Introduction: Disseminating Design: The French Connection

Abstract

The theme of the present issue originated from a session of the Design History Society Conference (2001) dedicated to examining the visual and textual descriptions of design in eighteenth-century England and France. The session invited answers to the questions: how was design communicated between makers and patrons, designers and entrepreneurs and producers and consumers? What visual, verbal and written languages were used? Were these languages becoming standardized, and how were designers, makers and clients trained to 'write' and 'read' them? Lastly, how did eighteenth-century commentators describe the objects they saw before them? While such issues of translation and dissemination are common enough in discussions of design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,1 they have not, thus far, featured prominently with respect to the eighteenth century, historians of which tend overwhelmingly to be preoccupied with the fixed, finished product rather than with the flux of process. The present issue is offered as a partial remedy for this lack. It has seemed fitting to allow France to play the glory part because then and thereafter she was heralded, admired and envied as a leader in design: the British House of Commons' Select Committee on the Arts and Principles of Design, convened in 18356, was still looking to the greater artistic content in French design for the explanation of the success of her 'fancy works', wallpaper and silk particularly, by comparison with their British equivalents.2 The English were habitually caricatured as hard-working, solid and mechanical in their talents, lacking those qualities of imagination and originality upon which superior turnover apparently depended.3 The 1835-6 Committee believed that one of the surest means of instilling a better knowledge of the principles of good design in the manufacturing classes lay in the foundation of design schools. In the implementation of this view, it had been anticipated by Shipley's Academy, founded in 1754, and the subject of Moira Thunder's contribution to the present collection. Thunder is less concerned, however, with the polemics of design than with measuring the impact or effectiveness of the education offered by such schools-to put it another way, with the translation of design into product. By a careful examination of the annual competition drawings in textile design, which she evaluates in terms of their translatability into cloth, or 'weavability', she challenges Matthew Craske's recent conclusion that design schools in Britain were largely without positive effect on trade and industry.4 Certain it is, at any rate, that contemporaries were persuaded of the practical utility of the Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce-the title by which William Shipley's venture was later, and is now, better known-and set about establishing sister institutions in imitation of it. In France more than forty design schools were founded in the second half of the eighteenth century and, as Renaud d'Enfert's recent study has shown, the pattern of their geographical distribution corresponds closely in over 40 per cent of cases to the distribution of the textile industry, a statistic that strongly suggests that manufacture helped shape 'where it did not actively invest', in pedagogical innovations.5 Examination of the curricula of these schools reveals that the content of the