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Historic Watercolour Drawings, Oil Sketches & Paintings of Interiors and Exteriors 1770-1870


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It is now well over a century since historians first published serious research into the history of interior and garden design, so it is appropriate that both a founder and a new member of The British Antique Dealers Association should celebrate a new century and Millennium with a major exhibition on this theme

INSIDE OUT represents the first such comprehensive exhibition in London for twenty years. It includes works of art never shown before, such as a superb panorama of ancient Rome by a consummate artist, the architect C.R. Cockerell; three extraordinary title pages by the delineator and creator of the Empire style, Charles Percier, and amongst others, William Burges's delicious conceit of a medieval �Summer Smoking Room� at Cardiff Castle.

A panoply of techniques are represented by a wide diversity of images depicting fascinating interiors and gardens, all contributing at least one foot-note to the history of taste that is INSIDE OUT.

Preface to inside out

For me, the urge to collect began in an attic in a neo-Georgian house my parents bought in Virginia. The previous owners had failed to clear out the attic and for the first time I stared into a room redolent of the past. My mother bought watercolours by Wyeth and my father a collec-tion of paintings by a 1930s artist of interiors and architecture in Washington, DC. My most for-mative influence however, was the teaching at Connecticut College of Professor Edgar deN Mayhew, the expert on American historic interiors, whose house and private collection I later cat-alogued on his death. Beforehand we had travelled together in England and in Europe. I had gone to the University of Virginia and Cambridge where friends and I decorated my rooms in the late-Regency style. We became known as collectors and as the �Club 1830'.

This is the first exhibition of its kind in London in nearly twenty years. It may also be the first to combine watercolour drawings in period frames alongside Georgian furniture in an interior setting. Like the gardens and interiors exhibited here, works of art are, in my view, best seen in a domestic context.

Charles Plante

Architectural Drawings: a Short Historiography

by John Harris

I bought my first architectural drawing in 1954, a perspective of a dining room creditably attributed to Thomas Cundy, and supposedly for Middleton Park, Oxfordshire, 1817. It cost two shillings, and I have a recollection that it might have resulted in my first communication with Howard Colvin, whose great Biographical Dictionary of English Architects had just appeared. Architectural drawings were then always to be found, often with booksellers, and sometimes with dealers in old master drawings, where they were treated as poor relations, unless they were by Sir James Thornhill. The 1950s was a decade of the emptying of country houses doomed for demolition, hence there were many sales. In country house auctions bundles of drawings were added unlotted to the end of sales, and alas, when estate offices were emptied there was many a fine bonfire. It was fortunate when they found their way to the ubiquitous country antique or bookshop.

I was in Malaya when the Marquess of Bute sent for sale at Sotheby's, 23 May 1951, what still constitutes the English architectural sale of the century, no less than 271 designs by Wren, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, and other architects associated with the Dukes of Argyll. When I joined the RIBA in May 1956 one of my self-imposed tasks was to attempt to chart the dispersal of those drawings that were not bought for national collections through the National Art Collections Fund. Today we are incredulous that three designs for St Augustine's, Watling Street, including Hawksmoor's pellucid wash rendering of the lantern, could cost but £13, or a group of Palladian designs for Roger Morris' villa at Whitton Place, Middlesex, £3.

Historically, we can recognize that the collecting of architectural drawings has always been the province of architects, providing them with exemplars. Father and son Tessin brought back thousands of drawings and prints from Paris to enhance the quality of Swedish architecture. Father and son Talman amassed a paper museum of architecture and ornament. What would we have given to have accompanied William Stukeley to John Talman's home at Hinxworth in Hertfordshire in 1725 to peer into � abt 200 . . . Vast Volumes four feet high & require two men to open and shutt them.'

Lord Burlington bought his drawings by Palladio, Jones and Webb from Talman to provide authority for his own architecture. Sir John Soane bought his corpus of Chambers in 1796 and 1811, Adam in 1819, and Dance in 1837, three architects he revered for various reasons. It was the same in France. Hippolyte Destailleur surrounded himself with one of the greatest collections of books, prints and drawings.

Just look at the catalogue of his second collection sold up in 1890 and 1896, spewing thousands of drawings on to the market. These were fodder for all those Beaux-Arts architects such as Mewes and Davis or Leon Decloux, and of course in the USA, too. This Architectural Drawings: a Short Historiography by John Harris.was also a peak moment when curators of museums entered the fray, such as the Kunstbibliotek in Berlin or the Musèe des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. I do not think this was a time yet for the emergence of private collectors and connoisseurs of such drawings. These came later, but by the 1920s ornament and decoration were being collected by French decorators, notably Andre Carlhian of the firm of Carlhian & cie. The whereabouts of their hundred or more magnificent drawings is still unknown.

