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Victorian and Edwardian Interiors

Reading the Colours of Victorian Interiors: The Poetic Home Revisited

Lire les couleurs de l’intérieur : poétiques de l’espace victorien
Charlotte Ribeyrol

Résumés

L’invention à Londres en 1856 de la mauvéine, le premier colorant de synthèse, marqua un tournant dans l’histoire de l’Europe industrielle. Jusque dans les années 1870, la Grande Bretagne fut à la pointe de cette révolution de la couleur. À la suite du mauve, ce fut toute une palette de nouveaux colorants qui vit le jour, transformant ainsi pour l’ensemble de la société l’expérience même de la couleur. Le ‘sens de la couleur’, sa perception et sa production, devinrent alors l’objet de multiples investigations à la fois scientifiques et artistiques, et de la part notamment de John Ruskin et de William Morris dont la couleur joua un rôle clé dans le processus créatif. Étonnamment pourtant, cette révolution de la couleur n’est que rarement abordée en lien avec les questions de décoration d’intérieur alors même qu’à partir des années 1860 un nombre grandissant de périodiques et de manuels se mirent à prodiguer des conseils en matière d’arrangements chromatiques dans l’idée de rendre le foyer plus ‘poétique’. Cet article explorera tout d’abord une sélection de ces ‘grammaires de couleur’ qui avaient pour objectif de contrôler le chaos de la modernité, puis un exemple particulièrement coloré et poétique d’intérieur victorien ayant survécu aux assauts du temps : la Tower House de l’architecte William Burges à Londres.

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Notes de la rédaction

This publication is part of the CHROMOTOPE project which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 818563).

Texte intégral

1In 2020 the luxury paint company Farrow & Ball partnered with the London Natural History Museum to launch a new collection of sixteen colours entitled ‘Colour by Nature’. According to the website, the collaboration was inspired by German mineralogist Abraham Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours originally published in 1774. Werner’s chromatic taxonomy was then translated and adapted in 1821 by the Edinburgh flower painter, Patrick Syme. However revolutionary in its own time, the fame of this colour chart primarily rests on Charles Darwin’s use of the classification to record the hues of the creatures and plants he encountered during his voyage onboard the HMS Beagle in the 1830s. For the marketing teams of Farrow & Ball the escapist reference to Darwin’s exotic explorations may well have appeared as a great selling point in the context of the Covid pandemic which confined everyone to their homes. These ‘natural colours’ were also perfectly in line with the company’s self-proclaimed eco-friendly water-based palette: ‘safe for your world and everyone who shares it’.1 In a word, it was not the actual classification itself that was of interest to Farrow & Ball but rather the connotations of its ‘charming’ exotic names: ‘with colour references including . . . “Beauty Spot on Wing of Teal Drake”, our colour creators felt right at home among its pages’. In contrast with the ‘dematerialized’ (Young 174) colour charts defined by standards like the Pantone Color Matching System, this nineteenth-century chromatic terminology had a ‘poetic’ quality which carried with it the promise of a harmonious interior.2

2However different the colours of Victorian interiors may have been from our own ever-changing domestic palettes, the desire for poetic, in the sense of harmonious, colour combinations in both walls and furnishings was already central to discussions of home decoration which flourished in the second part of the nineteenth century, a period which I see as a ‘chromatic turn’ triggered by the invention of the first aniline coal-tar based dyes. Surprisingly, this ‘colour revolution’ (Blaszczyk) has only rarely been approached from the perspective of interior decoration despite the fact that from the 1860s an increasing number of periodicals and popular handbooks offered guidance on how to make one’s home ‘poetic’ thanks to the right colour arrangements. In this article I analyse a selection of these ‘colour grammars’ which aimed to channel and control the chromatic ‘chaos’ of modernity, before discussing a unique instance of a well-preserved and poetically colourful interior: the architect William Burges’s Tower House in London.

The Poetry of Architecture

3During this period the ‘poetic home’ indeed became almost a ‘catchphrase’ to quote from Stefan Muthesius’ eponymous book (Muthesius 9). Muthesius primarily approaches this notion in terms of reception, that is to say from the angle of ‘poetic effect’, unveiling how ‘the overall shapes, textures, colours and lighting’ (Muthesius 27) of a room may influence the mood of its inhabitants. References to poetry indeed abound in accounts of the interiors of prominent figures like William Morris, whose Red House in Bexley Heath Rossetti described in 1862 as ‘more a poem than a house’ in a letter to Ruskin’s friend C. E. Norton (Rossetti qtd in Marsh 19). Here the poetic metaphor shifts the focus away from purely architectural considerations to embrace the more intimate space of the home which Rossetti, as a close friend and artistic collaborator of Morris, helped decorate. This was also the praise of a poet to another poet: in 1858 Morris had just completed his first collection of verse entitled The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems which one critic, having noticed an anachronistic reference to ‘red brick lips’ in the poem ‘Golden Wings’, later scorned as the work of a ‘decorator poet’ (Statham qtd in Faulkner 435). This volume is striking in its use of what Elizabeth Helsinger has described as ‘lyric colour’ stimulating both emotion and memory to provide ‘a disturbing alternative to the ordered worlds of realist representation’ (Helsinger 84). Similarly, a poetic home seemed an ideal perfect shelter from the prosaic external world. But in the case of Red House the poetic analogy was reflected in the very décor of the house, home to the first artistic experiments of the future firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company, which paid tribute to the literature of the past, from Homer to Chaucer. This is metonymically illustrated by the Prioress’s Tale wardrobe which stood in the main bedroom of the house and which was decorated with scenes taken from Chaucer’s poem (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Philip Speakman Webb and Edward Burne-Jones, Prioress’s Tale Wardrobe (1859) painted oak and pine.

