On the Means by which Repose is Attainable in Decoration

Author: Christopher Dresser Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint; original text 1876) Source type: chapter

Raw file: raw/chapters/dresser_2006-repose-decoration.md

Summary

An excerpt from Christopher Dresser's Studies in Design (London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1876; excerpt pp. 11–12), reprinted in Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, John Wiley & Sons, 2006, pp. 86–88) under the matrix tags "technological • 1876" and "late 19th century • colour." Dresser — the Victorian design reformer often called the first independent industrial designer — takes up his own prior demand that all decoration achieve "repose," now an "indispensable art quality," and sets forth its means: repose arises from the manifestation of knowledge and harmony, is destroyed by glitter, reflection and excitement, and is fully compatible with the brightest colours and the richest decoration when these are handled in "very small masses" so as to produce a neutral yet glowing general effect. The chapter closes with concrete prescriptions — cream rather than white ceilings, dark grounds for furniture and figures, light walls over dark dados — gathered under the maxim that "repose is compatible with richness, subtlety, and radiance of effect." The Intimus editors frame the text as "a testament to written discourse of the late nineteenth century where effect and experience were regulated by prescriptions of taste and decorum," and as a text that "situates interior design finishes and linings as significant contributors to spatial effect." See repose and neutral-colour-effect.

Key Claims

Repose is "an indispensable art quality" that all decoration must achieve — but its attainment was not self-evident even to its advocates: the chapter opens by conceding that the previous chapter demanded repose "as repose is an indispensable art quality" without "clearly set[ting] forth" the means (p. 86).
Repose requires knowledge and harmony — but they do not guarantee it: "In the absence of a manifestation of knowledge, and in the absence of harmony, there cannot be repose; but it does not follow that the reverse must be true" — there is "such a thing as a harmony of lights, of bright spots, of glitters, and all glitter is antagonistic to rest" (p. 86). Even gem-combinations can display knowledge and harmony and still fail to give repose.
Reflection is the enemy: "Rooms having their walls largely formed of glazed tiles, or of varnished surfaces, are rarely satisfactory, for the reflections which they of necessity throw out are exciting, and excitement is antagonistic to rest" (p. 86).
A physiological theory of decoration's effects: "Excitement is endurable and even useful to the system, if sparingly indulged in; but the constant endurance of excitement is exhausting" (p. 86) — the room is judged by its drain on the occupant's nervous system, which makes decoration a regime of nervous management.
Repose does not mean drabness: "We need not paint the walls of our apartments grey, nor of mud-colour, neither need we make them black; indeed, the highest sense of repose – i.e., dreamy, soothing repose, may be realised where the brightest colours are employed" (pp. 86–87).
The chapter's most striking definition: "Repose is attained by the absence of any want. A plain wall of dingy colour reveals a want; it does not then supply all that is necessary to the production of a sense of quiet and rest. A wall may be covered with the richest decoration, and yet be of such a character that the eye will rest upon it and be satisfied" (p. 87) — the wall fails not through excess but through visible lack.
The chromatic means: strong colours "in very small masses"; the three primaries (blue, red, yellow) "so mingled that the general effect will be perfectly neutral," which "may induce the highest sense of repose," while a "glow, or radiance" about the wall "will only give richness to neutrality, and this is desirable" (p. 87).
Subtlety outranks the stock solution: effects "which are 'subtle' – which are not commonplace – which are attained by the expenditure of special skill or knowledge, are the best"; a wall patterned with minute parts of red, blue and yellow in the 2:1 ratio (yellow to blue and red) "would be neutral, yet it would be refined and glowing in effect, and thus it would exceed in merit the mere tertiary tint on the wall" (p. 87) — knowledge made visible beats the ready-made mixture.
The white ceiling condemned: "The white ceilings which we have in our rooms are almost fatal to the production of those qualities which yield the sense of repose or rest"; a cream-tint ceiling harmonizes more easily, and "there is no reason whatever why a ceiling should not be blue, or any dark colour" (p. 87).
Dark rooms defended: "No satisfactory room, of dark general aspect, can look well if the ceiling is white, and rooms which are somewhat dark in tone are often desirable" (p. 87).
The dark-ground doctrine: "Furniture looks best on a dark ground, unless it be white and gold, when it is invariably execrable. Persons always look better against a somewhat dark background, and pictures on light strongly-figured walls are rarely sufficiently attractive to call to themselves the least attention" (p. 87).
Light admitted, darkness retained: "If it can be had, I like much window-space, to let in light, but the walls I prefer of darkish hue" (p. 87) — the distinction between luminosity (windows) and surface colour (walls).
A worked prescription for dark rooms: light upper walls with a dark dado, cream-tint ceiling, cornice lines of deep blue, pale blue and fine red separated by white — an arrangement that will "appear to be lighter and brighter than if the room were all white, and yet there will be a certain amount of repose about the general effect such as could not be easily attained were the ceiling white" (p. 87).
The closing maxim: "By our decorations we must ever seek to achieve repose, but we must always remember that repose is compatible with richness, subtlety, and radiance of effect" (p. 88).
Colour-mixing as exact, citable knowledge: the note on the 2:1 proportion admits "This is not rigidly correct, but for more exact information I must refer the reader to my Principles of Decorative Design (London), 1873, pp 40, 47, 48" (p. 88); the cream tint is specified technically as "a tint formed by the admixture of a small portion of middle-chrome – that chrome which is half-way between the colour of a lemon and of a deep-coloured orange – with white" (p. 88).

