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

Abstract

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.