Figure 1. Philip Speakman Webb and Edward Burne-Jones, Prioress’s Tale Wardrobe (1859) painted oak and pine.

Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

4Challenging the Renaissance dichotomy between the fine arts (poetry included) and the applied arts, such painted furniture celebrated the chromatic wealth of Gothic interiors, a period which Morris refused to associate with the ‘Dark Ages’:

And let me note in passing that the necessarily ordinary conception of a Gothic interior as being a colourless whitey-grey place dependent on nothing but the architectural forms, is about as far from the fact as the corresponding idea of a Greek temple standing in all the chastity of white marble. We must remember, on the contrary, that both buildings were clad, and that the noblest part of their real raiment was their share of a great epic, a story appealing to the hearts and minds of men. (Morris 1893, 42‒3)

  • 3  The Poetry of Architecture was the title of a series of essays which Ruskin published in 1837‒8 un (...)
  • 4  However, as noted by John Unrau, Ruskin was not convinced by the polychromy of Butterfield’s churc (...)

5Morris’s fascination with the colours of the past in all art forms, whether antique or Gothic, was directly indebted to his mentor John Ruskin who played a crucial role in Victorian debates about colour, including in the domestic sphere even if he never specifically wrote on the subject. Although his own approach was a far cry from Darwin’s, Ruskin often drew on the ‘colour by nature’ analogy to discuss the ‘poetry of architecture’3 as in the following passage: ‘I cannot, therefore, consider architecture as in anywise perfect without colour. . . . Our building, if it is well composed, is one thing, and is to be coloured as Nature would colour one thing—a shell, a flower, or an animal’ (Ruskin 8:176‒7). This text soon became the manifesto for the advocates of Neo-Gothic constructional polychromy, exemplified by William Butterfield’s All Saints’ Church in London (1859) which is still as colourful on the outside as on the inside.4

6Ruskin therefore offered a new visibility and legitimacy to colour upon which writers on house decoration from Charles Eastlake to Mary Eliza Haweis would later extensively draw. Breaking away from centuries of chromophobia which confined colour to deceitful surfaces, Ruskin praised the ‘sanctity’ of hue (Ruskin 7:417n) in both nature and art which he pitted in very Romantic terms against the bleakness of industrial modernity.

The ‘colour revolution’

7But by the late 1850s Ruskin’s faith in the redeeming powers of colour was threatened anew by industrialization as the chemist William Henry Perkin devised a means to extract mauveine from coal-tar. Distrusting this debased form of chromatic matter, Ruskin strove to sever the beautiful purple of Homer from its aniline epigones, singling out the ‘magenta’ named after a battle won by Napoleon III as a sign of a diseased ‘materialist’ world: ‘We moderns, . . . have preferred to rule over coal-mines instead of the sea. . . . And thus, grotesquely, we have had enforced on us the doubt that held the old word between blackness and fire, and have completed the shadow, and the fear of it, by giving it a name from a battle, “Magenta”’ (Ruskin 19:379‒80).

  • 5  According to Joanna Banham ‘in 1807 the phrase “interior decoration”—as distinct from architecture (...)

8The new anilines not only transformed the already flourishing textile industry but also the colours of the home as cheaply-dyed fabrics, rugs and wallpapers progressively became available to all. This democratization of colour, which has received much attention from fashion historians, has only rarely been analysed from the angle of interior design or rather of interior decoration as it was then called.5 With regard to chromatic debates, the conceptual difference is noteworthy: ‘decoration’ suggests practical guidance, in contrast to the word ‘design’ which emphasizes a more rational form of ‘preconception and control’ (Muthesius 32), implicitly relegating colour to a subservient position, as in the artistic controversy that developed in sixteenth-century Italy over the relative merits of disegno and colorito.

9The surprisingly limited interest in the chromatic economics of the Victorian home can partly be explained by the numerous ‘documentary’ difficulties (Pastoureau 6) which one is confronted with when working on the colours of nineteenth-century interiors:

  • Firstly, most of the colours of these interiors no longer exist, either because the colour schemes were replaced over time or because the house itself was demolished, like James McNeill Whistler’s White House (Figure 2) designed by his friend Edward William Godwin in 1877.

Figure 2. James McNeill Whistler’s White House, Tite Street, Chelsea, photographic print.

Figure 2. James McNeill Whistler’s White House, Tite Street, Chelsea, photographic print.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

  • Secondly, when the colours do remain, they often appear faded. The Victorians themselves were of course very much aware of these potential alterations due to exposure to light or dirt. Morris nonetheless preferred the beautiful faded tapestries of Hampton court to the ‘livid ugliness’ of the new dyes disfiguring an increasing number of interiors (Morris 1892, 218). One must also bear in mind that our perception of these colours under modern lighting conditions is very different from how the Victorians experienced colour in their candle- or gas-lit homes.

