Interior Decorating In Nineteenth Century France

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.

Designing the French Interior traces France's central role in the development of the modern domestic interior, from the pre-revolutionary period to the 1970s, and addresses the importance of various media, including drawings, prints, pattern books, illustrated magazines, department store catalogs, photographs, guidebooks, and films, in representing and promoting French interior design to a wider audience. Contributors to this original volume identify and historicize the singularity of the modern French domestic interior as a generator of reproducible images, a site for display of both highly crafted and mass-produced objects, and the direct result of widely-circulated imagery in its own right. This important volume enables an invaluable new understanding of the relationship between architecture, interior spaces, material cultures, mass media and modernity.

The author takes a detailed look at the design and decoration of domestic interiors in Europe and America during a period that has never before been considered in its own right. The homes protrayed include those of aristocrates and artists, members of fashionable society and the bourgeoisie. Their salons, studios, bedrooms, libraries, and bathroom - from architectural framework to choice and arrangement of furniture, to the minutiae of personal taste - provide fascinating insights into the domestic life and fashion of the time.

Publisher Description

This volume of primary source materials documents the nineteenth-century search for a representative style, and the alternating fashions for interiors that demonstrated the consumerism of the period. Although in some senses every interior is unique so that a style canon may seem to be meaningless, there have been important historical trends or styles that have influenced individual interiors, and these have formed the groundwork from which other styles and tastes have developed and changed. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of art history.

The author of seven best-selling books on French design, Phillips now shatters the notion that a room must have elements from one culture only and instead assembles a veritable bazaar of choices that showcase the best from a wide world of countries and cultures.

Christiane de Nicolay-Mazery, a specialist in furniture and antiques at Christies and Honelon, invites her readers to enter the elegantly luxurious interiors of some of France's most exclusive abodes. From the classic taste of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the creativity of the nineteenth century, she traces the path to the finesse of the twentieth century, which combines tradition and modernity. The interiors portrayed in these nine exquisitely illustrated chapters pay tribute to the refinement of French taste, a savoir-faire that has been continually renewed. Classic hôtels particuliers in the heart of Paris and romantic châteaux, as well as a surprising isba--a traditional rural log house in the Russian style--are but a few of the examples of the kinds of interiors that will inspire readers as they marvel over the art of French designers, including Madeleine Castaing, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Jacques Grange, François Joseph Graff, and Pierre Bergé. Unlike most books on French style on the market, this book is not only a testimony to timeless French elegance, it is an invitation to discover a synthesis of contemporary and classic décor, in some of France's most exclusive residences, firsthand.

In The French Room, best-selling author and interior designer Betty Lou Phillips explains the age-wisdom and fervent beliefs that have long defined French decorating and reveals the principles behind designing the perfect French room. With more than 150 awe-inspiring photographs, Tres French also shares secrets on the ways color solves irksome design problems without moving walls or making other structural improvements, addresses the art of hanging art and dressing salon windows, then moves into the French kitchen and bed chamber to explore those unique cultures. Betty Lou Phillips is the author of the award-winning Villa Decor, plus Inspirations from France and Italy, The French Connection, Secrets of French Design, Unmistakably French, French Influences, French by Design, and Provencal Interiors. A professional member of the American Society of Interior Designers, her work has appeared in Southern Accents, Traditional Home, Decorating, Bedroom & Bath, Window & Wall, Paint Decor, and more. Additionally, she has appeared on the Christopher Lowell Show and the Oprah Winfrey Show. She lives in Dallas, Texas.

The nineteenth century - the Era of the Interior - witnessed the steady displacement of art from the ceilings, walls, and floors of aristocratic and religious interiors to the everyday spaces of bourgeois households, subject to their own enhanced ornamentation. Following the 1863 Salon des refuses, the French State began to channel mediocre painters into the decorative arts. England, too, launched an extensive reform of the decorative arts, resulting in more and more artists engaged in the production and design of complete interiors. America soon followed. Present art historical scholarship - still indebted to a modernist discourse that sees cultural progress to be synonymous with the removal of ornament from both utilitarian objects and architectural spaces - has not yet acknowledged the importance of the decorative arts in the myriad interior spaces of the 1800s. Nor has mainstream art history reckoned with the importance of the interior in nineteenth-century life and thought. Aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, including art and design historians, historians of the modern interior, interior designers, visual culture theorists, and scholars of nineteenth-century material culture, this collection of essays studies the modern interior in new ways. The volume addresses the double nature of the modern interior as both space and image, blurring the boundaries between arts and crafts, decoration and high art, two-dimensional and three-dimensional design, trompe-l'oeil effects and spatial practices. In so doing, it redefines the modern interior and its objects as essential components of modern art.

At last, in a single volume, here is a sweeping, historical survey of interior design, decoration, and furniture. Starting around 3200 B.C., at the height of artistic development in ancient Egypt, Professor Blakemore takes us on a beautifully written and illustrated journey across five millennia of stylistic periods. Unique in its comprehensive approach, this book is a much needed addition to the existing literature on the history of interior design. 100 color illus., plus line drawings and halftones.