Nineteenth Century Interiors

This volume of primary source materials documents the spatial layouts of the nineteenth century home as they often became more precisely planned with rooms for specific purposes being developed. The styles began to truly reflect the owner’s taste and position. The range is of course vast from single room dwellings to large-scale mansions and numerous variations in-between. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of art history.

This volume takes forward the debate about 19th-century domestic space, drawing on economic history and literary criticism. To date, studies of 19th-century domestic space have discussed a feminized, middle class sphere, often using domestic guides and fictional representations of domesticity to generate their arguments.

The author takes a detailed look at the design and decoration of domestic interiors in Europe and America during a period that has never before been considered in its own right. The homes protrayed include those of aristocrates and artists, members of fashionable society and the bourgeoisie. Their salons, studios, bedrooms, libraries, and bathroom - from architectural framework to choice and arrangement of furniture, to the minutiae of personal taste - provide fascinating insights into the domestic life and fashion of the time.

This four-volume collection of primary source materials documents the histories of domestic interiors across the long nineteenth-century. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of art history.

Publisher Description

This volume of primary source materials documents the nineteenth-century search for a representative style, and the alternating fashions for interiors that demonstrated the consumerism of the period. Although in some senses every interior is unique so that a style canon may seem to be meaningless, there have been important historical trends or styles that have influenced individual interiors, and these have formed the groundwork from which other styles and tastes have developed and changed. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of art history.

"This four-volume collection of primary source materials documents the histories of domestic interiors across the long nineteenth-century. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of art history"--