Private home, artistic stage: the circulation and display of interior dreamscapes

Pierre-Luc Cicéri, chief decorator at the Paris Opéra, also established a career as interior decorator and educator of students that treated interior spaces as three-dimensional images and artworks in their own right. Cicéri’s followers helped push the art of fantasy architecture to a new level, creating a new form of art and popular entertainment around the “ideal home.” Exhibited at the Salon and at a variety of universal and decorative arts exhibitions as well as published in expensive, luxury folios and reprinted in cheaper, popular editions, the “interior dreamscapes” by Cicéri’s followers disseminated the interior for interior’s sake. The domestic interior could be admired, collected, hidden inside cabinets, or reappropriated as an object of contemplation for private walls. The same images functioned as two-dimensional blueprints for the construction of three-dimensional settings and as advertising schemes for the artists that produced and popularized them, furthering interest in and creating a common language about the appearance of the modern, private home. The chapter ultimately argues that wishful thinking and vicarious identification with the - often missing - owners of the model interiors made available through these means and furtively perused in private homes helped create a professional niche that would soon be occupied by the interior designer.

The inventor of interiors: old professions in search of a name

The focus here is on the visual and written records of three professional groups – upholsterers, cabinet-makers, and architects – that each made claims to the art and business of interior decorating. After a brief history of these groups in the pre-revolutionary era, the chapter examines their new status quo and quest for legitimacy in the nineteenth century and in the aftermath of the abolition of guilds and trades. To secure clients, they emphasized artistic skill over practical requirements or commercial interests. Dramatically different images and writings about the professions developed as a result. If the trade literature was filled with practical advice specific to each profession - including educational opportunities, union requirements, and claims to the status of rightful interior decorators over other professional groups - the more widely-circulating pattern books or illustrations in popular journals included a portfolio of images with minimal information. The latter favored creativity over practical considerations, blurring boundaries between professions and proposing unified, themed interiors where every element occupied a unique and pre-established position within a larger whole. Going beyond the requirements and expectations of their own trade organizations, together, upholsterers, cabinet-makers, and architects helped define the new profession of the proto-interior designer.

Epilogue: The presentness of historicism: the Musée centennal du mobilier et de la décoration and the legacy of proto-interior designers

The Epilogue charts the career of Georges Rémon, artistic grandchild of Pierre-Luc Cicéri. Rémon was an inventor of interior designs that took the historicist, themed aesthetic to a new level. Equally well-versed in revivalist and Art Nouveau interiors, Rémon also invented interior decorating schemes that paid lip service to the more recent political regimes of the nineteenth century (Second Republic style, Louis-Philippe style, Napoléon III style) as well as decorative settings in what would later become the Art Deco style. His workshop designed not only period rooms for the 1900 universal exhibition but also interiors of several ocean liners that brought the French aesthetic to America. His career is thus a perfect example of how the artistic output of upholsterers, cabinet-makers, architects, stage designers, illustrators, collectors and department store managers, directed towards the private interior, invented a “system,” which saw that unity and harmony, as expressed through one main theme and coordinated by the same person, would guide the design of each interior. Without the invention of this “system,” the twentieth-century profession of the interior designer might never have been born.

Introduction

In 1881, the city of Paris sought to establish a furnishing school – the future École Boulle (opened in 1886) – in the very heart of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the city’s center for trade and manufacturing. For this, it attempted to gain the support of professionals already working in the trades, including furniture and upholstery. Legriel and Lemoine, the presidents at the time of the Chambre syndicale de la tapisserie and the Chambre syndicale de l’ameublement, respectively, opposed the project vehemently. Chief among their concerns was the impossibility of providing cabinet-makers and upholsterers with a similar education....

Beautiful disorder, exception to the rule: the development of a new design aesthetic

In the last chapter, the book returns to the work of architects. It argues that architects’ engagement with popular journals helped shape new interior decorating styles by examining the projects undertaken by architect Alexandre Sandier and sponsored by the popular journal the Revue Illustrée. The chapter ultimately claims that imagination and theming played a most important role in the development of the profession of interior designer as well as in the formulation of new decorative styles such as Art Nouveau. These two developments are inextricably linked and cannot be understood in separation from each other.

The image of furniture: department stores and the trade in interior decoration designs

Chapter 4 examines department store retail in the second half of the nineteenth century to understand how the interior decorating schemes proposed on paper by the various professions discussed above could materialize in the homes of middle-class consumers. In doing so, the chapter argues that department stores were eager to align themselves with the thriving market in artistic interior decoration designs, contributing to the further popularization of this new art form. Through their full-scale model rooms inside the store as much as through their widely distributed and highly illustrated furniture catalogs, the Grands Magasins du Louvre, Au Bon Marché, Le Printemps, Au Petit St.-Thomas, and the Grands Magasins Dufayel brought the image of the most modern furniture and matching interiors to life, right in front of customers’ eyes. By selling the same furniture combinations and decorative schemes in a variety of materials, these stores catered to several social groups at once. Further, by offering personalized interior decorating services to those customers who wished to obtain an exclusive décor, French department stores in the second half of the nineteenth century became themselves early forerunners of the twentieth-century profession of interior designer.

The collector as taste advisor and interior decorator: popular advice manuals and the orchestration of the private interior

This chapter examines influential collecting and taste manuals from the second half of the nineteenth century dedicated to both a male, respectively a female, audience. After providing a brief history of collecting and its development in post-revolutionary France, the chapter explains how the visual and critical discourses about the proper appearance of the modern, private interior and about the arrangement of objects displayed therein informed the development of a new historicist, themed aesthetic. This new aesthetic required a mastermind to supervise the organization of each interior decorating ensemble within the upper as well as the middle-class private home - increasingly more decorated in the aftermath of the Industrial and Consumer Revolutions - paving the way to the work of the later interior decorators at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.