Decorating the American Home Since 1876
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Household Art Treatises, Manuals, and Guides, 1860s-1900s
Hints on Household Taste, published by the English architect and writer Charles Eastlake in 1868, heralded a reform movement in household design and cultural values. Although today considered quaintly ornate, the popular "Eastlake style" was a rejection of overwrought design, especially "unhealthy," lumbering, and heavily carved and machine-made furniture. Adapting medieval and Japanese designs, Eastlake counseled readers to develop a taste for incised motifs, geometric ornament, flat surfaces, and fretwork in their household furnishings. The popular Eastlake style constituted an important early element in the broader Aesthetic movement sweeping the Western world.
Eastlake's design found much favor with the rising middle classes in the United States. With rising living standards and more leisure time, middle-class families could dedicate themselves to the pursuit of art and culture. Through the inspiration of art applied to the textures, surfaces, and objects of the house the family itself was defined--and, indeed, refined. Under the tender care of women, houses were aesthetic creations reflecting and encouraging their occupants' imagination and interests. Collections of art, sculpture and books reflected the family's dedication to cultural sophistication, while embroidery and other handiwork symbolized talent and self-expression. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, American families lavishly ornamented their homes with goods increasingly available through department stores, mail order catalogues, and other retailers.
Yet, as the nation's sage Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1870, "the ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it." A family's aesthetic achievements required an approving audience. The social custom of calling required keen attention to the details of dress, decorum, and decoration, reflected in the use of the hall stand to check one's appearance, calling cards and card trays for visitors and the servants who announced their arrival, and, of course, the fashionable parlor to convey the tastes and enhance the hospitality of host and hostess.
Hospitality
Between 1870 and 1910, the proper middle-class American home boasted a front hall and a parlor furnish with specialized forms of furniture that facilitated the intricate social ritual of "calling" practiced primarily by women. Two pieces of furniture were required: the hall stand and the calling card receiver. Hall stands stood in silent attention to the comings and goings of family members and visitors. Coats and hats were deposited on its hooks, umbrellas dripped in tin-lined pans as their owners prepared themselves for their entrance into the parlor. The visitor's calling card was deposited in the card receiver held by a servant, who then carried the tray into the parlor for the mistress of the house. A mistress could be physically in the house but "not at home" to a visitor she did not wish to see or did not know. Leaving one's card, though, did require a response, whether in person or by card. In this everyday ceremony middle-class Americans secured their social identity and strengthened their sense of class.
The parlor was the center of cultural life in late nineteenth-century America. Whether a public parlor of hotel lobbies, photographer's studios, railroad cars and steamboats, or a domestic one, this room signaled a dedication to refinement and, indeed, a way of life. Families exhibited their tastes through art and sculpture, their heritage through heirlooms and family portraits, and their curiosity through the collection of bric-a-brac, shells, dried flowers, and souvenirs from around the world. Parlor furniture could be purchased in matched suites of richly covered and woven upholstery. Densely draped, ornamented, and furnished, the parlor of the late 1870s appears "overstuffed" to modern eyes, but to its historic inhabitants provided material assurance of their social standing and refined taste.
The middle-class American house often protected three generations of a family under its roof. Marriage, childbirth and childrearing, children's departures to school, work, or to homes of their own, the care of elderly parents, and the housing of friends, relatives, and boarders guaranteed that the family was never a static unit. What was certain, however, for the majority of American couples, was children. Women on the average married at age 22, gave birth to a child within a year, and continued to have children every two years thereafter. Although high child mortality rates often disrupted this pattern, women could expect to bear between five and nine children. Rarely was there an "empty nest."
For many Americans, children formed the focus of the home. Parents were to be both strict and loving, and mothers in particular were to educate their children for entrance into the world. The home and its furnishings thus were important tools with which to instruct children, whether in the traditional school subjects or in the social graces. Gender- and age-specific furniture was considered crucial to inculcating individualism in the child, as were the appropriate books and pastimes. A proper home raised up a proper individual.