Connections

Concepts: repose (the chapter's namesake concept) · neutral-colour-effect (its chromatic doctrine) · taste (the editors' framing: effect and experience "regulated by prescriptions of taste and decorum") · comfort (repose as the aesthetic twin of the room's bodily ease; the exhaustion claim) · atmosphere (finishes and linings as "significant contributors to spatial effect") · the-decorative (decoration regulated from within by an art-quality) · chromophobia (the anti-white-ceiling stance as 1876 counter-evidence to white inevitability) · colour-hierarchy (the neutral-mingling doctrine as an alternative to the Purist scales) · natural-finishes (the applied-colour regime that predates the natural/applied moral opposition) · domestic-interior (the room as a regulated system of effects) · knowledge (the "manifestation of knowledge" as visible art-quality) · simplicity (the anti-dingy-plainness counterpoint) Authors: Christopher Dresser · Taylor & Preston (editors of the reprint volume) Debates: ornament-vs-purity — Dresser supplies the debate's earliest interior-side position: ornament regulated by repose, not refused Related source notes: de Wolfe — Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (the decorator's tranquillity program, 1913) · Beecher & Stowe — A Christian House (the pre-modernist economical middle) · Braham — A Wall of Books (the natural/applied convention Dresser's chapter predates) · Batchelor — Chromophobia (the white interior as contested convention) · Baudrillard — Structures of Atmosphere (the calculated tonal system's ancestor) · Taylor & Preston — Proximities (the editors' framing of taste, harmony and repose)

Direct Quotes

"In my last chapter I insisted on the necessity for our achieving 'repose' in all our decorations, as repose is an indispensable art quality; but the means by which repose was to be attained was not clearly set forth." (p. 86)

"In the absence of a manifestation of knowledge, and in the absence of harmony, there cannot be repose; but it does not follow that the reverse must be true, and that because knowledge and harmony are revealed in our works, that there must necessarily be the sense of repose." (p. 86)

"There is such a thing as a harmony of lights, of bright spots, of glitters, and all glitter is antagonistic to rest." (p. 86)

"Rooms having their walls largely formed of glazed tiles, or of varnished surfaces, are rarely satisfactory, for the reflections which they of necessity throw out are exciting, and excitement is antagonistic to rest." (p. 86)

"Excitement is endurable and even useful to the system, if sparingly indulged in; but the constant endurance of excitement is exhausting." (p. 86)

"We need not paint the walls of our apartments grey, nor of mud-colour, neither need we make them black; indeed, the highest sense of repose – i.e., dreamy, soothing repose, may be realised where the brightest colours are employed." (pp. 86–87)

"Repose is attained by the absence of any want. A plain wall of dingy colour reveals a want; it does not then supply all that is necessary to the production of a sense of quiet and rest. A wall may be covered with the richest decoration, and yet be of such a character that the eye will rest upon it and be satisfied." (p. 87)

"If strong colours are used upon walls and ceilings, it is usually desirable that they be employed in very small masses." (p. 87)

"There will, however, be a glow, or radiance, about such a wall; yet this radiance will only give richness to neutrality, and this is desirable." (p. 87)

"Those effects which are 'subtle' – which are not commonplace – which are attained by the expenditure of special skill or knowledge, are the best, provided that the end which is most desired is attained by them." (p. 87)

"The white ceilings which we have in our rooms are almost fatal to the production of those qualities which yield the sense of repose or rest." (p. 87)

"No satisfactory room, of dark general aspect, can look well if the ceiling is white, and rooms which are somewhat dark in tone are often desirable." (p. 87)

"Furniture looks best on a dark ground, unless it be white and gold, when it is invariably execrable." (p. 87)

"Persons always look better against a somewhat dark background, and pictures on light strongly-figured walls are rarely sufficiently attractive to call to themselves the least attention." (p. 87)

"If it can be had, I like much window-space, to let in light, but the walls I prefer of darkish hue." (p. 87)

"By our decorations we must ever seek to achieve repose, but we must always remember that repose is compatible with richness, subtlety, and radiance of effect." (p. 88)

Notes

Pagination follows the Intimus reprint (pp. 86–88); the original excerpt spans pp. 11–12 of Studies in Design, and the raw file carries a mid-excerpt marker "(… p 12)" at the original pagination.
The raw file's header reads "Intumus: Interior Design Reader" — an OCR corruption of the book's actual title, Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (see the parallel note in Proximities).
Wikipedia's bibliography dates Studies in Design to 1875; the ingested text and the Intimus matrix tags give 1876. The source note follows the ingested text.

Open Questions

Is "the absence of any want" a phenomenological definition of repose — rest as the eye's completed satisfaction rather than a property of surfaces? How would it relate to later phenomenological accounts of the room (Bachelard, Pallasmaa)?
Does Dresser's physiological claim — "the constant endurance of excitement is exhausting" (p. 86) — prefigure the metropolitan nervous economy Simmel theorizes (the apparatus protecting against overstimulation)? Is the Victorian prescription of repose the domestic counterpart of the blasé attitude?
The editors read the chapter as evidence that "effect and experience were regulated by prescriptions of taste and decorum": is Dresser's repose a proto-atmospherics — the designed production of a felt state through finishes and linings — and does its prescriptive, rule-giving form anticipate Baudrillard's calculated atmospheric system rather than the lived atmosphere of phenomenology?
Dresser condemns white ceilings and defends dark rooms in 1876; the International Style codifies the white palette in 1932. Was the white interior a Victorian default that design reform briefly displaced before modernism reinstated it — or does the Intimus selection of Dresser serve the editors' argument that colour's suppression in modern interiors was a contested convention, not a historical destiny? See chromophobia, whiteness.