With a feverish desire to be in tune with high society, the well-to-do aped the taste of the Prince Regent’s court. The result was a Classical elegance with exotic flourishes.

No style more aptly named than Regency, for unlike most styles that bear the name of a current ruler, Regency has at its heart the tastes of the Prince Regent himself. The architects he employed set the style in buildings, and the furnishings in his homes were copied by the fashionable set. Even his critics fed off him by lampooning and caricaturing his scandalous private life and outrageous cronies.

In historical terms, the Regency began in 1811, with George, Prince of Wales (1762-1830), taking the place of his ailing father, King George III who, after prolonged bouts of illness, had been declared insane. It ended when the Prince became George IV on his father’s death in 1820. However, the term Regency is applied more liberally to cover styles and fashions from about the end of the 18th century until George IV died in 1830.

Palace of High Fashion

Regency style at its most sumptuous was embodied in Carlton House, in London’s Pall Mall, which was given to the feckless, headstrong Prince of Wales when he came of age in 1783. Delighted to escape his father’s staid court at Buckingham House (only later renamed Buckingham Palace), George chose the architect and designer Henry Holland to make Carlton House into a palace where he could shine among his chosen friends, a coterie of high-living dandies.

Antique Collector MagazineHolland used French craftsmen to create magnificent state rooms shimmering with ornate gilding and mirror-glass. They made a fittingly grand setting for the dazzling collection of opulent pre-Revolutionary French furniture. The furniture that Holland himself designed or commissioned had restrained Classical lines but its decoration was lavish.

Until it was found unsafe and demolished in 1827, Carlton House was a showpiece of Regency high society’s taste. When it was thrown open for public viewing for three days in 1811, so many people crowded in to see it that visitors collapsed in the crush.

 

Keeping up with the New

Staying abreast of high society’s fashions was an obsession of the wealthy. They grew rich in a booming wartime economy while Britain fought Napoleon on and off from 1793 to 1815. For most of that time the war penned them in their own country, although they were quick to swarm across the Channel again during the brief spells of peace. Apart from this, they devoted themselves to the good life in London, in genteel spas, at seaside resorts, and at their country houses. They eagerly studied the trends shown in journals and publications such as Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Fine Art (published 5800-20) and Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (published 1807).

Hope was a collector, antiquarian and designer who travelled widely in Greece. He copied the furnishings depicted on Greek vases and decorated them first with typical Classical motifs such as lion’s masks, Ionic scrolls and acanthus leaves, and later with the Egyptian motifs that were to become a distinctive Regency feature — winged discs, sphinxes and lotus leaves, for example.

Hope’s furniture designs were widely copied, in particular by George Smith, the owner of a London cabinet-making firm, but Smith was less interested than Hope in Classical accuracy and more intent on making furniture that was usable and comfortable. His designs sold well and popularised the style.

The new look in furniture veered from the spindly ultra-delicacy of the later 18th century towards a more robust, opulent style, still Classical in inspiration but exuberant in ornament. Shapes were simple and solid with rather low horizontal lines, broad unbroken surfaces, gentle curves and some discreet reeding and fluting. Legs were splayed with sabre curves; later, legs swelled out greatly at the knee and tapered to a tiny ankle.

Many tables were supported by one or more pedestals which spread at the base into three or four feet and these often ended in scrolls or carved paws. Round tables were in vogue. As it was now fashionable to recline rather than sit upright, chaises longues, ottomans and sofas became increasingly popular.

More Show and more Shine

In the buoyant mood of Britain after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, a richer style came into favour, adding gadrooning, ormolu mounts and Boulle-style inlay, for example, to the more restrained earlier fashion. Decoration was sometimes in brass but often in gilded or wood-grained cast iron. Knobs that would once have been made of brass might now be of glass, china or wood. The favourite woods were dark rosewood, mahogany and amboyna, showy striped calamander, zebra- wood and kingwood, and maple veneers.

New machines helped to produce the volume of pieces demanded by the swelling number of people who were becoming prosperous through trade and industry. Mechanical planes, saws and veneer knives were in use in the furniture factories. Rebates and grooves, dovetails and mouldings could also be machine made, so the work of individual craftsmen diminished. Polishing too was changing from the laborious applications of oil, dust and elbow grease to the cheaper and shinier gloss of French polish.

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