  • Thirdly, the surviving documentation about nineteenth-century interiors often tells us very little of their original chromatic décor, as in the obvious case of black and white photography. Although new colour printing devices like chromolithography had by then become available, these were generally reserved for publications detailing worthier ‘public interiors’ (Pimlott), as with the colourful frontispiece of Augustus W. N. Pugin’s Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament (1844) based on St. Mary’s College in Oscott (Figure 3).

Figure 3. A. W. N Pugin, Frontispiece of Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume (1844), chromolithograph.

Figure 3. A. W. N Pugin, Frontispiece of Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume (1844), chromolithograph.

10Occasionally the idiosyncratic arrangements of the more artistic homes could be recorded in watercolour, as in Whistler’s Yellow Room (1883–4) (Figure 4) in which the blue china and the complementary purple of the dress of the painter’s mistress perfectly blend with the overall striking ‘scheme of yellow’ of his White House.

Figure 4. James McNeill Whistler, The Yellow Room, Watercolor and gouache on paperboard (ca. 1883-4).

Figure 4. James McNeill Whistler, The Yellow Room, Watercolor and gouache on paperboard (ca. 1883-4).

The MET, Marguerite and Frank A. Cosgrove Jr. Fund, 2017.

11Our sources concerning the colours of the Victorian interior are therefore primarily textual, ranging from specialized periodicals providing guidance on the topic of decoration, to popular handbooks by self-proclaimed experts in the field, which were rarely illustrated in colour, with the notable exception of Walter Crane’s frontispiece to Clarence Cook’s House Beautiful, Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (1878) (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Walter Crane, ‘My Lady’s Chambers’, Frontispiece to Clarence Cook’s House Beautiful, Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (1878), chromolithograph.

Figure 5. Walter Crane, ‘My Lady’s Chambers’, Frontispiece to Clarence Cook’s House Beautiful, Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (1878), chromolithograph.

12But the problem when reading colour, as Rey Conquer notes, is that it is not there (Conquer 1). Colour can only be indirectly suggested, either thanks to more or less precise chromatic nomenclatures, or through descriptions which may occasionally verge on the lyrical, in keeping with the Victorian poeticization of the interior as a reflection of the interiority of its occupant. Such names and descriptions offer invaluable insight into the chromatic economics of Victorian domesticity, revealing how poetic effects were then sought after to overcome the polychrome chaos of modernity.

Victorian Colour Grammars

13In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the colours of the homes of the wealthy were mainly chosen in accordance with historical architectural styles. As noted by Megan Aldrich, contrasts of primary colours were then favoured, with certain hues standing out as more culturally significant than others, such as the Pompeian red of John Soane’s dining-room in his London house or the more subdued eighteenth-century pastel blues of Devonshire House revived by John Gregory Crace (Aldrich 191‒5).

14The aniline revolution, however, soon blurred these historically-defined lines by introducing a wealth of new dyes which in turn called for a new order. It became urgent for the taste of the masses exposed to these new tints to be trained. This marked the beginning of a soaring interest in the ‘colour sense’ as first discussed by William E. Gladstone in 1858 in an essay on the poetry of Homer, whom the future Prime Minister believed to have been colour-blind due to the ‘paucity’ of chromatic terms in his epics (Gladstone 1858, 3:458). The impact of this debate reached far beyond literary circles. For instance, when Gladstone published an expanded version of his essay on the ‘Colour-sense’ in 1877, Darwin immediately wrote to him to explain that colour terminology was not a physiological issue but a question of linguistic and cultural development (Bellmer 20). The following year Grant Allen argued in the ‘Development of the sense of colour’, that the capacity to name complex colours was the sign of an advanced humanity. As Anne Anderson has shown, Allen even drew on this evolutionary model to offer guidance on décor in his 1880 essay on ‘The Philosophy of Drawing Rooms’ (Anderson 335‒55). But Allen’s praise of subtle ‘neutral tints of sage green or reddish brown’ enraged the more conservative critic Harry Quilter, who saw these supposedly more evolved ‘neutral’ colours as ‘the negation of decoration . . . in no ways to be desired as a rule’ (Quilter 1880a, 335).

  • 6  For a comparison between Goethe’s and Field’s ideas about colour, see Linda Shires ‘On Color Theor (...)

15The search for which chromatic rules would make the home ‘poetic’ however predates these aesthetic debates. The first to explore the possibility of establishing such laws was the chemist George Field, best known as J. M. W. Turner’s colour supplier, and whose Chromatography or, A Treatise on Colours and Pigments, and of Their Powers in Painting, &c. (1835) largely shaped Victorian debates about chromatic arrangements. Field followed J. W. von Goethe’s 1810 Zur Farbenlehre in his rejection of Newton’s objective measurements of colour. Both viewed colour as a dynamic force the psychological effects of which Field analysed with reference to poetry.6 Field indeed believed that ‘the poetry of language involves grammar. . . , which has a distribution and regulation analogous to colours and sounds’ (Field 124), a comparison later taken up by Ramsay Hay in his Laws of harmonious colouring: adapted to interior decorations manufactures, and other useful purposes (1828). In 1850 Field published an abridged version of his Chromatography entitled A Grammar of Colouring primarily destined for artists. Although many of Field’s poetic allusions were excised from later editions of this text, the grammatical analogy proved particularly enduring.

