscripts had been preserved, not only by the Christian monasteries but to an even greater extent by the Muslims, and soon after 1350 these began to find their way into northern Italy. Men became increasingly dissatisfied with the spiritual outlook of medieval Christianity, and the old Greek curiosity and philosophical speculation began to revive. The Renaissance was, in fact, a return to the mainstream of Western art after what could fairly be described as the Gothic interregnum. Nevertheless, a thousand years lay between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, and the classical styles of the Renaissance bear the same kind of resemblance to those of Rome as modern Italian bears to Latin. They are similar, but by no means the same thing. The Renaissance brought back the Roman vocabulary of ornament, although the emphasis was now sometimes in different places. The classical orders (columns with base, shaft, capital, and entablature) were borrowed, and adapted to dress the new architectural style. Architects became highly skilled in the treatment of space, and decoration often played a major part in defining and enriching their vigorous spatial effects. Classical architectural forms were used in plasterwork, inlaid woodwork, and painted decoration as well as for staircases, doors, windows, and fireplaces, which formed increasingly important and elaborate features of interior design. Decorative details inspired by the antique were also used, executed in a wide variety of techniques; garlands, caryatids (statues of women used as supporting pillars), lion masks, grotesques, reclining amorini (cupids), cornucopia (horns overflowing with flowers or fruit), arabesques (entwining scroll and plant motifs), and trophies of arms are among the most familiar. Floors of coloured and patterned marble paving are frequently integrated with the overall decorative scheme. Modelled stucco, sgraffiti arabesques (made by cutting lines through a layer of plaster or stucco to reveal an underlayer), and fine wall painting were used in brilliant combinations in the early part of the 16th century. In Venice the transition from Gothic to Renaissance building came less abruptly, as demonstrated in the Doge's Palace, where a Gothic exterior is found in combination with a late 15th-century facade on the east of the courtyard and a series of High Renaissance council chambers, famous for wall paintings by the Venetian painters Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto. Wood panelling with flat pilasters and a molded frieze forms the lower part of the interior wall decoration, with the fine series of historical and allegorical paintings, above, divided into panels between painted and gilded moldings and pilasters. The ceilings of a later date are particularly richly painted, their heavily scrolled carved and gilt cornices and framing introducing a touch of the Baroque style. Windows with twin semicircular headed frames surmounted by a lunette (a semicircular wall area) and fitted into a third, larger round-arched opening are a typically Venetian feature of the waterside palaces. In these, as in all the great Italian houses of the time, the works not only of the finest painters of the period but of the sculptors, goldsmiths and silversmiths, wood-carvers, bronzeworkers and ironworkers were used to embellish the principal rooms. Silks, embroideries, and cut velvets were used as hangings and upholstery, together with elaborately cut and framed looking glasses and carved gilt pendant chandeliers, as in the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli, Venice (1480). Costly carpets were imported, and much fine linen was in use. Trompe l'oeil (realistic) effects of perspective were achieved in the painting of walls and ceilings and also with intarsia (inlaid wood) decorated panelling such as in the study of Federico da Montefeltro, formerly at Gubbio, Italy and now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York City or in the Palazzo Ducale, Urbino (completed about 1500), where a startling effect is created simulating open cupboards full of books. During the Renaissance, Venice became a glass-making centre and introduced many new techniques. Blue glass with fine enamel painting dates from the end of the 15th century. Excellent engraving was done with a diamond point as soon as glass of sufficiently good colour was produced, by using manganese to neutralize the colour introduced by impurities in the raw materials. Such glass, which was called cristallo from its fancied resemblance to the hardstone known as rock crystal, is the origin of modern crystal glass. The Venetians also imitated coloured hardstones in glass. Glass made white and opaque with tin oxide was sometimes used for enamel painting in the style of porcelain, and clear glass with opaque white threads embedded in it in lace-work patterns was called vitro di trina. The Venetians also made mirror glass of excellent quality; in the 17th century