It does seem that such collecting is a post-Second World War phenomenon, the focus or vortex being New York, emerging from the enthusiasms for collecting scenography and ornament. This might be called The Age of the Bibiena, for scenography was the fashion. Hyatt Mayor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art headed a team that included first Carl J Weinhardt, then John McKendry, and later Mary L Myers. At the Cooper Hewitt was the indefatigable Richard P Wunder, whose own collection of architecture, ornament and theatre was mouth-watering. We must not forget the scene painter Donald Oenslager, whose Four Centuries of Scenic Invention burst upon us in 1974. And then there was Phyllis Lambert, who by 1965 had begun the odyssey leading her to become the greatest collector of architecture, books and drawings (and early photographs) of all time.

If the vortex was New York, the origins were principally European. If the Bute sale was a bench mark for British architecture, the June 1959 Edmond Fatio sale in Geneva served as such for scenography and ornament.

In London the coterie of dealers included Wynne Jeudwine (also a distinguished book collector), Yvonne ffrench, Sven Gahlin, Christopher Powney, Paul Grinke, and Christopher Mendez specializing in prints. But it was Ben Weinreb who captured the market and enslaved his clients for architecture. Whereas Charles Plante can offer the Cobham Hall interior (no 6) as an exceptional item ( one bought from Weinreb's private collection), Weinreb had hundreds of such drawings on offer. We marvel at the continuous turnover of drawings in his 56 catalogues that appeared from the first in 1961 to the last in 1987. Can we really believe that in 1961 no less than 400 drawings by David Hamilton could cost but £385 and Robert Adam's drawings for Appleby Town Hall £650? Or in 1963, in catalogue 3, Palladio's San Petronio facade was £1,650 and Le Muet's Chateau de Pontz £210? This was the decade when the RIBA Curator brought in loot from far and wide.

I believe the market in architectural drawings peaked in the 1990s. The boom time in England was the seventies and eighties. Newcomers as dealers were Clarendon Gallery, Fischer Fine Art or Gallery Lingard. Upon Weinreb's retirement, we witnessed the emergence of Hugh Pagan as an independent book dealer, and Paul Grinke had moved on to Quaritch. Their book catalogues always did include a few desirable drawings, the auction rooms producing special catalogues devoted to the subject matching this vigorous market. Alas, these are no more. Notwithstanding all this activity there were more collectors of architectural books than drawings. But there were some notable exceptions: the late Bernard Pardoe was quietly and unobtrusively buying views of British country houses, his collection now numbering more than 600, with many designs. The otherexception, and what an exception, was Lodewijk Houthakker of Amsterdam.

He was ubiquitous in the salerooms. I first met him at the Fatio sale in 1959. The 1,106 entries in Peter Fuhring's magisterial two volume catalogue, Design Into Art, 1989, could be seen as the swansong of the fashion. The various sales that ensued of architectural and interior drawings, or the first of its kind the 1981 Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox Interiors exhibition, produced a temporary frisson in the market, but one that soon fizzled out, until the two sales of Interiors at Christie's London in 1994 and 1995.

In a piece I wrote for the Art Newspaper in April 2000: �Ornament prints a dying breed of connoisseur?', I recollected that probably the �period' framing of designs for architecture, ornament and furniture design displayed from the 1920s in the period rooms of the Musèe des Arts Decoratifs contributed, or even initiated, a fashion that spread to collectors and decorators. Carlhian & cie often included such framed drawings in their designed schemes of decoration. By the eighties nearly every antique shop in Paris could boast some item of framed architecture. This is Charles Plante's great forte, for whenever I visited the Olympia Fair from 1991 I made a bee-line for his stand. We have a shared joke: that I arrive enquiring after his Architectural Drawings Manufactory. Here is to be found virtual wallpaper of drawings all elegantly and tastefully framed, the perfection of �presentation' all presented in period frames and sometimes even with verre eglomise glass mounts. And here he is again with the exciting exhibition INSIDE OUT: An Exhibition of Watercolours of Interiors and Exteriors. c.1770-1870.

