Building reputations by Conor Lucey

Author:Conor Lucey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

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Decorating houses: style, taste and the business of decoration

The neoclassical style in Britain and Ireland, and its American counterpart, known as the Federal style, remained the dominant language of interior design practised during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Emerging in architectural circles during the 1750s, its efflorescence and dissemination within artisanal communities was facilitated by a burgeoning print culture, by the movement of immigrant tradesmen and by new building and decorating technologies. Opposed to the architectonic Palladian classicism fashionable in early Georgian Britain, neoclassicism was characterized by an eclectic and inventive use of classical sources, both antique and modern, and by an increasingly delicate and refined approach to composition, ornament and colour (Plate 15). By 1800, it was the characteristic style of elite urban interiors from London to Charleston and from Dublin to Boston. But while classicism was certainly the ‘common spatial and decorative language’ across the wider Atlantic world, and through economic and technological standardization exhibited a sameness that became a signifier of British architectural culture generally, the traces of artisanal innovation were hardly eradicated.1

Unlike the bricklayer and carpenter, artisans who practised the more refined building trades, such as plasterers, joiners and decorative painters, have generally enjoyed a better reputation in the historiography of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century architecture. While architects like Robert Adam and Charles Bulfinch remain central to the narrative of neoclassicism in Britain and America respectively, craftsmen are also recognized as pivotal agents of its wider cultural and material reach. But as with the design of the terraced house, art-historical appraisal of the artisan’s comprehension of Robert Adam’s pioneering decorative style has often been misunderstood. Alistair Rowan remarked that lesser architects and artisans adopting his ornamental lexicon typically ‘lacked an understanding of its syntax’,2 and for Geoffrey Beard, craftsmen ‘faced with the complex intricacies of neo-Classicism … might well have been found lacking without careful supervision’.3 On the other hand, recent interpretations of the artisanal relationship to classicism (and neoclassicism), influenced by cultural-historical perspectives, tend to prioritize context over connoisseurship. In Building the British Atlantic world (2016), Daniel Maudlin and Bernard Herman recognize how the artisan was ‘highly responsive to the forward impulse of modernity and the consumer drive for fashionable good taste’, an impulse ‘facilitated by the dissemination of ideas through migration (of craftsmen and connoisseurs), trade (the transatlantic shipping of books about buildings and supplies of building components), and through a high level of personal correspondence’.4 Recently published monographs on the Irish plasterer Michael Stapleton and the American carpenter Samuel McIntire, both long recognized as key exponents of the neoclassical style in Ireland and America respectively, consider their individual interpretation or negotiation of Adam’s decorative manner in terms consistent with their particular pedagogic formation and socio-economic circumstances (Plate 16).5

Of course, the neoclassical decorative style has also been recognized as a visualized sign of economic modernity. In his seminal Art in an age of revolution, 1750–1800 (1989), Albert Boime described neoclassicism as ‘the first art movement in history to be packaged, advertised

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