they supplied the mirrors for the Galerie des Glaces of the palace of Versailles. Large sheets, however, were not practicable until the French discovered a method of making plate glass late in the 17th century, when the national factory of Saint-Gobain was founded. Renaissance cassone, gilded poplar with painted panel, from the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, During medieval times, Italian wood-carvers had achieved a high level of skill in the decoration of churches; now they turned to secular furniture, for which they employed oak, walnut, cypress, and a new, rare, and expensive woodebony. (In 17th century France, the craftsmen skillful enough to be entrusted with this woodwho were also makers of cabinetscame to be called bnistes, a term that remains the French equivalent of the English cabinetmaker.) Many ancient Roman furniture-decorating techniques were revived. Inlaying with a variety of coloured woods, with ivory, mother-of-pearl, and tortoiseshell, with a mosaic of coloured stones known as pietra dura, and with painting and gilding in addition, ornamented the finest furniture. The chest (cassone; see photograph), often commissioned on the occasion of a wedding, was decorated with elaborate painting and gilding, sometimes with a large pictorial subject and sometimes with elaborately carved work, which was later coloured. Italian furniture in its design often made use of architectural motifs. Cabinets were often exceptionally luxurious, with such elements as caryatids flanking central doors, arcades of semicircular arches, and triangular pediment tops. The interiors were sometimes small models of architectural interiors, with mirrors inset to give an impression of spaciousness. Silver furniture, no longer extant, was used in considerable quantities in late Renaissance times, usually crafted from plates of silver beaten over wooden formers. An innovation in Italy, which rapidly spread throughout the rest of Europe, was tin enamelled pottery, known in Italy as majolica and farther north as faence or delft. Colourful dishes were often painted in a style known as istoriato (history painting) with mythological and biblical subjects. As some of the subjects were taken from engravings of Raphael's work, this pottery became known during the 18th and 19th centuries as Raffaelle ware. The majolica potters, the best of them located in Tuscany, made extensive use of grotesques, which show the style at its best. The old Roman fashion for small bronze figures was revived during the Renaissance, and the fashion for these in interior decoration continued almost to the end of the 19th century. The earliest were fairly exact copies of excavated classical bronzes and may have been forgeries intended for sale at the time as genuine Roman work. The art developed rapidly. Before the 16th century, bronzework was done by the goldsmiths, and, as in most goldsmiths' work, general effect was subordinated to meticulous detail. After 1500, when bronze became popular for lamps, candlesticks, sconces, inkstands, small freestanding decorative figures, and furniture mounts, treatment of suitable subjects developed along the lines laid down for full-sized sculpture. Many small bronzes were made, some of them in the grotesque style. At the beginning of the 16th century, the revived classicism of the Renaissance began to be modified, and eventually the style divided into two distinct paths. One remained faithful to tradition. The architect Andrea Palladio took ancient Roman works as a model, basing his designs on the theory of proportion laid down by Vitruvius in the 1st century BC in the Ten Books on Architecture. The second path was initiated by Michelangelo and led by way of Mannerism to the Baroque style. In both these latter styles, a deliberate exaggeration of forms displaced the strict logic and precision of the High Renaissance and aimed to convey freedom of movement and to involve the spectator in the drama of the design. Mannerism had only a limited influence on interior furnishing, as in the bronzes by Cellini and by Giambologna. Poses are often strained, the torso twisted, and the musculature emphasized; the favourite Mannerist subjects are violent ones, such as the rape of the Sabines and Hercules slaying Antaeus. Baroque was the style of the Counter-Reformation and was intended by the Jesuits to express the temporal power and riches of the Catholic Church in contrast to the austere doctrines of Protestantism. The theatricality of the Baroque style soon attracted the attention of princes, who wanted it to be used in the palaces they built. Coloured marbles were used extensively, frequently in combination with bronze and rich gilding. Coloured glass windows were often used for lighting special features. Walls were sometimes painted to appear to be a continuation of the interior, giving an impression of spaciousness. Certain materials were often simulated by others: scagliola, for example, is a mixture