What this exhibition demonstrates is a type of collection complementary to architecture, ornament and scenography, I mean views of interiors and views and designs for gardens. Indeed, it can be said that the mania for interior views has exceeded even that for architecture, although fine interiors are infrequently on the market. As David Watkin has written, Mario Praz has been the arch-collector and codifier of these studies of domestic interiors in An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration in 1964. He has several disciples: not least Alvar Gonzales-Palacios as a writer, and the Knight of Glin as collector, whose remarkable gathering of interior views was dispersed at the Christie's Interiors sale in 1994. In 1978 appeared John Cornforth's English Interiors 1790-1848, in 1980 Edgar deN Mayhew's seminal work American Interiors from the Colonial Era to 1915, and in 1984 Peter Thornton's Authentic Decor The Domestic Interior 1620�1920, and in 1989 Charlotte Gere's contributions with Nineteenth Century Decoration and Nineteenth Century Interiors in her catalogue for the exhibition of at the Frick Collection in 1992.

For gardens there has been cause and effect between the extraordinary flourishing of garden history in recent years and the emerging fashion for garden views, as exemplified by Mr Plante's presentation (numbers 17 & 18) of Zacherie-Felix Doument's ravishing record of M. Reverdit's garden at Toulon. For all these subjects comprising the inside and out of a building in its designed garden, Charles Plante is surely alone as a dealer who can show something of every category in a single exhibition, and always a gallimaufry of delight! I want them all. I envy the collector who is said to have arrived and bought an entire wall of fifty pictures!

The Psychology of the Interior View

by David Watkin

In terms of the study of watercolours of domestic interiors, Mario Praz (1896-1982) is the father of us all. A literary historian rather than an art critic, he used his study of psychology and poetry to explain the extraordinary hold which these drawings have over us. He claimed that, �The ultimate meaning of a harmoniously decorated house is to mirror man, but to mirror him in his ideal being; it is an exaltation of the self ...a museum of the soul.' 1 Praz was influenced by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), the German writer on aesthetics and literature, who argued that, �The interior is not only the universe, but also the sheath of the private man. To inhabit means to leave traces ... The detective novel is born, which sets out to search for these traces. The Philosophy of Furniture and his mystery stories show Poe as the first physiognomist of the interior.' 2

The expression of personality through interiors is hinted at in late-seventeenth-century France where the social world pioneered by figures such as Madame de Rambouillet (1588-1665) was subsequently echoed in engravings of domestic interiors by Abraham Bosse (1602-76), related to the work of Jean Le Pautre (1618-82).3 In England, we find early perspectives of an actual interior in the form of two views of Samuel Pepys' library in his Navy Office, York Buildings, drawn in 1693 by Sutton Nicholls (Magdalene College, Cambridge). In the history of artistic self-obsession which often lies behind views of domestic interiors, it is no coincidence that the diarist Samuel Pepys was one of the greatest English masters of self-confession.

Pepys was followed in the Spectator from 1711 by Addison and Steele who, in an age which saw a new confluence of bourgeois and patrician taste, described the way in which individuals displayed themselves through what they owned.4 If Baroque interiors had been an expression of power, eighteenth-century interiors became an expression of personality. Hogarth and the development of the conversation piece in the 1720s elaborated the theme of the representation of character through physical surroundings.

Horace Walpole (1717-97), creating Strawberry Hill as a portrait of his personality, commissioned John Carter to prepare watercolours of its interiors as amongst the first records of their kind. His guide to the house, published in 1784, was the first of such publications to include perspective views of rooms.5 The novelty was sensed by Walpole who confessed that, �It will look, I fear, a little like arrogance in a private Man to give a printed Description of his Villa and Collection.' 6 In a significant nod to the new art of Picturesque garden design, he added that the architecture of the house would be more understandable if one could see it in relation to its natural setting. It would have been helpful, he explained, if he had been able to �add the beauty of the landscape to the romantic cast of the mansion.' 7

Robert Adam and William Chambers were key figures in the presentation of designs for rooms in watercolour perspectives, as in Adam's pioneering engraved view of his drawing room at Derby House, Grosvenor Square.8 This was influenced by Piranesi and the Franco-Italian world of Rome in the 1740s and 50s, but such methods of representation became more established in England than on the continent, partly because of the growth of the Picturesque as expressed by Edmund Burke and the Scottish Associationist philosophers.

