Victorian Interior Decoration

[Nigel Watts]

The more one investigates a historial period the more one comes to realise how wrong one's preconceptions have been and how much stranger and more intriguing things were.

Victorian houses seem to have been decorated in a style which is so alien to 20th and 21st century ideas that recreating it is far from straight forward, and not helped by the fact fact that so few autehntic interiors have survived.

I am now seeking to close the gulf in my knowledge on the subject and have just bought or ordered the following books:

Muthesius, Stefan: The poetic home; designing the 19th century domestic interior Thames & Hudson 2009

Facey, JW: Elementary decoration; a guide to the simpler forms of everyday art as applied to the interior and exterior decoration of dwelling-houses ctc. London, Crosby Lockwood, 1896

Eastlake, Charles L: Hints on household taste in furniture, uphostery and other details 1868 - Dover reprint

Gere, Charlotte: Ninteenth-century decorating; the art of the interior Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1989

Dresser, Christopher: Principles of decorative design 1873, reprinted 1973

Any other ideas?

 

[Penners]

I presume you have Kit Wedd's book?

http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/publications/victorian-house/

 

[Feltwell]

Nigel - if ever you're venturing towards the North, then the NT property "Sunnycroft" is worth a visit - about 500 yards from my house! It has an interior that has hardly been altered since the 1890's. It was gifted to the NT by an old lady about 15 years ago I believe, she had lived there since birth (about 1900). Architecturally it is nothing special, it is the contents and the fact that practically nothing has changed in over 100 years that make it special.

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-sunnycroft

 

[Nigel Watts]

I presume you have Kit Wedd's book?

http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/publications/victorian-house/

I dont have this book but I will have a look at it if I see it in a bookshop. The cover doesn't look too promising though, with all that white paint.

What really interests me is the polychromatic and often multi-patterned nature of Victorian interior decoration. Many colours seem to have been used in a single room or even in a single feature, such as the different component mouldings of a cornice being picked out in different shades. How to do this in a way that creates the right effect is a challenge. It could so easily end up looking completely hideous.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Osbert Lancaster would agree with your last sentence there. You must have "Homes Sweet Homes", and read his nine, short, satirical entries on the 19th C - divided into "Early" Vicorian" " Le Style Rothschild" "Scottish Baronial" "Victorian Dining Room" "Greenery Yallery" "The Earnest Eighties""Anglican" and "Diamond Jubilee". Fascinating, and very funny.

I don't think that even we Nigel, with our love of using colour and pattern, could live with the full-on intensity of a Victorian scheme, complete with locks of dead people's hair round our necks, mementos from Margate on the mantelpiece, Japanese fans, and china shepherdesses!

I wonder how well the intensity of a Victorian room would translate into 2010 - it would have been infinitely softened by grime and candlelight.

Also, when I reread 19th C fiction I'm struck by how when the writer wants to endorse a character with purity, sweetness, and goodness, he or she makes their belongings plain. Think of Jane Eyre in the dove grey dress, or think of Molly in Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, clinging on to the simple whiteness and plainness of her dear departed Mama's furnishings when Mr Gibson remarries a gaudy new wife. Isn't this a warning to us to hold back and excercise restraint in our choices of ornamentation?

But, I'm a Hetty - not a Dinah - and if I had your cornice I'd want to pick out the leaves and flowers as well and put flashes of gilt here and there!

 

[Nigel Watts]

Great insight Joce, as ever.

I am not quite sure what I am aiming for at the moment, and most pictures of Victorian interiors give me instant indigestion, but there is something there which is lacking in the Georgian and the Modern. John Soane's house gets close, albeit in pre-Victorian style - contrasts of dark and bright spaces, bold use of colour, polychromy, texture, treasure-trove style clutter, fantasy and symbolism (the monk's cell).

Soane was an architect of genius and had a blank canvas and large budget with which to work. The question is how much of this kind of thing one can translate into the domestic interior of a middle class early Victorian townhouse before it all becomes too gross. Many, I suspect, would say virtually none - Osbert Lancaster especially, and no doubt most of my "it's grim up North London" neighbours. But then each generation always over-reacts towards the tastes of its predecessor. Pugin's images of romantic gothic architecture contrasted with the sterility of the prevailing classicism are just as compelling.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Lovely to read your response - especially as I didn't know about the Pugin images.

But then each generation always over-reacts towards the tastes of its predecessor.

Mmm, so true - and thank God for that! Otherwise we would all expire in sterility. When I was teaching those bright young things in that North London girls' school I felt that they wouldn't have the expanses of white and neutrality favoured by their parents -let's hope so anyhow. I think the mood is changing, and colour and pattern returning.

What particularly struck me in Soane's was the shape of those wonderful ceilings, which gave a particular richness to the whole scheme. Impossible to replicate at home, but, certain Soany elements could be replicated perhaps.

