The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785-1865, by Diana Davis

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865 by Diana Davis Pamela Fletcher (bio) The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865, by Diana Davis; pp. xii + 308. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2020, $65.00. Late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century elite interiors in Great Britain were decorated in a variety of opulent styles, many of which adapted historical visual idioms. The most famous today may be the gothic revival fashion seen at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill or William Beckford's Fonthill Abbey; yet the so-called Louis XIV style was adopted at least as widely and in the very highest of social circles, including at George IV's Carlton House and in the homes of many in his inner circle, before moving into more mainstream circulation as the century progressed. This adoption of ancien régime French style fell out of favor by midcentury, ridiculed as overly ornate, historically incoherent, and filled with fakes. In The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865, Diana Davis argues that our understanding of those interiors and the objects that filled them is still hampered by this change in taste, and offers a persuasive alternative reading of what she calls Anglo-Gallic style as a particularly British invention, knowingly combining old and new objects of both French and British origin. The first part of the book is dedicated to defining the aesthetics of the Anglo-Gallic interior and locating its emergence and popularity in historical, political and—especially—economic contexts. Davis situates the style within both the larger currents of nineteenth-century historicism and the fraught military and political exchanges with France in the period, and she suggests that Anglo-Gallic opulence was a visual statement of "Britain's dominance in the new Europe," though she does not generally emphasize the question of what these interiors meant to their owners and viewers (7). Instead, she shifts attention from collectors to sellers, positioning art dealers as the primary tastemakers behind this design fashion and arguing that "the Anglo-Gallic style was driven by commerce" (56). To make this case, Davis traces the British market for French decorative arts from the Revolutionary period's influx of objects, artisans, and aristocratic refugees to London through the mid-nineteenth century expansion of the market with public exhibitions and catalogs aimed at a wider audience. This work is an important contribution to recent scholarship on the scope and scale of nineteenth-century London's robust art market. The focus on the decorative arts is particularly welcome, not only because it was a very financially lucrative subfield of the art market but also because those who sold decorative arts were often also, as Davis emphasizes, makers of furniture, metalwork, and [End Page 526] other items of home decor. This fact productively complicates a narrative in which the fine art dealer in paintings and sculpture sheds a background in home furnishings as the role of the dealer achieved more status. The second part of the book is devoted to discussions of individual dealer-makers and their work, including Boulle marquetry furniture, ornamental metalwork, and redecorated and mounted porcelain. The section begins with the argument that to identify nineteenth-century recreations or refurbishings of older objects as fakes is to fundamentally misunderstand Anglo-Gallic taste. Using a stricter definition of the term fake to refer only to objects created with the intent to deceive, Davis argues that dealers and patrons alike valued refashioned objects and styles as a desirable and distinctly modern mode. This point, however, is only a prelude to her primary interest in these objects. As she explains, the dealers "were creating a new Francophile decorative style for the contemporary interior to suit British taste. If we accept this, we can then move on to the question of just how good the dealer's workmanship was" (155). Accordingly, the second half of the book consists of close visual readings of individual objects, revealing fascinating details of technique, fabrication, and materials. Davis does offer some interpretive gloss on individual objects and trends, but the main focus is making a connoisseur's case for the objects as the...