In the Middle Atlantic colonies, particularly in Philadelphia (which by 1760 had assumed urban leadership in the colonies), a type of domestic design midway between that of New England and Virginia had developed. There the English Rococo decorative style publicized by Thomas Chippendale received its most competent and original interpretation. This is well seen in Philadelphia interiors such as those of the Powel House (1765) and Mount Pleasant (1762) and in the work of cabinetmakers such as Thomas Affleck and Benjamin Randolph. By this time mahogany, with its fine grain, so receptive to carving and high finish, had largely replaced walnut as the principal cabinet wood. Inspired by this material and the challenge of London design, these Philadelphia craftsmen and their northern contemporaries, particularly John Goddard and Job Townsend of Newport, Rhode Island, brought their art to the highest level of perfection.
Powel HouseRemodeled (1769–71) Georgian room from the Powel House, Philadelphia, 1765–66; preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rogers Fund, 1918, 18.87.1-.4, www.metmuseum.org
During the third quarter of the 18th century, the panelled interior reached its most elaborate form in the colonies. North of Virginia a fully panelled room was exceptional; wood panelling was reserved for the chimney breast and its flanking recesses or cupboards. In Virginia and the South, full panelling remained the rule. (At colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, surviving houses have been carefully restored and furnished, giving a complete picture of the comfortable panelled rooms dating from the middle decades of the 18th century.) In both North and South, however, the mantel and its overmantel were emphasized as a decorative unit, and the Baroque broken pediment became the usual crowning feature of both overmantel and doorway. Painted woodwork remained popular, but with softer and lighter tones, tending toward white and gray. Plaster wall surfaces were also painted. Block-printed and painted wallpapers were frequently used in the main rooms of these houses, and there are indications that fabric wall hangings were used also.
Plaster ceilings completely concealed the floor beams by the second quarter of the century, and after 1750 these were frequently decorated with ornament in low relief in the French or Rococo manner and hung with many-branched chandeliers of crystal. Floors of hardwood, occasionally parquetry, were more frequently covered with patterned rugs of European or Oriental origin.
During the 18th century imports of printed cottons or chintz in the Indian taste, and silk brocades and damasks, largely replaced the linen and woolen weaves of earlier days. Upholstered furniture, wing chairs and sofas, and elaborate draperies increased still further the richness of the fashionable interior.
As in Europe, the growth of tea and coffee drinking encouraged production of suitable silverware and the import of English and Oriental porcelains, which required corner and wall storage cupboards. Demand was also created for a variety of small movable tables and stands for tea and coffee services.
During this century the German settlers in Pennsylvania added their traditional styles of design to the dominantly English tradition of the colony, the effects being more evident in folk arts than in formal decoration. It was to this style and its development after the Revolution that the first American decorative glass of Henry William Stiegel and Frederick Amelung must be credited, as well as most of the decoration on early American pottery. 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe
Neoclassicism predominated in France till the rise of Napoleon, when to Roman styles were added Egyptian motifs from his Egyptian campaign of 1798. This was known in France as the Empire style, after the First Empire of France (1804–14), and in England as Regency, for the period (1811–20) when George III was too deranged to rule. Furniture design, for the most part light and graceful during the early part of the Neoclassical period in France, had become more consciously luxurious as the Revolution was approached. During the Empire period it became massive, imposing, dark, and pompous. The usual vocabulary of classical ornament is to be found in both Empire and Regency, with some modifications from earlier times. The cabriole leg of the Rococo style became straight, and curves tended to disappear in all furniture. Symmetry of ornament replaced the asymmetrical curves. In England, in the latter part of the 18th century, porcelain became less and less fashionable, and its place was taken by the cream-coloured earthenware (creamware) of Josiah Wedgwood, and by his jasper and basaltes stonewares, all admirably adapted to the new style. Greek vase-shapes and classical ornament were commonly used in the decoration of Wedgwood wares of all kinds. In England, the work of Thomas Hope, a wealthy amateur architect, gained much attention through the publication of his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807). He enlarged and decorated his London home in Duchess Street, Portland Place, and also his country house, Deepdene, in Dorking, Surrey, with somewhat heavy and pedantic design that was at variance with the general trend of the time but influenced later work.
In Germany the solid bulk of the Biedermeier style, with its thick curtains, draperies, antimacassars, and padded upholstery, gave evidence of material prosperity. Many of these features were to become commonplace in Victorian England, but in the meantime, the Regency style was prevalent and contributed many masterpieces of design. Brighton Pavilion (begun 1815) was built by John Nash for the Prince Regent. Much lacquered and bamboo furniture was used, blending with Chinese wallpapers, fanciful treatments of palm trees as columns, and the most extravagant of crystal chandeliers. In general, however, the Regency style strove for elegance without extravagance; innumerable smaller houses were built and decorated with fine wrought-iron balustrades on curving stone staircases, pleasing carved wood or marble mantelpieces of modest sizes, and plain or panelled walls of light colouring, on which the use of wallpaper was becoming more common.
By the latter part of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution was slowly developing, particularly in England, and machinery was increasingly producing many objects of interior decoration, modifying their form to suit the new methods and reducing the price to make them available to new markets, a situation envisaged by Wedgwood. The less affluent of the middle classes became the largest section of consumers, and manufacture was increasingly directed toward catering to their tastes. In the early years of the 19th century a new concept was beginning to take shape—the notion of eclecticism, which propounded that any style was as good as another. This led to the idea that styles could legitimately be mixed together. In this way Horace Walpole’s nightmare of a garden-seat—Gothic at one end and Chinese at the other—became, in principle, an accomplished fact: one firm, for instance, made a classical urn on a Gothic base.
In the early decades of the 19th century, in addition to the Empire and Regency styles, there was a Greek style of marked simplicity, and an Italian style described as ‘picturesque with Palladian detail’ (a contradiction in terms), as well as an “Elizabethan” style, a “Tudor” style, a “Baronial” style (under the influence of Sir Walter Scott), an “Abbotsford” style (also resulting from Scott’s influence, based on his house of that name), and a revived Gothic style, far removed from Walpole’s modest and amusing essay. The revived Gothic was at first inspired by James Wyatt’s pseudo-cathedral built for the author William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey, with interiors of cathedral-like amplitude and about a 300-foot (90-metre) tower.