Sets, Lives, and Videotape

The three books under review amply evidence the lively state of cultural inquiry into the material object and its place in the economies of leisure, consumption, and the quotidian in eighteenth-century life. Genre painting, with its complex representational engagement with the everyday, is emphasized in this exploration, but it is clear that the boundaries between painting, decoration, furniture, theater, and even garden design cannot be easily demarcated. These three volumes engage with this new field with varying degrees of success.

The opportunity to review Furnishing the Eighteenth Century has been for me a great and somewhat unexpected pleasure. This book contains meticulous archival scholarship in abundance, attention to detail in a series of wonderful close observations, but most of all, in individual essays and as a project as a whole, a wonderful panorama of the imaginative routes taken by recent scholarship on the decorative arts. At many points I was both inspired by the imaginative range and humbled by the work rate of cultural historians of the decorative, enough to shame us complacent historians of the two-dimensional image. The answer to the skeptic’s question, “Can the settee speak?” which Norberg and Goodman entertain, is, on the basis of the work presented in this volume, a resounding yes.

In their introduction, Norberg and Goodman single out a number of scholars, including Daniel Roche, who shifted the focus from production of objects to their consumption (3). The editors are perhaps too modest to mention that they and their contributors are part of this wave. One thinks of the immensely detailed and revelatory studies by Natacha Coquery, the seminal work of Carolyn Sargentson, the groundbreaking, imaginative scholarship of Mimi Hellman, and the rich contributions of Dena Goodman to intellectual and social history, just to select, perhaps unfairly, a few. ¹

It is a bold and culturally significant move to start the book with an issue that has been, perhaps, the most neglected in this field, but most urgent in other areas of scholarly inquiry: the colonial implications of the furniture trade, which entailed importing woods and labor from the slave colonies, thereby creating human imbalances and skewing power relations. Here, the authors acknowledge the difficult task that faces us all as we try to make meaningful a commitment to a truly global view of eighteenth-century culture. The first section of the book is called “Mapping Meaning Globally” and contains three essays. First, Madeleine Dobie’s “Orientalism, Colonialism, and Furniture in Eighteenth-Century France” reminds us how histories of materials like mahogany are “intertwined with the history of European colonialism” (19) and how that emerges in popular culture, on stage, and in nomenclature. However, Dobie’s main point is that an “Atlantic axis,” consisting of the colonies and western French ports where the use of mahogany was more widespread, created networks of innovation beyond the European “centers” we traditionally associate with innovation. But Dobie also emphasizes “one of the most pressing, and unfortunately most neglected, questions relating to the production of furniture in France and its colonial outposts,” namely, the relative roles of slave and free craftsmen. She explains that in order to avoid having to pay French craftsmen’s relatively steep rates, masters trained slaves, and she suggests that we need to acknowledge a high slave input into producing the desirable mahogany furniture of eighteenth-century France. Her evidence is skillfully garnered from probate inventories, and from historians of colonial labor. A second part of the essay, “East Meets West,” contends that the new “Atlantic” trade in luxury woods and other goods was never acknowledged in culture, whereas the commerce with the East...