In rejecting the chilly off-whites of the Palladians, Adam's remarkable colours seem related to those recommended by Burke who had urged that �those which seem most appropriated to beauty, are the milder of every sort; light greens; soft blues; weak whites, pink reds; and violets.' 9 The influential Laugier had also considered colours in domestic interiors, writing of �a suave harmony of colours which is not at all incompatible with certain fierce contrasts.' 10 Following the association of colour with the character of rooms for different purposes, we can see how Soane and his successors reacted to Goethe's studies of the meaning and symbolical applications of colour.11

Soane's Plans, Elevations and Views of Pitzhanger Manor House (1802) was probably the first book by an English architect on his own house. This was five years before Thomas Hope's illustrated account of his mansion in Duchess Street, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration Executed from Designs by Thomas Hope (1807). This influential publication was close to Percier and Fontaine's Recueil de décorations intérieures (Paris 1812; plates issued from 1801), both books adopting a technique of austere outline engraving which deprived the interiors of their essential colour. This defect was corrected in the illustrated books which John Britton produced in the 1820s on the houses of Thomas Hope, William Beckford, and John Soane: Britton's MS History of The Deepdene: The Union of the Picturesque in Scenery and Architecture with Domestic Beauties was prepared in 1821-26, 12 his book on Fonthill was published in 1823, and The Union of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting . . . with descriptive accounts of the House and Galleries of Sir John Soane in 1827. Emphasis was placed throughout on their relation to the theory and psychology of the Picturesque: at Deepdene the ravishing watercolours show the complete blend of garden and interior, while at the Soane Museum, Soane had created different sensations in successive interiors, inspired by his study of Le Camus de Mézières' Le Génie de l'architecture: ou, l'analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (Paris 1780),13 as well as by British Picturesque theory with its focus on intricacy and variety, surprise and contrast.

These novel monographs on houses, recalling biographies of living persons, in which the new emphasis was on interior design and its promotion through publication, owed much to the romantic preoccupation with the self which began with the birth of the �confessional' novel. This can be traced to Goethe's The Sorrows of Werther (1774), a key text in the development of confessional literature, and to Rousseau's Confessions (1781-88), both works admired by Beckford and Soane who identified with Rousseau as the victim of organised persecution and as a justification for self-obsession.14.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were responsible for commissioning hundreds of watercolours of buildings, interiors, and gardens, which they had admired in Great Britain and on the continent.15 Many of these were intensely emotionally charged, especially for the Queen, since they recorded the birth-place and boyhood home of her beloved Albert. The tradition to which these watercolours belonged reached a climax in the years 1840 to 1880. After that, it was killed by two totally contrasting new developments: photography and Impressionism.

The drawings in the present exhibition are not only utterly ravishing but include masterworks by major figures such Joseph Gandy, CR Cockerell, Leo von Klenze, and Charles Percier whose breathtakingly beautiful stage-design for a wooded garden is of matchless quality. It is certainly a complete rarity not only to see such objects on view but also to be able to buy them. The collection also includes views of interiors in places such as Munich, Stuttgart, Naples, Constantinople, London, Cardiff, and Liverpool, while the gardens range from Versailles, Tivoli, and Rome, to Tsarskoë Selo. The exhibition is a major contribution to our understanding of the unique blend of garden design with interiors and exteriors which made eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe one of the great moments in western culture.

Notes

1 Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, London 1964, p24-5.
2 Walter Benjamin, Schriften, Frankfurt 1955, vol I, pp415-16. See Praz, op cit, p28.
3 See Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland, New Haven & London, 1978.
4 See Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England, London, 1993.
5 John Harris, Introduction, Interiors, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, 1981.
6 A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole . . . at Strawberry-Hill . . . With an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c 1784, pi.
7 Ibid,piv.
8 Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, vol. II, 1779, part 1, pl V (dated 1772).
9 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), 5th ed, London 1767, Section XVII, �Beauty in Colour', p220.
10 M-A Laugier, on �The Decoration of Buildings' in his Essai sur l'architecture, 2nd ed, Paris, 1755, p229.
11 On Goethe's �Theory of Colours', see John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, London 1993, pp201-4. And see Ian Bristow, Architectural Colour in British Interiors 1615-1840, New Haven & London 1996, pp89-92.
12 Minet Library, Lambeth. See David Watkin, Thomas Hope (1769-1831) and the Neo-Classical Idea, London, 1968, passim.
13 On Soane's debt to Le Camus de Mézières, see David Watkin, Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures, Cambridge, 1996, pp210-19.
14 Ibid, pp114-15, 206-10.
15 For a selection of these, see Delia Millar, Views of Germany from the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on their Journeys to Coburg and Gotha, Royal Collection Enterprises, 1998.

