Household Furniture and Interior Decoration

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Thomas Hope

British art collector Thomas Hope published a volume of his own furniture sketches and interiors that ultimately proved to be influential in changing period perceptions of upholstery and interior decoration. In this excerpt, he attacks the loss of beauty and line, denouncing mechanical processes that result in furniture that is flimsy, lacking solidity and inelegant. Central to his argument is an appeal to recall the ways of the ancients, not only for their conceptions of beauty and utility, but as a search for form that is conducive to adapting contemporary modes of convenience. Exposing a now familiar argument, he implies that such forms would acquire a timeless quality, the expense of which outweighs the cheap but poorly made fashionable decorations prevalent at the time.

Under the general denomination of Household Furniture are comprised an infinite variety of different productions of human industry, wrought in wood, in stone, in metal, in composition of various descriptions, in silk, in wool, in cotton, and in other less usual materials. Each of these different articles, however simple be its texture, and however mean its destination, is capable of uniting to the more essential requisites of utility and comfort, for which it is most immediately framed, and with which it can consequently, on no account, dispense, a certain number of secondary attributes of elegance and beauty, which, without impeding the chief purpose of the object, may enable its shape and accessories to afford additional gratification, both to the eye and to the imagination.

Almost every one of these various articles however, abandoned, till very lately, in this country, to the taste of the sole upholder, entirely ignorant of the most familiar principles of visible beauty, wholly uninstructed in the simplest rudiments of drawing, or, at most, only fraught with a few wretched ideas and trivial conceits, borrowed from the worst models of the degraded French school of the middle of the last century, was left totally destitute of those attributes of true elegance and beauty, which, though secondary, are yet of such importance to the extension of our rational pleasures. Furniture of every description, wrought by the most mechanical processes only, either remained absolutely void of all ornament whatever, or, if made to exhibit any attempt at embellishment, offered in its decoration no approach towards that breadth and repose of surface, that

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distinctness and contrast of outline, that opposition of plain and of enriched parts, that harmony and significance of accessories, and that apt accord between the peculiar meaning of each imitative or significant detail, and the peculiar destination of the main object, to which these accessories belonged, which are calculated to afford to the eye and mind the most lively, most permanent, and most unfading enjoyment. The article only became, in consequence of its injudicious appendages, more expensive, without becoming more beautiful; and such remained the insipidity of the outline, and the unmeaningness of the embellishments, even in the most costly pieces, that generally, long even before the extreme insolidity and flimsiness of their texture could induce material injury in them from the effects of regular wear and tear, the inanity and tameness of their shapes and appendages already completely tired the eye and mind; and left these no other means to escape from the weariness and the disgust which they occasioned, than an instant change for other objects of a more recent date and a more novel construction. (… p 2)

If thus great were the advantages which the adoption of the totally new style of decoration here described seemed to promise, the difficulties with which its execution was to be attended appeared not less considerable. The union of the different modifications of visible and intellectual beauty which were desirable, with the different attributes of utility and comfort which were essential; the association of all the elegancies of antique forms and ornaments, with all the requisites of modern customs and habits, having heretofore been so seldom attended to, in objects of common and daily use, I found no one professional man, at once possessed of sufficient intimacy with the stores of literature to suggest ideas, and of sufficient practice in the art of drawing to execute designs, that might be capable of ennobling, through means of their shape and their accessories, things so humble in their chief purpose and destination as a table and a chair, a footstool and a screen. (… p 7)

In England much more attention is generally paid to the perishable implements of the stable than to the lasting decoration of the house; and it is therefore not impossible that many, even among those most disposed yearly to lavish enormous sums in the trifling and imperceptible changes which every season produces in the construction of the transient vehicle, may most strongly object to the expensiveness of the infinitely more important and more palpable improvements, of which is susceptible the more permanent fixture. To such it would be easy to prove, that the mode of decorating apartments, hitherto in vogue, which, through the paltriness of its materials, and the slightness of its texture, is subject to experience such speedy decay, and (what is worse) through the poverty of its forms, and the unmeaningness of its embellishments, is liable to occasion such rapid disgust; and which, consequently, is usually broken or discarded, long ere it has had leisure fairly to serve its time, though at first its cost be less, yet, by means of the incessant change of fashion which it stimulates and supports, on the whole, occasions a much greater expense than the style of furniture here set forth; which, little susceptible of

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experiencing premature destruction, for want of due solidity of form, and less liable, it is presumed, than the former, to suffer merited disgrace, while yet in all its freshness of youth, for want of intrinsic power to please, may be preserved in families, from generation to generation, as a valuable portion of the patrimonial estate. (… p 16)

Thomas Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration: Executed from Designs by Thomas Hope, Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme (London), 1807. (Excerpts pp 1–16)

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