 

[Nigel Watts]

Two of my books have now turned up. This is Dresser on ceilings in 1873:

"Now as to the decoration of a room. If one part only can be decorated, let that one part be the ceiling. Nothing appears to me more strange than that our ceilings, which can be properly seen, are usually white in middle-class houses, while the walls, which are always in part hidden, and even the floor, on which we tread, should have colour and pattern applied to them .... we like beautiful walls, or we would have them whitewashed also; indeed, we like our surroundings generally beautiful. Why not, then, have beautiful ceilings, especially as they can be seen complete?"

By decorated, of course, he means more than just painted non-white but patterned, stencilled etc. He particularly praises grey blue as a ceiling colour, which I have often seen as a residue.

And on cornices:

"1st. Bright colours may here be employed. 2nd. As a rule, get red in shadow or in shade, blue on flat or hollow surfaces, especially those that recede from the eye, and yellow on rounded advancing members. 3rd. Use for red either vermilion or carmine; for blue, ultramarine either pure or with white; for yellow, middle chrome much diluted with white. 4th. Use red very sparingly, blue abundantly, the pale yellow in medium quantity. Beside primary colours, none others need be used on the cornice. It is a mistake to use many, or dull, colours, here, but gold may be used instead of yellow."

Facey, in 1896, on cornices:

"It will be seen at once how readily these forms of ornament lend themselves to decorative treatment in colours. Thus in ... an "egg and dart" moulding, we would paint the recesses behind the egg a bright scarlet, the egg a pale cinnamon, or left in the white; the dart etc, a pale green or coloured to correspond with the egg. A soffit having an ornament in relief ... may be "cut in" a gray, mauve, or pink, care being taken to avoid a heavy tone, and adopting merely a delicate suggestion of the tint, rather than a definite colour."

 

[JoceAndChris]

Heavens - PPUKe is like one long Oxbridge tutorial; it's brilliant.

How fascinating! What's a soffit? I agree about the ceilings, but think plaster moulding better than stencils - look at these! http://www.stevensons-of-norwich.co.uk/service/spectacular-decorative-ceilings/ (I want number 6, but it's 8k)

So your hallway cornice in red, blue, and gold? It sounds glorious!

 

[Nigel Watts]

What's a soffit?

I think this refers to the part of a cornice which is flat against the ceiling.

I agree about the ceilings, but think plaster moulding better than stencils

Dresser again:

"First, take away the wretched plaster ornament in the centre of the ceiling, for it is sure to be bad. There is not one ornament out of a thousand that can be so treated as to make the ceiling look as well as it would do without it. Now place all over the ceiling a flat painted or stencilled pattern, a pattern which repeats equally in all directions, and let this pattern be in blue (of any depth) and white, or in blue (of any depth) and cream-colour, and it is sure to look well (the blue being the ground and the cream-colour or white the ornament).....

"These are all, however, simple treatments, for any amount of colour may be used on a ceiling, provided the colours are employed in very small masses, and perfectly mingled, so that the effect produced is that of a rich coloured bloom. A ceiling should be beautiful, and it should also be manifest; but if it must be somewhat indistinct, in order that the caprices of the ignorant be humoured, let the pattern be in middle-tint or pale blue and white only...."

Later he says:

"As to the colour of a ceiling if there is to be no ornament upon it, let it be a cream-colour rather than white.... A grey-blue is also a very desirable colour for a ceiling.... Another effect I like is produced by the full colour of pure (or almost pure) ultramarine. In this case the cornice should be carefully coloured, and pale blue and white should prevail in it, but a little pure red must be present."

The next bit I like the sound of:

"A further and very desirable effect is produced by placing pale cream-coloured stars irregularly over the plae blue, or even the deep blue ceiling, or by placing pale blue stars upon the cream-coloured ceiling. The stars should vary for an ordinary room ceiling (say a room sixteen feet square by ten feet high) from about three inches from point to point down to one inch; the larger stars having six points; others being smaller and with five points; the samll ones having some three points and some three. If such stars are irregularly (without order) intermixed over the ceiling and yet are somewhat equally dispersed, a very pleasing and interesting effect will thereby be produced. This effect is much in favour with the Japanese. The stars, however, should be smaller if placed on a deep, than on a pale, ground.

"Another good effect is provided by giving the ceiling the colour of Bath, or Portland, stone, and starring it with a deeper tint of the same colour. This effect is improved by each star having a very fine outline of a yet darker tint of the same colour."

The reference to the Japanese is a clue to where Dresser is coming from I think. By this time (1873) a reaction had set in to overly naturalistic representation. Flat surfaces should be treated with flat decoration. Floral and other representative motifs were fine so long as they didnt try to look too three diminesional. The surfaces of oriental ceramics, Persian carpet designs and those of other imported fabrics such as Kasmir shawls seem to have been highly influential in this respect.

 

[JoceAndChris]

I like you being off already!

That's all completely fascinating - I also love the idea of the stars, and if it was the Bath stone coloured version, don't see why that would be headache-inducing at all - if combined with subtly patterned wallpaper, or plain walls and floral fabrics.

I really, really wonder what he intends to happen on the walls if the ceiling is ultramarine or grey blue. And what he plans for the walls if there's a full-on stencilled ceiling in a bloom of colours.

