Interiors - Caroline Murphy on how the swag and pelmet style of Victorian living predates our obsession with home decorating
The Geffrye Museum, set in the elegant 18th-century almshouses of the Ironmongers' Company in east London, is devoted to the history of interiors and gardens - more specifically, the sort of interiors and gardens beloved by the British since we moved out of mud huts. The museum includes a wood-panelled Tudor room and a late 20th-century warehouse space - all designed to reveal the dramatically changing face of the domestic interior.
The latest exhibition, "Home and Garden: domestic spaces in paintings from 1830-1914", is the concluding instalment of a two-part show exploring the representation of interiors from the 17th to the 20th century. Works by amateurs are juxtaposed with those by James Tissot and Walter Sickert, while slick society portraits or genre pieces hang alongside intensely personal family mementoes, all within a quirky assortment of private spaces.
The show has the appeal of a World of Interiors-type magazine, all the while making an explicit connection between home and self - one that seems highly relevant to our era of make-over shows, Elle Decoration and Ideal Home exhibitions.
The paintings are presented as historical documents first and as works of art second. One such piece is the portrait of the family of businessman Henry Clark, the owner of a button and trimming warehouse in the City of London. It was painted by the pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt in 1846. Although Hunt was a major Victorian artist, this is an early work and rather inept. He struggled with basic proportions, and Clark's children, painted in the parlour of their home, appear to have monstrously oversized heads. The main interest is in the Clark family's pride in their finest room: their possessions and the decor enjoy almost the same prominence as the family members. The room vaunts an eye-watering combination of spiralling brown-red foliage-laden wallpaper, a lavishly patterned brown-green carpet, and ornately gilded paintings and mirrors. The final flourish is a paisley shawl, flung over a highly carved mahogany couch. A mania for elaborate decoration has been captured for posterity.
The time-frame of the exhibition is, broadly speaking, the Victorian period. This was an age of unprecedented private enrichment across a broad swath of society, and that prosperity found an outlet in people's homes and gardens.
Take, for example, the artfully restrained Kensington living room of Henry Cole (the principal organiser of the 1851 Great Exhibition and the genius behind the Victoria and Albert Museum). Painted in 1852-53, the room is notable for its plain, painted walls and art displayed in simple mounts, and for the curious way in which Cole himself is almost entirely obscured from view, in a shadowy corner.
In contrast to this is George Townsend Cole's 1858 portrait of the master sail-maker Henry Lambert in his Wapping house. Lambert sits in a room awash with trellis-patterned wallpaper, swagged and fringed pelmets, a heavily floral car- pet and an equally baroque rug. To add to the decorative riot, the room is stuffed with oversized ornaments and elaborately carved furniture. Most striking of all is the large window looking on to a flotilla on the Thames. Both the source of Lambert's wealth and its fruits are very much in evidence.
Other paintings show gardens, including those belonging to Charles Butters, "gentleman builder", who made a for- tune building suburban villas in east London. Painted in 1876, his lavish Italianate gardens might appear rather municipal to the modern eye, with their brightly coloured planting and symmetrically placed urns and borders. But at the time, they represented the height of fashion: a garden magazine of 1876 described them as being "conspicuous for substantial elegance".
Tastes may have changed, but our fascination with interiors as mirrors of individual character remains, and so this exhibition strikes a profoundly familiar chord.
"Home and Garden: domestic spaces in paintings from 1830-1914" is at the Geffrye Museum, London E2 (020 7739 9893) until 18 July
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