Willing to accept the newly rich as well as new designs, the gentry in early Georgian Britain swelled in numbers and indulged their spending urge — often to excess. This led many to ruin, but it also allowed craftsmen, designers and artists to make great reputations for themselves.

Merit, good fortune, education and patronage, corruption and service to the nation were among the varied means of advancement in mid- 1 8th century Britain. The band of people deemed to belong to polite society broadened to receive many from comparatively humble backgrounds. Artists and architects, bankers and businessmen, as well as those born into the nobility and the landed gentry could join the fashionable upper set in the reigns of George I (1714-27) and George II (1727-60).

There was little to hinder the quickening pace of prosperity apart from the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 supporting the Stuart claimants to the throne, and the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 172o — when over-ambitious investors in a company trading with the South Sea islands suffered financial collapse. Many more investors, and merchants, grew rich, however, through the success of the East India Company.

The Social Round at Home and Abroad

In this prosperous age, the well-to-do enjoyed a constant, extravagant round of dinners, balls, gambling and horseracing. Spending money — and being seen to spend it — was in vogue. No shame was attached to going bankrupt if it was done with style. For all its acceptance of the lowly who rose to join it, polite society liked to show itself a cut above the rest. Its absurd clothing, for example, used expensive imported fabrics beyond the means of social inferiors, and in excessive quantities. Women’s oblong hooped skirts measured some 6 ft (1.8 m) across and men’s coat cuffs doubled back to their elbows.

Style demanded that the autumn and winter should be spent in London. Social life, business interests, attending parliament and the inconvenience of travel all made it desirable to have a house in London. A summer trip must be made to a spa town, where a leader of fashion would act as master of ceremonies, as ‘Beau’ Nash did at Bath. And style decreed that each year, those of polite society’s sons who had finished their formal education should go to the Continent for the Grand Tour. Learning and culture were increasingly the marks of a gentleman.

Antique Collector MagazineThe Grand Tour lasted anything up to five years and took the young men, in the company of tutors, to visit the great houses, palaces and cities of France and Italy, to admire the ruins of antiquity and to collect trophies — imitations as well as genuine pieces of Classical sculpture, and paintings not just by masters of the past but by the very latest successful artists — Canaletto, for example.

A Taste for Classical Temples

One influential young man, the Earl of Burlington, returned from his travels in Italy inspired especially by the work of the 16th century architect Andrea Palladio. Lord Burlington studied the work of Palladio’s only previous British champion, Inigo Jones, before he designed Chiswick House and built it between 1725 and 1729 to hold his collection of art and sculpture.

Its restrained, Classical-temple style was taken up for many of the town houses that now sprang up in London and in fashionable spa towns such as Bath, Tunbridge Wells and Scarborough. Terraces lining the streets and built around squares had the facades and proportions of Palladian villas.

The buildings were Classical inside as well as outside. The proportions of the rooms were based on the cube, and the measurements of columns and pilasters agreed with Classical rules — the height of a Corinthian column, for instance, is ten times its diameter. Doorways were framed with columns and pediments.

Classical restraint did not yet extend to the furniture, however. William Kent, a protégé of Burlington and one of the first architects to involve himself with every detail of exterior and interior design, had no qualms about ornate furniture. He developed his own line of heavy, richly carved pieces, typified by marble-topped tables on gilded pedestals of birds or female or animal figures. Kent’s furniture, essentially Baroque, set the pattern for many other designers until about 1740.

The Lighter Touch of Rococo and Chinese Style

On the Continent, the ponderous and florid Baroque had, about 1730, suddenly lightened into the more delicate style known as Rococo. The name is derived from the French rocaille, `rockwork’, and coquillage, ’shell’. The style evokes rocky grottoes, and makes liberal use of scallops, garlands, and ‘S’ and ‘C’ curves. It is often asymmetric and suggests swirling movement and playfulness.

When the Rococo reached Britain after 1740, it rarely featured in exterior design as it did in France. It tended to appear in graceful details — on mirror frames, girandoles (wall- fixed candleholders), chimney pieces, furniture, wallpaper, textiles and ceilings.

Similarly light-hearted was the use of Chinese motifs. The excitingly foreign style of porcelain, lacquerwork, embroidered textiles and hand-painted wallpaper imported from the Far East was the inspiration for decorating whole rooms, especially ladies’ bedrooms, with Chinoiserie. Chinese figures, pagodas and the long-necked ‘ho-ho’ birds similar to cranes found their way onto mirror frames and European porcelain. Thomas Chippendaleapplied this style so emphatically to a range of his furniture that it is called Chinese Chippendale.

Just as ideas from distant places were used in Chinoiserie, ideas from distant times were adapted to give a Gothic touch. The pointed arches and tracery seen in Medieval churches appeared on furniture — in chair-backs and the glazing bars of bookcases, for example — and in sham ruins built on country estates.

All these styles — Palladian, Rococo, Chinoiserie, Gothic—could be used in one house, even in one room. A variety of tasteful effects was the aim of the fashion-conscious.

Adapting to Mahogany

Nature forced changes on furniture, in which solid walnut and walnut veneer had reigned supreme for some 5o years. In 1709 France suffered severe weather that killed off many of its walnut trees. In 1720 France stopped exporting walnut, and furniture-makers in Britain lost their major timber source. The Caribbean solved the problem and mahogany was imported from Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Cuba from about 173o.

It was appreciated for its colour and the close grain that made it suitable for precise joinery and for carving. Many shapely pieces were made in solid mahogany, among them the typical Georgian armchair with wide, upholstered seat, pierced split of interlacing bands, gently curving arms, and cabriole legs with carved knees and — the emblem of early Georgian furniture — ball-and-claw feet.

Another typical early Georgian item is the three-footed pedestal table with a round top, often with a `piecrust’ border and hinged to swing up for the table to stand flat against a wall when not in use. The tripod pedestal was also used on kettle stands, candlestands, dumb waiters — and pole screens to shield heavy face make-up from the heat of a fire.

Tallboys and bureau-bookcases, incorporating architectural forms, were topped by a pediment. Whereas in 1700 such pieces were generally given cabriole legs, now they tended to have bracket feet — low, straight feet curved at the inner edge. The Rococo influence was seen in the lines and ornament of armchairs and the serpentine or bombe shapes of commodes (elaborate chests of drawers).

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