Heavy handed Decor

Cosy family life remained the aim of mid- Victorians. This still demanded comfortable furnishings such as deep-buttoned chairs, ottomans and chesterfield sofas, but now everything had a heavier look, showed more wood — along the top of seat backs, for example — and bore fancy carving or fretwork. The front legs of the graceful balloon-back chairs were elaborated into carved cabrioles. (more…)

Fashionable rooms now had their wooden floors carpeted, often wall to wall. Draperies were lavish, with fabric not just festooned across rods above the windows and hanging as curtains crossing over at the centre, but sometimes covering the walls as well. Other wall treatments included wallpaper and painted decorative effects such as marbling, graining and stencilling. Walls, furniture coverings and curtains might have the same pattern, frequently of flowers or of country scenes, sometimes of stripes (evoked by the military mood). Pale colours, with yellows and lime-greens among the most popular, gave rooms an airy look. (more…)

Dinner consisted of a soup, fish, fricassee of chicken, cutlets, veal, hare, vegetables of all kinds, tart, melon, pineapple, grapes, peaches, nectarines with wine in proportion. Six servants wait upon us, a gentleman-inwaiting and a fat old housekeeper hovering round the door. Four hours later the door opens and in is pushed a supper of the same proportions.’ So the Countess of Granville recorded in 18 o a meal served just to her husband and herself. Food and drink were central to luxurious living and the wealthy offered guests dozens of dishes at dinner. (more…)

Adam, Wedgwood and Sheraton are names that conjure up the delicate Neoclassical style of the late 18th century. It was a style ideal for the factory methods that were starting to nudge at the craftsman’s pre-eminence.

A marked Change in decorative style coincided with the start of George III’s reign in 1760 — not that the devout, industrious 22-year-old king had much to do with the change. He became a cultured and devoted family man with an interest in science, but he was no society leader. (more…)

Silver, Ceramics and Glass

The Palladian, Rococo, Chinoiserie and Gothic styles inspired other craftsmen besides furniture-makers. The best silversmiths of the age, such as Paul de Lamerie, worked in all these styles. A salver might have restrained, Classical-style borders and a candlestick might represent a Classical column, while a basin and ewer might bear the shells and garlands of the Rococo. One dish might be engraved with Oriental figures and another be heavily chased with Gothic traceries. (more…)

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. (more…)

Probably we could not do better than go around a dining- room and see how it was used. There will be plenty of it, and probably most prominent of all, hanging in the centre of the room a great chandelier, with scintillating lustres or “brilliant drops.” Few of those seen in the shops today will have survived intact from the eighteenth century without repairs or replacements, but they are still magnificent things, and must have looked glorious in the light of a multitude of candles.

On the tables themselves will be candelabra, with slender branches carrying the candle-sockets, sometimes diamond- cut or scalloped, with heavy bases for stability. There will also be those near relatives which started as simple “vase candlesticks,” later to become girandoles with fringes of hanging lustres and finally to evolve into the coloured glass lustre vase of the Victorian mantelshelf. (more…)

I put these together because they can look so well together, the shining gold of one helping so much to bring out the rich tones of the other. Here, your collection will depend upon how much room you have. A large dresser full of glowing copper and brass can be a magnificent sight, and will take such things as the fine big round and square copper kettles, not forgetting the charming conical Devon kettle, a shape followed by modern makers for electric ones. Other shapes in copper are provided by fine ewers (see front cover), coffee pots, beer mullers, funnels, coolers (see back cover, bottom left), jelly moulds (front cover), in all kinds of patterns. (more…)