The very structure of a middle-class dwelling accommodated well a family's need for flexibility. Separate rooms connected only by a hallway could be closed off when not in continual use. Many exterior and interior doors provided alternative routes to ensure privacy and quiet. The construction of front and back staircases separated the family from the servants, and formal activities from work chores.
Style and Color in the Home
In the last third of the nineteenth century, many middle-class Americans adopted a new form of home decoration. Dubbed "Household Art," "Interior Decoration," or "Household Taste," this movement was led by emerging tastemakers on both sides of the Atlantic. Between the publication of Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste in 1868, and Candace Wheeler's Household Art in 1893, some twenty-three books and numerous articles on the artistic house were published. Though now considered evidence of Gilded Age excess and eclecticism, these reform treatises were in fact intended to restrain overindulgence.
One need not be wealthy to be artistic. One needed only art principles to understand the wealth of truly beautiful objects to life up the spirit and the mind. This was no romantic dream, but a social necessity. As Harriet P. Spofford write in 1878, furnishing "is no trivial matter. Its study is as important, in some respects, as the study of politics; for the private home is at the foundation of the public state."
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, designers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean sought to reform taste by developing consistent philosophies of aesthetics based in the exotic--whether "the exotic" was defined historically, culturally, or geographically. Following the lead of John Ruskin, William Morris (1834-1895) incorporated medieval influences in his designs, arguing that art included "the shapes and colours of all household goods." Morris's emphasis on naturalistic form influenced Charles Eastlake, whose Hints on Household Taste found a ready readership in the United States. This so-called Aesthetic movement also incorporated Oriental motifs brought to Western attention through wars in the Middle East and Far East, and through the world's fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
What did this first generation of professional tastemakers teach Americans about the proper designs of their houses? Their stated intention was to educate consumers to make "tasteful" selections of furniture, floor coverings, draperies, wallpaper, and the like. Harmony of color, judicious reinterpretation of historical styles, and an understanding of nature were key aspects of taste.
The mid-nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic change in the interior design of residences in the United States. Two factors contributed to this change--the discovery of aniline dyes made from coal tars, which produced bright, vivid colors for interior furnishings, textiles, and paints which were not possible with the natural dyes of previous eras; and the application of mass production techniques to furniture manufacturing which made a wide variety of furnishings available to middle-class families.
A myriad of revival styles drawn from classical, renaissance, and medieval forms filled the interiors of homes. The revival styles were gradually replaced by the Arts and Crafts and the Colonial Revival styles of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. The Arts and Crafts movement, developed in England through the works of John Ruskin and William Morris as a reaction against industrialization and mass production, combined with elements of the exotic to create the Aesthetic style. Rich, but muted tones, as seen in the entry hall and parlor re-created in this exhibition, created one of the popular color palettes of the period.
The Colonial Revival style, inspired by the historic displays at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, replaced the dark wood tones and strong colors of early styles with lighter interiors and painted trim.
Consumerism
The era of mass consumption in the United Stats began after the Civil War. Department stores became cathedrals of consumerism. Filene's in Boston, Wanamaker's in Philadelphia, and, of course, Macy's of New York City offered the "world in miniature" in sumptuously appointed and carpeted galleries. Carefully created displays of merchandise inside the stores enticed passers-by and serious shoppers. Another sales tactic, advertising, was transformed in 1869, when Francis Wayland Ayer founded the earliest advertising agency. Retail sales leapt from $8 million in 1860 to $102 million in 1900.
Rural folks were not exempted from consumer culture. Aaron Montgomery Ward, a traveling salesman who had tired of retail and his route, began in the early 1870s to sell, directly to the consumer, discounted goods through a catalogue. Montgomery Ward Company of Chicago was but the first of the city's mail-order houses, all of which benefited from consolidation of the nation's transportation and communication networks and the expansion of the postal system. The Montgomery Ward catalogue offered farmers and frontiersmen goods as varied as cream separators and corsets, buggies and brooms, furniture and fancy goods. By the end of the century another mail-order house, Sears, Roebuck and Company, offered Americans a "wishbook" that was the most widely read book other than the Bible.