Have you been to Marrakech? I'm sort of reminded of some of the riads in those descriptions.

 

[LadyArowana]

Floral and other representative motifs were fine so long as they didnt try to look too three diminesional. The surfaces of oriental ceramics, Persian carpet designs and those of other imported fabrics such as Kasmir shawls seem to have been highly influential in this respect.

There is an old carpet pattern often referred to as "Dome of the Mosque" so floors and ceilings have been influencing each other for a long time!

 

[JoceAndChris]

That's a really, really lovely thing. I think that's how patterned hand woven carpets look best - when they mirror the pattern on the ceiling.

Soon we'll be in Egypt. I don't know whether to look at carpets there or not. It's so hard to make the intense geometric patterns work with floral wallpapers, impossible in fact. Here, you'd have to have one or the other. And I can't bear to give up on wallpaper!

 

[Nigel Watts]

My Charlotte Gere book turned up yesterday evening. Also fascinating, with lots of illustrations, but its a shame so many of those late 19th C interiors were only captured in black and white photos.

My thinking now is a hall and staircase in pompeian red, grey and mahogany with dado, frieze, door surrounds etc stencilled in grecian motifs, with coloured cornice and ceiling incorporating some other colours - not sure quite what yet, but there needs to be some yellow, and perhaps some blue and some green. Cream soffits to the stairs, again stencilled with a grecian border. Red wall colour continuing up the stairwell but the stencilling becoming progressively less elaborate on each floor.

Bedroom to have something of an aesthetic movement feel; grey blue ceiling with cream stars, cornice coloured in pale blue, red, pale yellow, Watts's jasmine wallpaper, reddy pink curtains, possibly blue woodwork, cream door panels overpainted with floral motifs, probably no dado.

All this is going to be quite hard to plan and execute. I think I need to start doing some drawings and get my watercolour set out.

 

[JoceAndChris]

You will turn your house into a work of art, not that it isn't already. It would all be a huge labour of love - difficult to find enough time when you go back to work. Can you interest either of your sons in some of the painting, or are their academic commitments too strenuous? Tradesmen could be hired for the simpler bits, but I wonder if they will be patient enough for all the cutting in and picking out your project requires?

I think you should make some 3 d models out of cardboard for what you propose so you can see if you like the colours and effects.

 

[robgil]

i looked into victorian bathrooms and fittings for a while , also the plumbing involved , it was very interesting indeed.i hunted around and found all the antique bathroom fittings i needed to put a bathroom that would have been only fit for a very wealthy victorian persons home into a humble little cottage that probably would not have had a bathroom at all. The victorian era was from 1837? to 1901 so i presume that as technologies advanced then so did the interior decor , for instance 1970's decor is much different to present day modern decor although in some instances things have gone full circle and some people like that retro look , even though a lot of 1970's houses didn't have that retro look at all.
so if you want to split hairs you have to ask your self what victorian look you are going for , or are you going for a mix of different looks?
also the decor may have been dictated by the home owners wealth , a wealthy persons home would be quite a different thing from a poor persons home , so if you want authenticity you might have to first ask your self how wealthy were the victorian occupants of your house likely to be and what kind of decor could they afford?

 

[JoceAndChris]

Very good points made above Rob. One thing that really strikes me as I attempt to turn this cottage into a little country house is how difficult the proportions are. Elaborate decorative schemes are generally devised for large properties, and to fit country house style in here you have to scale everything down in size or it looks wrong.

But about authenticity - it bothers me a lot less these days. The interior of the house has to be something you like and can live with. I can't live with the simple whitewashed walls and lack of soft furnishings that probably characterised this place in 1810, but I do want to create a version of authentic Regency style, even though there will be showers, TVs etc.

 

[Flyfisher]

But about authenticity - it bothers me a lot less these days. The interior of the house has to be something you like and can live with.

Spot on. People sometimes have a strange view of authenticity; I doubt many of us would enjoy, or be prepared to endure, truly authentic period living of a few hundred years ago - unless we were emulating something approaching the royal social circles.

Anyway, what is truly authentic? Earlier styles and fashions have always been plundered in the quest for finding a decor to one's taste. I vote with Joce; plunder away until you create something you like and can live with.

 

[Nigel Watts]

I dont disagree with any of the sentiments expressed but it is very easy to fall into an all-too-comfortable view of how a house of a particular period should look and be decorated. A few journeys into the unknown to broaden the mind can be helpful from time to time. A ruthless pursuit of authenticity, from which one then can draw back and modify, can be an exhilarating experience.

Buy the way, if you have downward pointing palmette and lotus frieze, how do you deal the corner in a 90 degree turn? I cant work it out. I feel so ignorant of the grammar of ornament.

 

[robgil]

i guess i am quite lucky in this respect as authenticity for me is a simple coat of white lime wash. obviously i cannot find fittings that date back to the 16c so all i can do is find fittings that dont seem too out of place but even some modern contemporary fittings can look quite good in an old house. As for furnishings i can consider anything from very old to ultra modern and it probably wont matter that much as i will never be able to furnish it authentically , and even if i could i doubt i would be able to live in it.