This book explores the beginnings of the interior design profession in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on a wealth of visual sources, from collecting and advice manuals to pattern books and department store catalogues, it demonstrates how new forms of print media were used to ‘sell’ the idea of the unified interior as a total work of art, enabling the profession of interior designer to take shape. In observing the dependence of the trades on the artistic and public visual appeal of their work, the book establishes crucial links between the fields of art history, material and visual culture, and design history.
Table of Content
Introduction
1 The collector as taste advisor and interior decorator: popular advice manuals and the orchestration of the private interior
2 The inventor of interiors: old professions in search of a name
3 Private home, artistic stage: the circulation and display of interior dreamscapes
4 The image of furniture: department stores and the trade in interior decoration designs
5 Beautiful disorder, exception to the rule: the development of a new design aesthetic
Epilogue: the presentness of historicism: the Musée centennal du mobilier and the legacy of proto-interior designers
Index
About the author
Anca I. Lasc is Associate Professor of History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute, USA
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