of marble chippings, gypsum, and glue that was widely employed to imitate brecciated marble. What appeared to be richly coloured marbles were often no more than painted wood. Drapery was frequently imitated in carved marble, and wooden columns, the purpose of which was purely decorative, were painted like marble or some other exotic stone. Marble or stucco was made to imitate brocaded hangings, as in the Sala Ducale, Vatican, where an effect of space from limited means is created. Basic techniques were unaltered, but all restraint in their use vanished in bold theatrical effects and sensual luxuriance of modelling. Walls became curved, pediments were broken (i.e., with central part omitted), columns and pilasters twisted until the buildings seem to come alive with movement. Bernini exuberantly combined rockwork, figures, and draperies with columns, panelling, and vaulting. From Italy these styles spread across Europe, where they were absorbed in varying degrees and tempered by the national or local taste and genius. Many Italian designers and craftsmen travelled and worked abroad in France, England, Austria, and Spain. France From the middle of the 15th century, ideas from Italy began to change the face of French buildings; this change came gradually, first in the applied decorative detail superimposed on basically Gothic designs, then extending to a symmetry and regularity of the whole. Indeed, one of the basic differences between the Renaissance in France and in Italy is that in the latter the revolution in style involved, from the very outset, the whole conception of design. The centralization of power and the brilliance of French court life was consolidated under Francis I (151547) and had already resulted in patronage of artists and craftsmen from Italy. Since the need for churches had been fulfilled in the great age of Gothic building, the king and his court rivalled one another's magnificence in building new chteaux in the early Renaissance style. Stone and timber were readily available, with masons and carpenters skilled in their use. Among the earliest attempts in the new manner are the additions made by Francis I to the Chteau de Blois. The spiral staircase, with its own open stonework tower, may have been designed by Leonardo da Vinci, who died nearby at Amboise in 1519. Even at this early stage, the decoration of the staircase ceiling with carved bosses (an ornamental ceiling projection) featuring the monogram and heraldic device of the king shows a typical French contribution to Renaissance decoration. Such shields and monograms formed an important element in many decorative features, being used in wall and ceiling panel design or on the large carved stone chimneypieces. The fine galleries of Francis I and Henry II (154759) in the royal Palais de Fontainebleau illustrate the increasing elaboration of applied decoration and colour. The flat ceilings are of wood, coffered, coloured, and gilded in a variety of geometrical forms outlined with fine moldings. Molded panels enclose paintings on the upper section of the walls, and molded or carved wood panelling the lower parts, as in Italy. Floors are of hardwood strips, sometimes repeating the pattern of the coffered ceiling above. Benches supported on consoles (ornamental brackets) are designed as part of the overall scheme of wall panelling. Italian artists had been employed at Fontainebleau and elsewhere, influencing the contemporary French architects toward a more Italian conception. Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio decorated the Galerie de Franois I, while the hexagonal coffered ceiling in the Galerie de Henri II was designed by the French architect Philibert de l'Orme. The architects Sebastiano Serlio and Giacomo da Vignola, together with the goldsmith Benevenuto Cellini, all worked for a time in France, and much of the decorative work in the chteaux of the Loire valley was executed by Italian craftsmen. In the early 17th century and during the long reign of Louis XIV (16431715), formality and magnificence became paramount in the life of the court. Suites of large rooms elaborately decorated provided an opulent background for the King and his courtiers; such suites usually consisted of a vestibule, antechamber, dining room, salon, state bedroom, study, and gallery. Staircases were stately and spacious, offering a fitting approach to the main rooms. Decorative schemes incorporated the fittings, hangings, and furniture with that of the room. The Baroque style was admirably fitted to express ideas of luxury and pomp. It inspired the building of some of the finest palaces erected in Europe since the days of Imperial Rome. The palace of Versailles built in the mid-17th century and widely imitated, led to the French court style in interior decoration and furnishings. Versailles was intended to be the outward and visible expression of the glory of France, and of Louis XIV, then Europe's most powerful monarch. His finance