16Field’s work was notably read by Owen Jones who refers to ‘Field’s chromatic equivalents’ in Proposition 18 of his own Grammar of Ornament (1856). In Face au Chaos, Rémi Labrusse shows how such ‘grammars’ signalled the reappraisal of the art of ornamentation in the age of industry (Labrusse 14). In many ways what Labrusse states about ornament can be applied to colour, which Jones mentions in no fewer than 21 of his 37 Propositions. No longer envisaged as a superficial, secondary detail resisting scientific discourse (Lichtenstein 12), colour had by then become a sign of the modern and the focus of an increasing number of theoreticians and practitioners who believed that its syntax should be taught in a pedagogical impulse to channel the chromatic and eclectic confusion of modernity.

17In order to make his own grammar accessible to all, Jones extensively drew on the new medium of chromolithography. But when his Grammar of Ornament was first published in 1856, Jones’s reputation as a leading chromophile was already firmly established as he had conceived the chromatic decoration of both the 1851 Great Exhibition and the Fine Arts Court at Sydenham. The colour scheme of these two public interiors received much attention at the time, in particular from Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, a British writer on art and fashion who made a name for herself by translating medieval colour treatises. In her enthusiastic article entitled ‘The Harmony of Colours as Exemplified in the Exhibition’, Merrifield explains that colour is not simply a matter of taste but that its rules should be ‘cultivated’ by ‘the upholsterer, house-painter, decorator, and paper-hanger’ (Merrifield 379‒80), in keeping with the new laws of colour contrast devised in 1839 by the director of the Gobelins Dyes Works, the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, whose writings had not yet been translated into English. Although Chevreul’s theories would later prove extremely influential in artistic circles, in particular for the Neo-Impressionists, Merrifield here reminds us that his reflections were initially spurred by decorative concerns as he aimed for the Gobelins tapestries to be displayed to their best advantage.

18Merrifield’s essay marked the advent of feminine expertise in colour decoration (Loske 1‒16), challenging centuries of chromophobia depicting colour as a fickle ‘gay lady’, to quote from George Darley’s scathing review of Field’s Chromatography published in the Athenaeum (Darley 638). In the following decades, the empowerment of women in the colour field was facilitated by the multiplication of periodicals and women’s magazines devoting more and more columns to the art of decoration. Shorter forms made such expertise more accessible to women writers as well as to an increasingly female readership well acquainted with the domestic sphere. But not everyone viewed this new literature favourably. Charles Eastlake (nephew to Ruskin’s friend the artist Charles Lock Eastlake who had translated Goethe’s Farbenlehre) was one of these. His Hints on Household Taste in furniture, upholstery, and other details (1868), considered by Muthesius as ‘the first proper book on the interior’ (Muthesius 45), were derived from a series of articles published in the Cornhill in 1864. Despite the fairly humble title, Eastlake’s text is full of historical and poetic references which serve to both legitimize his own incursion into the field and stigmatize the supposed flippancy of women’s approach to decorative matters. Talia Schaffer has shown in particular how ‘the rise of the artistic professionals [within the female private sphere], meant that women often found themselves vilified as inept amateurs’ (Schaffer 85). Eastlake notably mentions a ‘Materfamilias’ who fails to choose the right carpet because she knows nothing of chromatic harmonies (Eastlake 10). And yet, contrary to Merrifield, he refuses to take his cue from Chevreul’s Laws:

But, unfortunately, most of these precepts, however ingeniously they may be based on science, are continually belied by Nature, who is, after all, the best and truest authority on this subject. It has indeed been argued that all who consult her works with love and attention, will in time appreciate the right value of decorative colour, and that those who have learnt in that school need learn in no other. (Eastlake 117)

19Here the source of the analogy with the colours of Nature can be traced back to Ruskin, who distrusted all forms of chromatic rules, as shown by this transcription of his ‘Addresses on Decorative Colour’, a text on medieval illuminations:

A man of no talent, a bad colourist, would be ready to give you mathematical reasons for every colour he put on the canvas. Mulready was another great colourist, and [Ruskin] had once asked him whether he had any principles or rules of colour. The reply of the colourist was, ‘Know what you have to do, and do it;’ but he could not tell by what rules he was to know what to do to a certain thing. The same thing prevailed in poetry. The master poets, who wrote the best verses, could not tell their way of doing it. Tennyson was, in [Ruskin’s] opinion, the leading master of versification at the present day, and he knew of no rules to guide him. (Ruskin 12:500)

20In short: just as the knowledge of grammar cannot help you write good poetry, the knowledge of the grammar of colour will not make your home poetic.

From Colour Grammars to Tertiary Colours

21Of this the Aesthetes became strikingly aware in the late 1870s, in particular Godwin when describing his own London home in Gordon Square. Alongside specialized essays and popular handbooks, Godwin’s series entitled ‘My Chambers and what I did to them’ (1876), constitutes another important textual source on chromatic decoration offering privileged access to both the interior and interiority of the artist. Poetic and musical analogies here replace grammatical references, a meaningful conceptual shift as purely artistic aspirations progressively supplanted the didactic focus on chromatic syntax.

  • 7  Letter from Whistler to Beatrix Whistler [June 11, 1891?], Glasgow University Library, MS Whistler (...)

