A picture-perfect life, 1880s-style

Photograph of a Sitting Room, 1883.  Photograph, likely Albumen.  Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera Coll. 182.

With digital communication, taking a quick photograph of furniture arrangements or picture placement for review and approval by others seems like second nature.  We throw it up on Instagram, or SnapChat for all to see. The inscription on the reverse of this photo gives proof that this idea of sharing our spaces is not a modern, digital concept. The inscription reads: “Andover//Jan 1883//for Aunt Kittie//from//E.U.W. & F.G.W.’’ The photo shows a sitting room with a desk placed before the fireplace, two wooden armchairs and two wooden rocking chairs. All of the furniture and decorative objects in the room are specifically positioned to create a space in keeping with the modern aesthetic recommendations. E.U.W. and F.G.W. followed a typical trend that started in the late nineteenth century to document interior spaces. This photograph and its inscription suggest it depicts a shared apartment, possibly in the academic and industrial town of Andover, Massachusetts. The presence of scarves and feminine hats decoratively placed on the trifold screen and mirror frame indicate that they are two women, maybe sisters, sharing the apartment. In her article “Picturing Rooms: Interior Photography 1870-1900,” Sarah Anne Carter argues that interior photography “documented a process of personalization within the home, arranging individual possessions and spaces as part of a unified, aesthetic composition[1].”

Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (Croton-on-Hudson, NY: 1878).  Winterthur Library

At the same time that interior photographs were becoming more popular, advice books and articles were pervasive. One such writer was Clarence Cook. He was a pioneering art critic of the late nineteenth century and wrote decorating advice articles for Scribner’s Monthly. These articles were compiled and edited into a book, The House Beautiful, published after the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Winterthur’s library holds an 1878 printing of the book. In the preface, Cook claims that he was overwhelmed with requests for the articles to be published, and that people wanted prices and dimensions of the objects he described in his articles. He explains that the purpose of the book is only to give examples of things he has seen and liked in both furnishing companies and friends’ houses, or show designs of objects he thinks would be both beautiful and functional in each space discussed.

Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (Croton-on-Hudson, NY: 1878).  Winterthur Library.  Frontispiece by Walter Crane.

There are many elements depicted in the interior photograph that Cook suggested in The House Beautiful. Cook suggests simplicity above all else, to buy the best furniture that one can afford, and only what is needed (two chairs of each style, presumably two desks from what is visible in the image), then add the “ornaments of life[2]” casts, pictures, engravings, and books, use an eastern rug only where they will not be obscured by furniture, uses rod and ring curtain hangings, divide the  space with screens and curtains, and group objects in a picturesque and yet natural way. “The mantelpieces ought to secure the intention of the fireplace as the center of family life… a few beautiful and chosen things… to lift us up, to feed thought and feeling.[3]” Cook repeatedly praises the skills of artists that created the plates illustrating his book.  The frontispiece, “My Lady’s Chamber,” highlighted here, is a beautiful illustration from a design by Walter Crane. While not specifically referenced in the text of the book, it is an eye-catching depiction of a warm, welcoming, space. It also features elements that can be seen in the interior of E.U.W. and F.G.W.: a small rug in front of the hearth, plates and paper fans used decoratively on the mantle and around the room, and decorative bellows hanging near the fireplace. The details make for a compelling comparison; one of an imagined space by artist and writer, the other, carefully crafted and lived in, a space of two women.

Whether E.U.W. and F.G.W. actually read Cook’s writings on home décor, or not, they clearly shared his aesthetic affinities. Cook wrote: “The room ought to represent the culture of the family, – what is there taste, what feeling they have for art; it should represent themselves and not other people….[4]” They were using this interior photograph to declare themselves, maybe even their independence, to Aunt Kittie, and how they arranged their space indicated the influence of prescriptive literature from the period.

By Caite Sofield, Winterthur-University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) class of 2018

Further Reading:

Clarence Cook, Art and Artists of Our Time.  New York: S. Hess, 1888.

Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, ed.  Material Women: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices.  Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.

Amy G. Richter, At Home in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History.  New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Notes:

[1] Sarah Anne Carter, “Picturing Rooms: Interior Photography 1870-1900,” History of Photography 34 no. 3 (2010): 252

[2] Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (Croton-on-Hudson, 1878, rpt. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1980) 48.

[3] Clarence Cook, House Beautiful, 121.

[4] Cook, House Beautiful, 48-49.