minister, Colbert, set up a manufactory that made works of art of all kinds, from furniture to jewellery, for interior decoration. A large export trade took French styles to almost every corner of Europe, made France a centre for luxuries, and gave to Paris an influence that has lasted till the present day. The vast initial cost of Versailles has been more than recouped since its completion. Even Louis XIV's most violent enemies imitated the decoration of his palace at Versailles. In 1667 Charles Le Brun was appointed director of the Gobelins factory, which had been bought by the King, and Le Brun himself prepared designs for various objects, from the painted ceilings of the Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) at Versailles to the metal hardware for a door lock. (It should be noted that at the Gobelins, as elsewhere in France, furniture was designed by artists or architects who had no practical experience of manufacture, whereas, in the great age of furniture making in England, most designs were made and executed by the cabinetmaker himself, who had an intimate knowledge of his material.) Though the Baroque trend is well established in the Versailles interiors, generally speaking it was regulated in France by an underlying restraint that seldom permitted decoration or movement to dominate entirely. Besides the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre is an example of magnificence in decoration. The vastness of these rooms and the lavish use of marble, plasterwork, and painted ceilings (with the addition at Versailles of mirror glass panels) created an effect of overwhelming grandeur. Among the architects and artists working at this time were Jean Berain, Andr-Charles Boulle, Jean le Paultre, Robert de Cotte, and Jules Hardouin-Mansart. Their work continued in the later period in which Baroque ornament was transformed into the airy, delicate Rococo of the mid-18th century. The beginning of this more fluent treatment can be seen in the work of Robert de Cotte at Versailles and the Htel de Toulouse, Paris. An immense variety of materials was used for the inlaid and decorated furniture; in a piece by Boulle, for instance, the designer employedin addition to the tortoise-shell and brass inlayebony, copper, lapis lazuli, green-stained ivory or horn, and mother-of-pearl. Despite its freedom from onerous restrictions, the Baroque style had preserved the classical idea of symmetry. Not until the early decades of the 18th century were there marked departures from the notion that an object divided vertically should consist of two halves that are mirror images of each other. The Louis XIV style embodied a passion for symmetry, but with the Regency of the duc d'Orlans, which began in 1715, asymmetry became one of the features of contemporary decoration and one of the major aspects of the Rococo style. The principal designer in this style, who was largely responsible for its development, was Juste-Aurle Meissonnier, a goldsmith and ornemeniste. It is no accident that many objects in Rococo style, including furniture, look as though they had been designed by a metalworker. It has been said that Rococo began when the scrolls stopped being symmetrical. The influences that brought about this revolutionary concept are worthy of consideration. Beginning in the early decades of the 17th century, Chinese porcelain and lacquer were imported into Europe in ever-increasing quantities. Porcelain, especially, attracted many distinguished collectors, including most of the royalty of Europe. This increasing use of Chinese art objects in European decorative art provided a powerful influence with no trace of classical tradition. Soon after 1650 the Dutch began to import porcelain from Japan, at first decorated in blue, but toward the end of the century in polychrome, painted either by, or in the manner of, Sakaida Kakiemon. This was widely sought, and even more highly valued than Chinese porcelain. When Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, bought a palace early in the 18th century to house his collection, for instance, he called it the Japanische Palais, and in France Louis-Henri de Bourbon-Cond, duc de Bourbon, established a factory at Chantilly to imitate Japanese porcelain. The decorations of Kakiemon were markedly asymmetrical, as were the painted lacquer panels that were imported to be made into screens and furniture, and there seems no doubt that this feature also influenced European Rococo art. Despite the quantities in which it was imported, the demand for Oriental porcelain could not be satisfied, and European potters sought desperately to discover the secret. The first factory to make porcelain in the Oriental manner was at Meissen in Saxony, patronized by Augustus the Strong, but soon many small factories began to spring up in Germany, Austria, and Italy. France had several factories making a modified type of porcelain, the most important being the Svres factory, owned by Louis