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  • Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, and: Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England
  • Barrett Kalter (bio)
Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg, eds. Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. x+246pp. US$69.95. ISBN 978-0-415-94953-8.
Amanda Vickery . Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. xviii+382pp. US$45. ISBN 978-0-300-15453-5.

The twelve strong essays collected in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century illuminate the circuits of production and consumption that moved furniture and decorative objects from city to countryside, back and forth across the Atlantic, as well as the social pressures that imbued those objects with significance. The first of four thematically organized sections maps the global itinerary of materials and styles. Madeleine Dobie's terrific essay studies the use of luxury woods from French colonies in the West Indies to construct furniture in an Orientalist style. She argues that the exotic guise of the furniture concealed from metropolitan consumers the slave economy that supplied them. Chaela Pastore discusses the vogue for mahogany; though the wood grew in Saint Domingue, Creoles who bought mahogany furniture were criticized for mimicking the elites in France who wanted to monopolize this luxury as a token of national and racial purity. David Porter's chapter returns to the topic of Orientalism by way of a treatise on aesthetics by William Hogarth. Chinoiserie exemplified the features that Hogarth claimed had universal appeal (for example, novelty, asymmetry, and femininity), yet the style repelled him. Porter shows that the Chinese style was often satirized as a source of female pleasure that displaced men; its connotations thus undermined the heterosexual dynamic implicit in Hogarth's theory of beauty.

While Pastore and Porter examine efforts to regulate fashion, the second set of essays profile people who carried fashions across [End Page 427] geographical and social boundaries. Natacha Coquery reconstructs the business of a Parisian upholsterer whose trade in second-hand goods broadened access to high-end fashions. With the help of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vermont woodworker James Wilson produced the first globes for sale in the new Republic. David Jaffee records Wilson's achievement as an instance of "Village Enlightenment," whereby cosmopolitan knowledge was introduced to the provinces by commerce (81). Jaffee complicates the centre-periphery model of diffusion, though, by showing how American artisans often adapted English styles to local tastes and thereby signalled their nation's independence. Kathryn Norberg analyzes the ways in which courtesans appropriated features from aristocratic interiors in order to create the novel and seductive environments in which they plied their trade. The third section of the volume continues this investigation of the domestic interior with Donna Bohanan's discussion of noble houses in provincial France. The decoration of these homes closely resembled those in Paris and Versailles, a consequence, Bohanan argues, of a change in laws that deepened the division between old and new aristocracy by taxing the latter more heavily. Goaded by this check to their aspirations, parvenus in the provinces embraced the elite style emanating from the court and city to assert the authenticity of their rank.

Anyone who has ploughed straight through the museum galleries devoted to ceramic dinnerware, bored by so much sameness, should definitely read Mimi Hellman's compelling semiotic analysis of the matched set. Hellman argues that seriality would have been alluring prior to industrialization, given the difficulty of manufacturing apparently identical objects by hand. The matched set was priced beyond the reach of most consumers, but for those who could afford them, their multiplicity provided a pleasing sense of continuity and order. The meuble, a matched set of furniture, could unite a group of people while signalling differences in status among them, depending on the type of chair one sat on and its position in the room. Mary Salzman suggests that a pair of eighteenth-century paintings taught people to interpret interiors in just this way. Noting a standard reading of the objects in Jean-François de Troy's The Garter and The Declaration...

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