22Aesthetes like Whistler or Godwin indeed showed no interest in making their subtle colour harmonies accessible to a wider audience. Their ‘coloristic snubbery’ (Matthews 180) was characterized by a rejection of both basic primaries and the new cheap aniline dyes which Whistler significantly spelt ‘analines’ as if to highlight their excremental nature.7 Instead, the Aesthetes flaunted their predilection for ‘artistic colours’ or tertiary hues defined by Christopher Dresser in the colour section of his Principles of Decorative Design (1873) as the mixture of two secondary colours such as olive, citrine or russet (Figure 6). In the age of mass-produced colour, the obstruse poetic names of these tertiary hues were evidently intended to act as ‘class markers’ (Schaffer 104).

Figure 6. Diagram taken from the colour section of Christopher Dresser’s Principles of Decorative Design (1873), p. 34.

Figure 6. Diagram taken from the colour section of Christopher Dresser’s Principles of Decorative Design (1873), p. 34.

23The Aesthetes were soon mocked for their chromatic elitism. In the following passage from Act I of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (1881), the Aesthetic maidens scorn the basic primaries of their suitors’ military uniforms to embrace a historically-charged but chromatically neutral and even neutralised ‘cobwebby grey velvet, with a tender bloom like cold gravy, which, made Florentine fourteenth century, trimmed with Venetian leather and Spanish altar lace, and surmounted with something Japanese—it matters not what—would at least be Early English!’ (Gilbert 11). Harry Quilter, who had bought Whistler’s White House when the painter went bankrupt following his legal action against Ruskin, further ridiculed such ‘fashionable’ chromatic arrangements:

The favourite colour for hangings is sage-green or dusty Indian-red. These colours are not beautiful in themselves—far from it—but they form harmonious combinations with the blue china, which is also fashionable (not, mind you, because it is beautiful but because it goes with the other decorations). (Quilter qtd in Anderson 343)

24For this critic, the Aesthetes’ uprooted language of colour for colour’s sake in interior decoration was divorced from true beauty. Reversing the image of the harmonious poetic home, he even described these aesthetic interiors as ‘an outgrowth from the worst part of Swinburne’s and Rossetti’s poetry’, causing ‘victims by the hundred, and much of the effeteness of our artists and the hysteria of our women’ (Quilter 1880b, 912). In short, not only were these colour combinations felt to be ugly, they were perceived as perverse, the tertiary ‘sage-green’ dangerously recalling Théophile Gautier’s ‘verdeurs’ of decadence (Gautier 17) which A. C. Swinburne had contributed to popularizing in England. Such supposedly unhealthy tastes in matters of both poetry and dadoes were also Punch’s favourite target, as shown by this spoof advertisement published on 31st March 1883:

To be sold, the whole of the Stock-in-Trade, Appliances and Inventions of a Successful Aesthete, who is retiring from business. This will include a large stock of faded lilies, dilapidated Sunflowers, and shabby Peacock Feathers, several long-haired Wigs, a collection of incomprehensible Poems and a number of impossible pictures. Also an invaluable manuscript work entitled ‘Instructions to Aesthetes’ containing a list of Aesthetic catchwords, drawings of Aesthetic attitudes and many choice secrets of the craft. Also, a number of well-used Dadoes, sad-coloured Draperies, blue and white China, and brass fenders . . . no reasonable offer refused. (Punch qtd in Taylor and Gere 116)

25This pathologizing vein has a long history in chromophobic discourse. In Homer’s time colour was seen as a pharmakon, both poison and remedy. But when it emerged in the 1860s that arsenic-based emerald green wall-papers were indeed toxic, these questions became more than simply metaphorical. The controversy was rekindled in the 1880s as olive and sage greens became the craze—a craze encouraged by Godwin and his friends. But having noted the melancholy effect this hue had on him, Godwin himself appealed to an unnamed doctor outraged by the so-called ‘Tertiary School’:

‘I have known’, he said, ‘a considerable number of rooms papered with this green, and I have observed that everyone subjected to its influence . . . invariably suffers for it physically in some way; next to the arsenic colour it is the very worst green I know. The bright green poisons you in an open, direct, active manner, but this dull one with the pleasing externals of quietness and repose robs you of that light, which . . . makes you poor indeed’. (Godwin qtd in Kinchin and Stirton 198)

26The Aesthetes seem to have been particularly sensitive to the psychological effects of colour which the emerging pseudo-science of chromotherapy was then exploring. Drawing on a synaesthetic analogy, Dresser thus claimed that ‘by certain combinations colour may make glad or depress, convey the idea of purity, richness, or poverty, or may affect the mind in any desired manner, as does music’ (Dresser 34). Similar concerns can be found in the works of Mary Elizabeth Haweis. Haweis was a prolific writer and an artist in her own right who wrote extensively on Chaucer as well as on the art of decoration. An advocate of women’s rights and dress reform, she analysed ‘the transformation of the domestic interior into a key site of women’s entry into art’ (Whalen 628), adjusting Ruskin’s chromatic precepts to the new aesthetic craze:

‘No colour harmony,’ said Ruskin many years ago, ‘is of a high order unless it involves indescribable tints’: and such indescribable tints of nearly every colour have been (alas! among many bad ones, and oft-times ill combined) a delight to cultivated eyes since about 1870. (Haweis 1879, 108)

27Haweis’s chromatic guidance did not, however, involve the prescription of any universal, abstract law: ‘There is no ought in beauty, save your own feeling of delight, . . . the more you cultivate your eyes and minds, and the more fastidious you become in arranging pleasant accessories, the higher is the form of beauty resultant from your efforts’ (Haweis 1881, 361‒2).