XV and patronized by his mistress, Mme de Pompadour. The first English factory, at Chelsea, was established as late as 1745. Porcelain was probably the most important expression of the Rococo style in the first half of the 18th century, with bronze and goldsmiths' work closely following in second place; indeed, this period might well be called the age of porcelain. Rooms entirely decorated with porcelain still exist. These included not only vases and figures, but also mirror-frames, scrollwork, cornices, and even small console tables. A very fine example still survives at the Palazzo di Capodimonte (Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte) in Naples. The French style developed, in the 18th century, into a very skillful synthesis of materials in which bronze and porcelain played an important part. Furniture was elaborately mounted in bronze with a marble top and was often decorated with porcelain plaques, as well. Clocks were made from porcelain vases. Jardinieres and vases were filled with porcelain flowers with bronze stalks and leaves. Veneering with rare woods reached its height, and decorative marquetry, often elaborately pictorial, was practiced. Much sought at this time was the marquetry of brass and tortoiseshell, which began with Boulle, although it was a revival of an Imperial Roman fashion. Tapestries covered the walls when these were not decorated with carved wood-panelling known as boiserie. Another form of wall-decoration, also employed in the making of furniture, was vernis Martin (Martin's varnish), an imitation of Oriental lacquer that was extremely popular after 1730. The large salon de reception of the 17th century gave place to smaller, more intimate rooms, and more of them, and the furniture and decoration of the period are also on a smaller scale. The Rococo style is remarkable for its flowers and its curves. Furniture legs were gracefully curved, and tops were cut into serpentine shapes. It is easy to see when the Rococo style ends, because chair legs at once become straight. Typical Rococo features are seen in the interiors of the architect and decorator Germain Boffrand for the Htel de Soubise, Paris (begun 1732), where architectural form has been subordinated to the demands of the decoration; the cornice has disappeared, and walls curve into the ceiling, appliqud with ragged C scrolls, garlands of flowers decked with ribbons, sprays of foliage, trellising, and shell motifs. The reduced scale of rooms and the reaction from monumental design result in elimination of the classical orders. Relatively small painted panels, idealizing peasant life, were enclosed in flattened moldings, silvered or gilt; pastel-coloured backgrounds prevented the smaller size of the salons from becoming too evident. The use of Chinese motifs typifies the search for novelty and blends well with the general lightness of style. The Cabinet de la Pendule (Room of the Clock) at Versailles (1738), designed by J. Verberckst, is another excellent example of French Rococo interior design. Gilles-Marie Oppenordt and Franois de Cuvillis also were distinguished designers who worked with the best artists and craftsmen of the time. The Rococo fashion spread across Europe to the courts of minor royalties, where many Frenchmen were employed to provide up-to-date buildings and schemes of decoration. In France the Gobelins factory became restricted mainly to the output of tapestries; equally fine work is seen in Aubusson and Beauvais carpets and tapestry. Improvement in glass manufacture resulted in larger mirror panels and brilliant crystal chandeliers. The Louis XVI, or Neoclassical, style began, in fact, to take root before the death of Louis XV in 1774; Mme de Pompadour and her brother, the Marquis de Marigny, were among the first to be attracted by the new classical style in the 1750s. From 1748 onward the characteristically French regard for formality was stimulated by the archaeological discoveries at the sites of the ancient Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii and by the other surveys of classical remains published at this time. It is sometimes forgotten that contemporary English styles also had influence in France, mainly through the published works of the architects Robert and James Adam. The asymmetrical, sinuous lines of the Rococo were slowly replaced by a more restrained form of decoration based once again on straight lines, right angles, circles, and ovals, arranged symmetrically. The lightness and fine moldings were retained, but the decorative forms were once more contained by the architectural framework. New motifs, many of them selected from antique Roman wall painting, decorated the panelling, in paint or in flat relief; palmettes, husks, urns, tripod stands, sphinxes, trophies of arms or musical instruments were frequently combined in the decorative schemes. Gilt bronze was used with wood and plasterwork for moldings and ornamental fillets, emphasizing the rectilinear character of the design. The work of J.