List of Plates

1 Promenade dans un Parc (Versailles), Jean-Baptiste Maréchal

2 A Formal Water Garden with Terraces, German School

3 �Le Tapis Vert' Versailles, Hubert Robert, (Studio of)

4 Huntsmen in a Garden Setting, Dutch School

5 Les Grand Cyprès de la Villa d'Este, Tivoli, Claude Louis Chatelet

6 Section of the Intended Library at Cobham Hall, George Shakespeare

7 Saint-Philippe-de-Roule, Paris, Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin

8 Cloyster at Fountains Abbey, Joseph Halfpenny

9 Elizabeth Anne Fordyce in the Little Sitting Room, Putney Hill, JM Fordyce

10 Design for the Stage: �The Temple of Venus', for Grétry's opera �Anacreon', Charles Percier

11 �Antique Fragments of Ancient Rome', Charles Percier

12 �Fragments of Ruins . . .', Charles Percier

13 �A Classical Capriccio . . .', Charles Percier

14 Neo-classical Palace Interior, French School

15 Le Château Chatillon-Coligny-Montmorency, Hilaire Thierry

16 Plan of an Estate Situated at Grove Street in the Parish of Hackney .., WH Ashpitel

17 View of M. Reverdit's Garden near Toulon, France, Zacharie-Félix Doument

18 View of M. Reverdit's Garden from the Belevedere near Toulon, Zacharie-Félix Doument

19 The Ruined Tower and Observatory at Tsarkoë Selo, Russia, J Tearnof

20 The Casa Cenci in the Borghese Gardens, Rome, J-H Marmont de Barmont

21 A Garden Wall Landscape, Jean Victor Bertin

22 Classical Landscapes (set of eight), Benjamin Barker II of Bath

23 An Interior based on Penelope Weaving, Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard

24 A Tribute to the Architecture of Ancient Rome, c.1819, CR Cockerell

25 Designs for Lough Crew House, County Meath, Ireland, c.1825, CR Cockerell

26 The Rose Satin Drawing-room, Carlton House, William Henry Pyne

27 �The Consulting Rooms of No 2 Rodney Street, Liverpool', ES Bickerstaffe

28 A Neo-classical Blue Drawing-room, GC Maund

29 A Neo-classical Palace Interior in Naples, Italian School

30 Drawing-room Interior in the Palace in Stuttgart, Ludwig Holthausen

31 �Zur Erinnerung an den Weihnachtsabend', Carl LF Rumpf

32 An Interior: �The Catch of the Day', English School

33 A Library Interior in a Country House, English School

34 A Study in a Siberian House, Russian School

35 A Drawing-room Interior, German School

36 Group Portrait of Three Men in an Elaborate Sitting Room, English School

37 King Ludwig I's writing-room in the Residenz, Munich, Leo von Klenze

38 The Ante-room to the Sculpture Gallery for Sir Francis Chantrey, RA, Sculptor, at 30 Belgrave Place, London, Sir John Soane and Joseph Michael Gandy

39 Little Holland House, No 1 Addison Road, London, Sir Charles Barry

40 A Young Girl with her Cat in a Garden Close at Salisbury, RN Hind

41 An English William IV Sitting Room in Late Summer, English School

42 Drawing-Room Interior with Collection, Lady Honoria Cadogan

43 The Ante-room and Hallway at Rempstone Hall, Sarah Caroline Sitwell

44 Drawing-room Interior, Helene Marie Stromeyer

45 Interior of a Cossack Hut near Kertch, Russia, General Edward W Wray

46 An Afternoon Siesta of in Constantinople, General Edward W Wray

47 Drawing-room Interior at the Hôtel Rainbeaux, Paris, Emma Roberts

48 Bedchamber Interior at the Hôtel Rainbeaux, Paris, Emma Roberts

49 The Garden at Hôtel Rainbeaux, Paris, Emma Roberts

50 The Hôtel Rainbeaux, 57 Rue de Ponthieu, Paris, APC Anastasi

51 Design for Interior Staircase of Leeds Town (unexecuted), Cuthbert Brodrick

52 �The Morning Room, Bowden Hall, Gloucester', JD Birchall, Senior

53 The Summer Smoking-room at Cardiff Castle, William Burges, ARA and Axel Haig