28An interesting mix of the poetic and the practical, the section on ‘Becoming Colours’ of The Art of Decoration encouraged women to trust their ‘feeling’ and to draw on their own experience of fashion to devise the right chromatic harmonies for their interior: ‘Now, if any woman rather shrewder than her fellows, [should] ask me, “How shall I know which combination best suits my especial needs” I answer, “Try it in a bonnet. No colours suit a room that are not pleasing in dress”’ (Haweis 1881, 366). This passage counters both Quilter’s crusade against Aesthetic palettes as well as the commodification of women as matching props encouraged by the Aesthetes themselves in their holistic approach to the harmony of the interior. In a cartoon entitled ‘Chinamania made useful at last!’ (12 December 1879), Punch had already satirized this tendency by depicting a fashionable lady covered in hand-painted china as both camouflaged and fetishized like an Aesthetic relic (Mitchell 50) (Figure 7).

Figure 7. ‘Chinamania made Useful at last!’ Illustration for Punch, 12 December 1879.

Figure 7. ‘Chinamania made Useful at last!’ Illustration for Punch, 12 December 1879.

A (book)case Study: The Colours of William Burges’s Tower House

29The Art of Decoration is also a fascinating source because, contrary to most handbooks on the topic, Haweis actually mentions examples of colourful interiors to which she was given privileged access. More detailed descriptions can however be found in another of Haweis’s texts entitled Beautiful Houses. In this book published in 1882, she depicts a series of beautiful interiors which she specifically discusses as ‘treated with true poetic feeling’ (Haweis 1882, 22). Among these homes, of which she offers us an invaluable first-hand account, features William Burges’s Tower House (1875‒1878) in the then artistic quarter of Melbury Street, Kensington.

30Although partly forgotten today, Burges was in his own time extremely renowned and respected. He was a friend of Morris (whose Red House he visited in 1860), Swinburne, and Rossetti and when he died in 1881, Godwin, Wilde and Whistler were among the last acquaintances to visit him on his death-bed. His architectural work and painted furniture offer a fascinating transition from the Gothicism of the Pre-Raphaelites to Aestheticism, and yet his style is absolutely unique in its eclectic love of bold polychromy drawn from Egyptian, Greek, Pompeian, Gothic or even Japanese ornaments and artefacts, as well as from poetic sources. Moreover, Haweis notes that Burges’s inspiration was taken from ‘sweet old stories, fairy tales, Greek legends, songs, merry quips and satires’ alike (Haweis 1882, 15). The architect, who believed that furniture and interiors should tell stories, even devised a form of poetic functionalism, exemplified by his Narcissus Washstand, inscribed with a quotation from Chaucer, which Haweis praised as a ‘gem fit to splash at all day in poetic enjoyment’ (Haweis 1882, 20). Similarly, Burges’s ‘Red Bed’ was humorously illustrated with scenes from Tennyson’s poem ‘The Day Dream’.

31Some of these objects, like the Flax and Wool wardrobe, are still in Tower House, a unique interior which not only escaped demolition but was also not turned into a public interior. Unlike its close neighbour Leighton House, which Haweis likewise discusses, Tower House is a perfectly preserved private interior thanks to the close care of its owner since 1972, Led Zeppelin’s celebrated guitarist and Victorian art collector, Jimmy Page. Because it is a private home it is difficult to visit but invaluable documents survive, including photographs of the rooms, as Burges had been a pioneering enthusiast of the new medium (Roquet 190). These photographs, taken in 1878 when the house was completed, were published in 1885 by Burges’s brother-in-law Richard Popplewell Pullan, who inherited the house after his death. A selection of these images features in Godwin’s tribute to Burges. In this two-fold, illustrated text Godwin displaces the genre of the obituary, resorting to the trope of metonymy to depict the intimate, imaginative world of his lifelong friend.

Figure 8. Edward W. Godwin, ‘The Home of an English Architect’, detail of ink stand, Art Journal (June 1886), p. 171.

Figure 8. Edward W. Godwin, ‘The Home of an English Architect’, detail of ink stand, Art Journal (June 1886), p. 171.

32Opening up Tower House to his readers, Godwin singles out Burges’s painted furniture from the 1850s and 1860s as ‘more like a house than a modern cabinet,’ (Godwin 1886, 301) the true home, as it were, to Burges’s imagination—with the display of the photographs on the page giving the impression that the house and its furnishings are almost on the same scale (Figure 8). Here ‘the stories told are full of meaning . . . of quaint conceits and replete with the evidence of their author’s knowledge and of his sympathy with the comedy of life’ (Godwin 1886, 304).

Figure 9. William Burges, Great Bookcase (1859–1862), pine, carved, painted and gilt.

Figure 9. William Burges, Great Bookcase (1859–1862), pine, carved, painted and gilt.

Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

33In William Burges and the Victorian Colour Revolution, I analyse one of these objects mentioned by Godwin, the Great Bookcase (Figure 9) painted in counter-changing blues and golds by no fewer than fourteen artists (including Burges himself) after the model of a medieval armoire from Noyon. This armoire is now lost, but throughout the second half of the nineteenth century it was frequently reproduced and referred to as a model polychrome piece in publications on furniture and decoration by writers such as Eugène Viollet-le-Duc or Charles Blanc, who published his own Grammaire des arts décoratifs: Décoration intérieure de la maison in 1882 (Figure 10).

