Chamber Piece:
Another Country
5 June 2015
Not having seen his byline in The New York Review of Books for a while, I had begun to wonder if James Fenton was still with us; but here he is, in the current “art and money” issue. An essay entitled “The Rothschild Taste” certainly falls within this rubric, and Fenton’s brisk history and description of Waddesdon Manor, the Buckinghamshire pile that was donated to the National Trust in 1957, is quite entertaining. We’re reminded that the bogus château was widely thought to be too “hideous” to conserve; it has in spite of that become “one of the National Trust’s most visited sites.” It is stuffed with paintings, tapestry, objets de vertu, and “period rooms.” The period rooms provoke an interesting tangent.
Having nothing to do with the fortunes of Waddesdon, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco has published an “excellent recent” book about the salon doré that was taken from the Hôtel de la Trémoille and installed in the Museum of the Legion of Honor. What interests Fenton isn’t so much the fabric of the room as its original design and use. By “design,” I mean not the boiseries but the complementary mirrors and wall-bound sofas that were its only permanent furnishings.
If the salon in San Francisco looks to our eyes splendid but slightly underfurnished, with its mirrors, chairs, and consoles, that is because we have become used to museum displays in the form of period rooms stuffed with the museum’s star possessions. Or, in grand houses like Waddesdon, trophy antique furniture displayed to best effect beside comfortable contemporary sofas and chairs, and surfaces crammed with family mementos and plants and flowers and so forth.
What one loses is any sense of the provisional nature of the eighteenth-century interior: the valets waiting alertly to shift the chairs and bring out the gaming tables from behind screens, or counting the heads of the likely dinner guests before putting up the dinner trestles, or waiting for the last guests to leave before bringing out their bedrolls from the chests in the entrance hall.
I remember the mild shock of learning about this, many years ago, from a novel that I still haven’t finished reading, Le paysan parvenu, by Marivaux. The title character rises up in a bourgeois household, eventually marrying one of the sisters to whom it belongs. There is a little party scene in which the arrival of dinnertime occasions not the move to a dining room but the setting up of dining facilities in the room already occupied by the party. I had known that this was the medieval way of doing things, but I thought that it had been supplanted, in the Eighteenth Century, by arrangements more familiar to us. Not so. There’s an argument to be made, that the most important thing about any grand eighteenth-century salon was not its decoration but the human beings gathered within it. We should find authentically dressed period rooms, with all the permanent furniture lined up along the walls, pretty boring.
Fenton notes that the really valuable furniture, “the desks and commodes and so forth,” were arrayed in private rooms that “only the intimates of the household would ever get to see.” That’s a very interesting disconnect. A grand house would have reception rooms with opulent wall and fireplace treatments, but little in the way of furniture beyond occasional tables and chairs, while the gorgeous furniture would be relegated to private rooms to which regular visitors would never be admitted. We, in contrast, put our best things where people can see and appreciate them. And we like to show off all our rooms, too. On our grandest occasions, every bedroom and every bathroom — everything but the closets, really — is open for inspection.
As Fenton also notes, the Nineteenth Century saw the introduction of heavier furniture along with the beginnings of “the servant problem,” as the number of household retainers began to drop. It was not convenient to move sofas about. Gradually, permanent furniture crept away from the walls, and the occasional pieces — the chairs and small tables that valets whisked in and out of the room — settled down alongside it. The reception room was no longer an empty ground to be filled in by the whims of the moment. It now had a personality of its own, a look that persisted day after day.
Like the history of costume, which is full of examples of the transformation of hunting outfits into evening clothes, the history of interior design is marked by a zig-zag from simplification to complication. Consider the drawing room. Now the most formal reception room in any house that boasts one, the drawing room was originally the withdrawing room. In those days, the main reception room was the great hall, a big room in which almost every domestic affair could be conducted, from sleeping to cooking. The withdrawing room was a chamber into which the owner and his wife could retire from the crowd of servants and retainers in the hall. Inevitably, withdrawing rooms got larger and more comfortable; they also became more presentable, which is to say, more formal. In search of relaxation — the simplifying zig — it was felt necessary to withdraw from the (with)drawing room. In America, this new withdrawing room was, in the middle of the last century, called “the den.” Somewhat later came the “family room,” which might well be larger than the “living room” — a room conspicuous for the lack of living done in it. As the old formal rooms disappear from new construction, the rooms that were originally escapes become more formal. The tug of war between inviolate privacy and welcoming display is unrelenting.
It is in the nature of homes that most of us never give a thought to how we inhabit them. Some people like to “entertain” — I put the word in quotes to remind readers that the semi-intransitive usage is going to seem quaint and perplexing one of these days. More commonly, though, homes are retreats from the world, safe places in which to raise children or just to rest up. Privacy certainly has the upper hand today. It is not the privacy of closed doors, however, but the privacy of attention withheld. It is the privacy of apps and earbuds. Everyone below the age of fifty appears to be living the dream life of an adolescent male. How much longer this will remain satisfactory, especially to women, is hard to say.