-A. Gabriel in both the Chambre du Conseil at the cole Militaire (begun 1751) and the Galerie Dore, Ministre de Marine (begun 1762) may be cited as Parisian examples. The keynote of colouring, as well as design, is refined simplicity. Silk tapestry wall hangings with fine flower and ribbon motifs appear in pale blues, greens, rose, and lilac. Similar colourings were used for satin and velvet upholstery. The fine wood carving of the brothers Rousseau, gilt bronze work by Clodion (Claude Michel), and furniture pieces by David Rntgen, C.E. Riesener, and Jean Oeben show Louis XVI decoration at its highest. Apartments for Queen Marie-Antoinette at Versailles and her boudoir at Fontainebleau are full of this extravagant delicacy, soon to be obliterated in the French Revolution. Interior design in the West 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe Neoclassicism predominated in France till the rise of Napoleon, when to Roman styles were added Egyptian motifs from his Egyptian campaign of 1798. This was known in France as the Empire style, after the First Empire of France (180414), and in England as Regency, for the period (181120) when George III was too deranged to rule. Furniture design, for the most part light and graceful during the early part of the Neoclassical period in France, had become more consciously luxurious as the Revolution was approached. During the Empire period it became massive, imposing, dark, and pompous. The usual vocabulary of classical ornament is to be found in both Empire and Regency, with some modifications from earlier times. The cabriole leg of the Rococo style became straight, and curves tended to disappear in all furniture. Symmetry of ornament replaced the asymmetrical curves. In England, in the latter part of the 18th century, porcelain became less and less fashionable, and its place was taken by the cream-coloured earthenware (creamware) of Josiah Wedgwood, and by his jasper and basaltes stonewares, all admirably adapted to the new style. Greek vase-shapes and classical ornament were commonly used in the decoration of Wedgwood wares of all kinds. In England, the work of Thomas Hope, a wealthy amateur architect, gained much attention through the publication of his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807). He enlarged and decorated his London home in Duchess Street, Portland Place, and also his country house, Deepdene, in Dorking, Surrey, with somewhat heavy and pedantic design that was at variance with the general trend of the time but influenced later work. In Germany the solid bulk of the Biedermeier style, with its thick curtains, draperies, antimacassars, and padded upholstery, gave evidence of material prosperity. Many of these features were to become commonplace in Victorian England, but in the meantime, the Regency style was prevalent and contributed many masterpieces of design. Brighton Pavilion (begun 1815) was built by John Nash for the Prince Regent. Much lacquered and bamboo furniture was used, blending with Chinese wallpapers, fanciful treatments of palm trees as columns, and the most extravagant of crystal chandeliers. In general, however, the Regency style strove for elegance without extravagance; innumerable smaller houses were built and decorated with fine wrought-iron balustrades on curving stone staircases, pleasing carved wood or marble mantelpieces of modest sizes, and plain or panelled walls of light colouring, on which the use of wallpaper was becoming more common. By the latter part of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution was slowly developing, particularly in England, and machinery was increasingly producing many objects of interior decoration, modifying their form to suit the new methods and reducing the price to make them available to new markets, a situation envisaged by Wedgwood. The less affluent of the middle classes became the largest section of consumers, and manufacture was increasingly directed toward catering to their tastes. In the early years of the 19th century a new concept was beginning to take shapethe notion of eclecticism, which propounded that any style was as good as another. This led to the idea that styles could legitimately be mixed together. In this way Horace Walpole's nightmare of a garden-seatGothic at one end and Chinese at the otherbecame, in principle, an accomplished fact: one firm, for instance, made a classical urn on a Gothic base. In the early decades of the 19th century, in addition to the Empire and Regency styles, there was a Greek style of marked simplicity, and an Italian style described as picturesque with Palladian detail' (a contradiction in terms), as well as an Elizabethan style, a Tudor style, a Baronial style (under the influence of Sir Walter Scott), an Abbotsford style (also resulting from Scott's influence, based on his house of that name), and a revived Gothic style, far removed from Walpole's modest and amusing