Figure 10. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Drawing of a 14th-century armoire from Noyon, from Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français, vol. 1 (1858), p. 10.

Figure 10. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Drawing of a 14th-century armoire from Noyon, from Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français, vol. 1 (1858), p. 10.

34But despite these erudite credentials, I would like to follow Gaston Bachelard in approaching domestic objects like these as central to the intimate ‘poetics of space’:

L’armoire et ses rayons, . . . sont de véritables organes de la vie psychologique secrète. Sans ces ‘objets’ et quelques autres aussi valorisés, notre vie intime manquerait de modèle d’intimité. Ce sont des objets mixtes, des objets-sujets. Ils ont, comme nous, par nous, pour nous, une intimité. (Bachelard 83)

35Resembling the façade of a Gothic edifice, Burges’s medievalising and yet distinctively High Victorian bookcase collapses the distinctions between interior and exterior to offer such a ‘model of intimacy’. But this extraordinary object equally blurs the line between private and public, as well as between the fine arts and applied arts. Initially intended for Burges’s rooms on Birmingham Street this polychrome piece was indeed publicly displayed in the medieval court of the 1862 London International Exhibition, whose colour scheme was designed by John Gregory Crace in keeping—once again—with Chevreul’s principles (Crace 342). Its eight painted panels conceived like stained-glass windows illustrate the Pagan and Christian origins of the fine arts, that is to say architecture, painting, sculpture and poetry as represented by the Dante of the Vita Nuova in a colourful thirteenth-century interior (Figure 11), which was Burges’s favourite artistic period.

Figure 11. Edward John Poynter, Dante’s Vision, detail from the Great Bookcase (1859–62).

Figure 11. Edward John Poynter, Dante’s Vision, detail from the Great Bookcase (1859–62).

Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

36The Library of Tower House was specifically designed to house this bookcase. Haweis likened this fascinating room to ‘a blaze of gold and colour’ (Haweis 1882, 17), as shown in a watercolour by the Swedish draughtsman Alex Haig (Figure 12). What indeed made the aesthetic experience of Tower House so unique was its colours, which Pullan compared to ‘an illuminated MS. of a romance of the Middle Ages’ (Pullan 3) of which Burges owned some rare examples. The dazzling hues of Burges’s idiosyncratic interior—which no grammar could translate, even if ‘queen Grammar’ is given pride of place on the castellated chimney-piece—paid tribute to the rich material culture of the past which a later Victorian architect, William Lethaby, described in the following paratactic terms: ‘Here were silver and jade, onyx and malachite, bronze and ivory, jewelled casements, rock crystal orbs, marble inlaid with precious metals; lustre, iridescence and colour everywhere’ (Lethaby 254). Burges’s extensive use of such diverse polychrome materials may partly explain why the colours of this unique interior have survived the onslaught of time.

Figure 12. Alex Herman Haig, The Library, Tower House, Kensington (1880), watercolour heightened with bodycolour.

Figure 12. Alex Herman Haig, The Library, Tower House, Kensington (1880), watercolour heightened with bodycolour.

RIBA Collections, London.

37The chromatic correspondence between the library and the Great Bookcase further reflects Burges’s metonymic aesthetics as the stories and motifs depicted on this piece paved the way for the architect’s larger, but equally colourful, fantasies, including Lord Bute’s Cardiff Castle. But Burges also designed for his own library several other closed bookcases of counter-changing colours, all based on the Noyon armoire, thus lending an almost poetic rhythm to the room. The figures that appeared on these bookcases (which are still in place) composed ‘a comic alphabet’ which included references to the arts of the thirteenth century. ‘A,’ for instance, stood for ‘Architect’ and was illustrated with a portrait of Burges in medieval dress standing in front of a model of Tower House.

38A tribute to the sacred hues of a fantasized medieval golden age celebrated by Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites as well as to the artistic self-referentiality of the Aesthetic interior, this unique poetic home still ‘glowing with imperishable colours’ (Burges 107) in many ways defies the chromatic guidance found in most Victorian manuals on interior design. And yet, Tower House’s eclectic and historicised polychrome decoration may be read as a spectacular example of a much broader quest for more meaningful colour harmonies in the age of garish industrial dyes.

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Internet References:

Farrow&Ball website https://www.farrow-ball.com/natural-history-museum/discover-the-collaboration. Accessed 29 December 2022.

Shires, Linda. ‘On Color Theory, 1835: George Field’s Chromatography’. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=linda-m-shires-on-color-theory-1835-george-fields-chromatography. Accessed 29 December 2022.

The Online Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler. http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/freetext/display/?cid=6591&q=analine&year1=1829&year2=1903&rs=1. Accessed 29 December 2022.

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Notes

1  https://www.farrow-ball.com/natural-history-museum/discover-the-collaboration Farrow&Ball website consulted in December 2021.

2  To take up the term used by Andrea Hart, Head of Special Collections and advisor to the company for this collection. https://www.farrow-ball.com/the-chromologist/inspiration/uncovering-our-new-collection. Page accessed in December 2021.

3  The Poetry of Architecture was the title of a series of essays which Ruskin published in 1837‒8 under the pen name ‘Kata Physin’ (Greek for ‘According to Nature’).

