Two mid-Victorian fashions rejected the smothering cosiness. One was inspired by France, where nostalgia for the furniture of Louis XVI had produced a mishmash of pre-Revolutionary styles with a sprinkling of the brass or ormolu used in the Empire style.

In Britain this vogue was imitated, and rooms decorated with white and gold paper held delicate French-style furniture decked with veneers and marquetry of woods such as satinwood, amboyna and purpleheart. Pottery manufacturers, notably Minton and Coalport, produced close copies of Sèvres, while the Worcester Royal Porcelain Company produced high-quality ‘Limoges ware’. The Gothic Revivalists also rejected cos- Mess. They still carried the torch of native British design and their creations speak of mid-Victorian style as loudly as assorted clutter does. The pointed arches, pinnacles and crocketed spires of London’s St Pancras Hotel (completed 1871) and Albert Memorial (completed 1872), both designed by Gilbert Scott, exemplify the distinctive style as it was applied to buildings.

Antique Collector MagazineThe Gothic style was taken up not just for other public buildings but for houses — and for their contents as well as their architecture, especially in the hall and the library. Newly rich magnates chose the Gothic style for their country mansions because it suggested an ancestry steeped in

History. Stained-glass windows with heraldic emblems, and suits of armour were part of the illusion of medievalism. The ancient look in furnishing widened to embrace Jacobethan’ (Elizabethan and Jacobean) features—both in genuine Tudor panelling and furniture and in newly produced imitations.

In art, the medieval period was evoked by the Pre-Raphaelites Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Imitating early Italian painters, they used heightened colour and painstaking detail to create distinctive, romantic work.

Buildings in Gothic style had luminous interiors, with richly dark, gilded wallpaper, and decor based on a vivid main colour backed by two or three contrasting but complementary colours. Colour combinations were a distinctive feature of mid-Victorian buildings. Many of the new suburban terraces had designs on outside walls of red, yellow and blue or purple bricks. The hall floor was laid with encaustic tiles in which the colour was applied as a clay slip and fused to the tile body in a second firing; these were used to make complex geometric patterns.

A studious approach to colour was taken by Owen Jones, an architect and designer who became one of the most influential of the period through his publications. In his encyclopedic The Grammar of Ornament (1856), Jones set out his theory of decoration, citing 37 ‘General Principles in the Arrangement of Form and Colour‘. Principle number six asserts that: ‘Beauty of form is produced by lines growing out one from the other in gradual undulations: there are no excrescences; nothing could be removed and leave the design equally good or better.’

This concept of beauty went right to the heart of what was wrong with mid-Victorian design, where a good deal could be removed without loss. The opinions of Jones and others who disliked current style led the revolt that stirred up radically new ideas about design in the late Victorian period.

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