essay. The revived Gothic was at first inspired by James Wyatt's pseudo-cathedral built for the author William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey, with interiors of cathedral-like amplitude and about a 300-foot (90-metre) tower. This Gothic Revival produced a small number of houses in which the pointed arch together with fan vaulting and crocketed (carved with foliated ornament) or deeply undercut moldings were used with some taste and discretion. Toddington Manor, Gloucestershire (1829), by the architect Charles Barry (who, with A.W.N. Pugin, designed the Houses of Parliament), and Hughenden Manor, the house of British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, exemplify a style used later in the century with greater ostentation and coarseness of detail. In the principal European countries, interior decoration grew increasingly heavy and elaborate. Ornament came to be considered synonymous with beauty, and pattern covered every possible surface. The products of industrial manufacture were mostly very crude, and their use resulted in loss of refinement; for example, aniline dyes, which are harsh in colour, were first made in 1856 and soon replaced the softer, more harmonious colours. Architects decked out their buildings according to whim in a variety of styles. In less ambitious schemes of decoration brightly coloured wallpapers with bold patterns were widely used, and the white plaster ceilings were relieved by modelled cornices and often also by some central feature, frequently in a coarsened Rococo design, which made a background for the elaborate light fitting. Rooms became crowded with furniture, and fireplaces were often mounted with elaborate overmantels, fitted with mirror panels and a multitude of shelves and brackets for the display of knickknacks. Both furniture and fittings were draped in dark-coloured plush with heavy fringes. Varnished pitch-pine dadoes, stained-glass windows, and encaustic-tiled floors were also popular. By the 1830s there was a revival of Rococo, to be seen in the porcelain of the period and the chairs of John Belter of New York, and there was something called the Louis XIV style, which that monarch would have found difficulty in recognizing. Throughout this period there was a limited amount of pseudo-Chinese decoration, principally on pottery and porcelain and papier-mch. After 1853, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the U.S. Navy reopened Japan to Western trade and influence, a new kind of Japanese art began to be exported, such as the vases of unprecedented ugliness decorated in Tokyo and called Satsuma, or enormous, grossly over-decorated vases from Seto in Owari (presently Aichi Prefecture), none of which would have found a buyer in the Japanese home-market. The 19th century was an age of eclecticism. Decorators introduced the custom of having a different style for each roomGothic, Elizabethan, or Old English for the dining-room; Queen Anne, Chippendale, or Louis XVI for the drawing-room; with pseudo-Elizabethan furniture for the library. Design reached its nadir with the Great Exhibition of 1851, in London, the low-water mark in the history of European taste in interior decoration, from which there was no conceivable direction except upward. In France, where there was a sounder tradition and Gothic had not been influential for centuries, 19th century taste was not quite so debased as in England. A light and amusing version of Gothic known as the Troubadour style made its appearance in the 1830s, perhaps an international tribute to the contemporary fame of Sir Walter Scott. Rococo was revived as the Pompadour style, and there was a neo-Renaissance period, with furniture designs based on 16th-century Italian work. On the whole, the furniture of the second empire (185270) was very acceptable in design, although these pieces were based largely on the 18th century; these styles harmonized well with the contemporaneous music of Jacques Offenbach and the brilliance of the court of Napoleon III. In England there were a few people who recognized the depths to which taste had fallen. The designer and writer William Morris advocated a return to fine craftsmanship in furniture, textiles, and wallpaper, and started his own firm in 1861. Under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, artists who advocated a return to medieval principles, his furniture designs were based on actual surviving specimens instead of on Gothic architecture of the most florid periods. Morris's productions were well-made and well-proportioned, often with painted decoration in the old style. He helped to organize the Arts and Crafts Society with the object of improving design. His influence was limited, however, because, like his contemporaries, he looked backward for inspiration and in doing so refused to accept the possibilities of machine production. The 1870s and 1880s saw a fashion for reproductions of 18th-century furniture, especially the