While their homeland was Oliver Crom well’s Commonwealth, Royalists who had taken refuge in France experienced the French style of life. One of its features, which they copied on returning home after 166o, was the arrangement of rooms. The public, formal core of a house was the hall or vestibule and the main reception room, often called the salon (saloon) or great parlour. The private suite of rooms had its own slightly less formal reception room — the withdrawing room — which was an antechamber to the bedrooms.

The largest houses had separate private suites for the master and the mistress of the house, and for other family members or for guests; each suite had a withdrawing room. In smaller houses just one room served as public reception room and family living room. This withdrawing room of about 1680 was not yet a comfortable room. It declared the owner’s status to visitors and provided a setting for conversing with due etiquette.

Upright Formality

Furniture was still placed against the wall and much of it still had an upright, rectangular quality. The tall, caned chairs, for example, were not made for relaxing in, although a touch of comfort was given by cushions on the seats. Upholstered armchairs and other comfortable furnishings were still kept mainly in the bedroom or the closet. There was often an addition of more up-to-date and exotic pieces such as imported lacquer cabinets resting on gilded Baroque stands, and walnut-veneered pieces in a lighter style.

The basis of the room was generally Classical, the dado and cornice of the walls echoing the plinth and capital of a Classical column. The space between was enhanced perhaps by carving, by specially commissioned paintings, by lacquerwork or, as here, by panels of fine cloth. Towards 1700, ceilings were increasingly painted with dramatic trompe l’oeil domes or cloudy skies.

Antique Collector MagazineWindows, spaced regularly along the walls, were usually of the sliding sash type, held open by weights hidden inside the frame. The triad, or triolet, was developed to fill the space between windows. It consisted of a table with a looking glass above it and flanked by a pair of tall candlestands. Lighting continued to be by candles, which were often numerous. They were in chandeliers of gilded wood or of glass hung just above wig height, in silver and brass sconces fixed to the wall, and in candlesticks and candelabra on the furniture.

The floor was usually of scrubbed oak or deal hoards and covered with rush matting. Although it was becoming more common to place Turkish and Oriental carpets on the floor, the practice of laying valuable carpets on tables persisted until the 172os. Parquet flooring in the French manner was expensive and it tended to break apart; if it was used at all, it was most often in the bedroom or the closet, where fewer people would walk on it.

Touches of more casual decoration began to enter the withdrawing room. On the mantel shelf there might be English pottery figures or a garniture — a set of vases, usually three large and two smaller, in Chinese or Japanese porcelain or in delftware. Jardinieres and vases of flowers or plants (real or of silk or paper) stood about the room. And later on there was often a hint of fun given by a dummy board — a realistic cut-out wooden figure newly ennobled by Charles II and merchants now growing rich from booming trade. They wanted plates and dishes, tankards and mugs — and toilet sets including glue pots, patch and powder boxes, bowls for lotions and ointments, and candlesticks. They even bought solid-silver furniture and fire ‘irons’. Elaborate silver wall sconces for candles became status symbols.

Huguenot silversmiths such as Pierre Harache and David Willaume benefited from the demand. They excelled at exuberant Baroque ornament, and the new, purer silver that became the legal standard in 1697 was heavier, softer and thus better for their method of casting ornament to apply separately to an item. The Huguenots also brought the technique of cut-card work, in which scrolls, medallions, leaves and other motifs were cut from thin sheets of silver and soldered flat onto a plain surface. The technique gave a much sharper outline than embossing.

Gradually elegance of line rather than fussy ornament was appreciated. The swelling baluster shape especially was used for drinking vessels, candleholders, the feet of dishes and all manner of objects.

Beneath the surface show, keen minds were engaged in scientific study, and enterprising manufacturers were eager to turn new techniques into profits. This was the age when Sir Isaac Newton discovered the natural laws of gravity and motion, Robert Boyle defined chemical elements and established how gases behave, and Thomas Newcomen invented a steam engine. Amateur scientists toyed with microscopes and orreries and absorbed the reports published in the new scientific periodicals. Thomas Tompion worked with scientists to develop accurate watches, travelling clocks, and bracket and longcase clocks. He and others also made barometers.

Homemade Glass and Exotic Porcelain

By 1676 George Ravenscroft had found a method of making clear lead-oxide glass free of fine cracks, a breakthrough that allowed a British glass industry to compete with imported Venetian glass. The new glass was not as runny in its liquid state as Venetian glass and it could not be blown as thin, so styles were adapted to suit it. Wine-glass stems, for example, were sturdy but graceful balusters at first, then a variety of shapes including mushroom, globular and multi- ring. A bubble of air in the stem was a popular decoration. Soon sweetmeat dishes, cream jugs, candlesticks, toilet pots and other items were made, some with applied ornament.

Particularly coveted were products of the workshop that George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, had opened in 1663. It made silvered glass and created a huge market for mirrors. Only the larger output that was made possible by the development of cast glass about 1700 could begin to satisfy the demand.

In pottery too, more home-produced wares were available. There was earthenware covered with cream and coloured slips, or with the tin glaze that fired to a white background for the brightly painted decoration of delftware. None of it equalled the translucent but tough and cheap white Chinese porcelain painted with dragons, birds and flowers in blue or polychrome. Demand for this was part of the taste for Chinoiserie that also encouraged Chinese motifs in furniture, textiles and silverware.

Imitation of Oriental blue and white ware was the seed of the boom in the delftware industry in both England and Holland during the 17th and 18th centuries. William of Orange brought with him from Holland a taste for delftware.

William’s wife, Queen Mary, was a keen collector of Chinese and Japanese porcelain— one of many who collected not just blue and white but the more colourful and more expensive famille-verte, which the Chinese made for export from the late 17th century. Pieces of furniture, and even whole rooms, were designed for displaying the precious porcelain; other specialised items, too, were collected. This gathering of objects of antiquity, curiosity and beauty was to grow even more during Georgian times.

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