4  However, as noted by John Unrau, Ruskin was not convinced by the polychromy of Butterfield’s church: ‘I do not altogether like the arrangements of colour in the brickwork; but these will hardly attract the eye, where so much has been already done with precious and beautiful marble, and is yet to be done in fresco. Much will depend, however, upon the colouring of this latter portion. I wish that either Holman Hunt or Millais could be prevailed upon to do at least some of these smaller frescoes.’ (Ruskin 11:229n, qtd in Unrau 147).

5  According to Joanna Banham ‘in 1807 the phrase “interior decoration”—as distinct from architecture—was coined for the first time in Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture and Interior Decoration’ (Banham 918). For how the new dyes transformed fashion, see Regina Blaszczyk’s The Color Revolution (2012) and Charlotte Nicklas’s essay on ‘Body and Clothing’ in the Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry (2021).

6  For a comparison between Goethe’s and Field’s ideas about colour, see Linda Shires ‘On Color Theory, 1835: George Field’s Chromatography’ https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=linda-m-shires-on-color-theory-1835-george-fields-chromatography consulted in December 2021.

7  Letter from Whistler to Beatrix Whistler [June 11, 1891?], Glasgow University Library, MS Whistler W584. See The Online Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler. http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/freetext/display/?cid=6591&q=analine&year1=1829&year2=1903&rs=1 (accessed 29 December 2022).

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1. Philip Speakman Webb and Edward Burne-Jones, Prioress’s Tale Wardrobe (1859) painted oak and pine.
Crédits Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 925k
Titre Figure 2. James McNeill Whistler’s White House, Tite Street, Chelsea, photographic print.
Crédits Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 503k
Titre Figure 3. A. W. N Pugin, Frontispiece of Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume (1844), chromolithograph.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,2M
Titre Figure 4. James McNeill Whistler, The Yellow Room, Watercolor and gouache on paperboard (ca. 1883-4).
Crédits The MET, Marguerite and Frank A. Cosgrove Jr. Fund, 2017.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,2M
Titre Figure 5. Walter Crane, ‘My Lady’s Chambers’, Frontispiece to Clarence Cook’s House Beautiful, Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (1878), chromolithograph.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 268k
Titre Figure 6. Diagram taken from the colour section of Christopher Dresser’s Principles of Decorative Design (1873), p. 34.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 161k
Titre Figure 7. ‘Chinamania made Useful at last!’ Illustration for Punch, 12 December 1879.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 683k
Titre Figure 8. Edward W. Godwin, ‘The Home of an English Architect’, detail of ink stand, Art Journal (June 1886), p. 171.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 660k
Titre Figure 9. William Burges, Great Bookcase (1859–1862), pine, carved, painted and gilt.
Crédits Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1013k
Titre Figure 10. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Drawing of a 14th-century armoire from Noyon, from Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français, vol. 1 (1858), p. 10.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,6M
Titre Figure 11. Edward John Poynter, Dante’s Vision, detail from the Great Bookcase (1859–62).
Crédits Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,9M
Titre Figure 12. Alex Herman Haig, The Library, Tower House, Kensington (1880), watercolour heightened with bodycolour.
Crédits RIBA Collections, London.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/12794/img-12.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 855k
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Charlotte Ribeyrol, « Reading the Colours of Victorian Interiors: The Poetic Home Revisited »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 97 Printemps | 2023, mis en ligne le 21 mars 2023, consulté le 14 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/12794 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.12794

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Charlotte Ribeyrol

Charlotte Ribeyrol is an Associate Professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, a Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France and an Honorary Curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Her main field of research is Victorian Hellenism and the reception of the colours of the past in 19th-century painting and literature. Her first monograph entitled ‘Étrangeté, passion, couleur’, L’hellénisme de Swinburne, Pater et Symonds came out in 2013. In 2014-2016 she co-directed a major interdisciplinary project on chromatic materiality (POLYRE, IDEX Sorbonne Universités) which led to the publication of a collection of essays entitled The Colours of the Past in Victorian England (2016). Following her Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford (2016‒2018), she was awarded an ERC consolidator grant for her project CHROMOTOPE (2019‒2024) which explores the 19th-century ‘chromatic turn’. Her forthcoming monograph on the Victorian architect and chromophile William Burges entitled William Burges’s Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution (Yale UP) will come out in 2023.
Charlotte Ribeyrol est maîtresse de conférences HDR en Littérature britannique du xixe siècle à Sorbonne Université, membre junior de l’Institut universitaire de France et Honorary Curator de l’Ashmolean Museum d’Oxford. Ses recherches portent sur l’hellénisme victorien en peinture et en poésie ainsi que la réception au xixe siècle des couleurs du passé. Elle a publié et co-édité plusieurs ouvrages sur le sujet, notamment “Étrangeté, passion, couleur”, L’hellénisme de Swinburne, Pater et Symonds, ELLUG, 2013 ainsi qu’un numéro spécial de Word and Image sur la couleur (mars 2020). De 2014 à 2016 elle a co-piloté le projet IDEX POLYRE qui a donné lieu à la publication suivante The Colours of the Past in Victorian England (2016). Après une Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship à Oxford (2016‒2018), elle a obtenu un financement ERC Consolidator pour son projet CHROMOTOPE qui explore l’impact littéraire et artistique du tournant chromatique des années 1860 en Europe. Son ouvrage sur la chromophilie de l’architecte victorien William Burges est à paraître chez Yale University Press au printemps 2023.

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