designs of Chippendale, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton, in which a few minor crudities, of a kind thought to be inseparable from hand-work, were added to machine-production. Much of the 18th century furniture that decorates today's interiors is no older than this vogue. A fashion arose in the 1880s for Japanese fans and screens and blue and white porcelain, in conjunction with bamboo and lacquer furniture, a taste to some extent influenced by the paintings of James Whistler. The influence of Whistler, Morris, and others may be seen in the Art Nouveau style of decoration, which was developed in the 1890s by the Belgian architect and designer Henry van de Velde and the British designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo. This was a style in interior decoration which went under various names at the timeArt Nouveau in England, Modern Style in France, the Jugendstil in Germany, and the Stile Liberty in Italy, in reference to the influence of the London firm of Liberty & Co. in promoting the style. Art Nouveau was most reminiscent of Gothic, with overtones of the Japanese art imported during the last quarter of the 19th century. Its ornament is markedly asymmetrical, and principally floral, particular use being made of the lily. It is strongly curvilinear, and there is hardly a straight line to be seen. It often derives its effect from an incongruous juxtaposition of decorative motifs. In furniture, for instance, the asymmetry of Rococo is to be found in its ornament, but in Art Nouveau the whole piece of furniture in some cases is asymmetrical, one side being higher than the other. Although the style created much interest at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, it never became very widely established but was one of several leavening agents in the sphere of design. Nonetheless, its influence extended beyond World War I into the 1920s, when the Art Deco style from Paris became current (see below 20th century). Its influence can also be found in such relatively modern designs as the Barcelona chair of Mies van der Rohe of 1929. Reaction against overcrowded, fussy interiors gathered strength. Plain interior walls in white or very light colours, natural woods, and simple doors and fireplaces were among the changes introduced by the more advanced designers in an attempt to create an original style suited to the changed circumstances of life in the first part of the 20th century. Late 18th to early 20th centuries in the U.S Classic movement after the Revolution, 17851835 Even after the American Revolution, English decorative influence predominated in the United States, in spite of greatly increased contacts with French thought and ideas. Although many leaders like Thomas Jefferson wished to see a complete break with English traditions, the Georgian forms of colonial days persisted in common usage till 1800 or after. By 1785, however, the reaction in Europe against the rather heavy classic style called free Palladianism and its Rococo and Baroque elaborations began to affect design in the United States. Jefferson, largely under French influence, became the leader of one aspect of the new movement in the South that combined practical planning with a literal classicism based on the direct study of ancient monuments. While Jefferson's interest in strict classic form was felt particularly in architecture, the decorative phase of the movement, both North and South, was dominated by the freer and more personal interpretation of classic motifs based on the work of the Adam brothers in England, before and during the American Revolution. This was the principal influence in the designs of the Boston architect Charles Bulfinch and his followers and was popularized about 1800 in the builders' pattern books of William Pain and Asher Benjamin. The houses of Boston, Salem, and Portsmouth that were built around 180010 by or under the influence of Bulfinch and Samuel McIntire, an architect of Salem, are the best examples of the changes wrought by the fine scale and delicate precision of their Adam-inspired designs, producing what has become known as the early Federal style. In the houses of the time, the circle, the ellipse, and the octagon were introduced as occasional variations in the plan, and the flying or freestanding staircase became a characteristic of the entrance hall. In interior decoration, wood panelling was practically abandoned or was restricted to the area below the chair raili.e., the wall molding at the height of the chair back. Decorative emphasis was concentrated on the mantel and overmantel, the doors and window frames, and the cornice, all usually of wood and enriched with delicate repeat ornament (either carved or applied). Rich colour in draperies and upholstery was set off by wall surfaces and decoration in light tones, grayed tints, or white. Block-printed wallpapers with classical motifs were frequently used, as were stencilled decorations in the sim