Rooms Preserved in Watercolor Paintings

Henry James described his novel “The Spoils of Poynton” — in which a mother and a son fall out concerning the fate of the contents of the family home — as nothing less than a tragedy about furniture. It is “a story of cabinets and chairs and tables,” he wrote in the preface to the 1908 edition, and of the “passions, the faculties, the forces [that] their beauty … like that of antique Helen of Troy, set[s] in motion.”If this sounds extreme, it was an extremism characteristic of the age. In the 19th century, the middle and upper classes indulged a kind of religion surrounding the family home. In an era when wealth and refinement did not always go together, connoisseurship, or taste, was a crucial marker of social class. And while the industrial workplace became increasingly depersonalized, the home became a private sphere, less for formal entertaining than for relaxation and retreat.An upcoming exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, “House Proud: Nineteenth-century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection,” vividly illustrates the transformation of the upper-class house, during the course of the century, from an outwardly-oriented assertion of power into a source of personal pride and comfort.The 71 watercolors included in the exhibition were donated to the museum in 2007 by the collectors Eugene and Clare Thaw. They are all essentially house portraits: detailed drawings of salons, drawing rooms, libraries, and other domestic spaces, executed by either professional or amateur watercolorists. (Even after the invention of photography, watercolors were the preferred medium for documenting interiors. While photography offered greater verisimilitude, it could not represent color, and interior photographs were frequently dark and gloomy.)The Thaws were interested in these drawings in part because the genre was underappreciated in America, the head curator of drawings, prints, and graphic design at the Cooper-Hewitt, Gail Davidson, said. They were also intrigued, she added, by the intimate story the drawings tell, of “what people lived with and how they collected and what they considered comfortable” in the 19th century.Although the exhibition is organized in terms of the rooms depicted, rather than strictly chronologically, one can observe a dramatic change between the pictures from the early and mid-19th century and those from later years. The former depict vast, formal salons, often with elaborate paneling and ceiling decoration but sparsely furnished, or with the furniture pushed up against the walls.For instance, in William Henry Hunt’s drawing of “The Green Drawing Room of the Earl of Essex at Cassiobury,” from 1823, the girl sitting with her back to us at a piano, and her small dog, are the sole human, informal touches in what is clearly an elegant receiving room, lined with gilded carvings and paintings by J.M.W. Turner.By contrast, the man seated and reading in the salon of the Lanckoronski family’s Vienna apartment (in Rudolf von Alt’s 1881 drawing) seems completely at home in his environment. The room is crowded with furniture and books; the chairs, which look soft and accommodating, are casually covered with white cloth covers.Similarly, von Alt’s drawing of the library in the apartment, while it does not include people, nonetheless shows a room designed for contemplation and repose. Soft leather chairs surround the table, on which books are stacked, as though someone has just been interrupted in the midst of research. The patterned rug and the richly colored fabric draped over the table reinforce the cozy atmosphere of domestic comfort.The watercolors in the show were executed for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the owner of a house would commission watercolors of interior views. Queen Victoria, for example, commissioned watercolor interiors of her many palaces, as well as palaces she visited. Sometimes such drawings would be given to a visitor as a kind of souvenir: The French king, Louis-Philippe, gave Victoria an album of views of his Chateau d’Eu, after she stayed there in 1843. Such albums were also frequently given as mementos to daughters who were about to be married off, so that they could remember their family home.While many such interiors were painted by professionals, some were executed by amateurs, including young women, who were trained in painting, along with music, as part of their genteel education. One of the most charming paintings in the exhibition is “Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Library in Townsend House, London” (1884), which depicts a room, decorated in the eclectic “Aesthetic” style, in the home of the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The watercolor was done by Alma-Tadema’s daughter, Anna, when she was 16 or 17 years old, and already a skilled artist in her own right.In addition to the watercolors, the exhibition includes pieces of furniture and objets d’art, some from the museum’s own collection and some borrowed from private collectors. Together, the objects and the watercolors give a lively sense not only of what 19th-century domestic interiors looked like, but of how their inhabitants felt about them.

Rooms Preserved in Watercolor Paintings

Rooms Preserved in Watercolor Paintings

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