Kapoor on Davis (2020)

In art history it is the collectors who usually dominate discussions. Diana Davis’s book departs from this well-established tradition by focusing attention instead on British art dealers whom she presents as much as connoisseurs as enterprising tradesmen. These dealers are the tastemakers, alluded to in the first part of the title, who played a prominent role in fashioning a new aesthetic in British homes in the early nineteenth century. According to the author, the dealers introduced objets d’art of French royal and aristocratic provenance into British homes, thus inaugurating a new style of interiors known popularly as the Louis XIV style. However, they also went beyond their role as mere providers of luxury items from France by adapting French creations to suit British aesthetics, a style Davis calls Anglo-Gallic.

The book is divided into two parts containing four chapters apiece. The first part provides the historical, political, economic, and artistic background to the development of the Anglo-Gallic aesthetic, thus contextualizing the contribution of nineteenth-century British dealers to interior design. While the first two chapters in part one focus on the larger picture—why French objets d’art of the ancien régime found favor with royal and aristocratic customers in Britain after the Revolution of 1789 and during a period of war—the next two chapters shift their attention to the dealer. The dealer was “everything the collector feared and despised” because of his interest in commerce (77). However, he had an “intangible” asset: he understood objets d’art well (83). In fact, Davis demolishes the notion of the dealer being guided solely by monetary motives when she writes that the dealer’s comprehension of the market value of objects was based ultimately on his discernment of their artistic worth. Overall, part one establishes London as the center of the art market following the French Revolution, with British art dealers emerging not only as key players who orchestrated the passage of objets d’art from France to Britain for commercial profit, but also as art aficionados who had a discriminating eye and judged the artistic quality of objects they bought and sold. The second part reinforces this argument about the dealers’ aesthetic abilities by presenting them as makers who styled visually splendid interiors using their own creations. Not only did they manufacture antique furniture, they also produced bronze-mounted art objects and porcelain akin to those produced in France, their aim being to satisfy the British Regency taste for “matt and burnished gold” (189) and painted china.  

Though not immediately apparent, the French Revolution is the pivot for Davis’s study of the emergence of the Anglo-Gallic interior in art history. To begin with, Davis’s discussion of how French art travelled to Britain is framed by a reference to the Revolution, after which ancien régime art was suddenly unloved and unwanted in France. This reference is accompanied by a brief tracing of the flight of French émigrés (many of them dealers) to London where, along with ingenious British dealers, they “stimulated the demand for ancien régime art by affirming the British elite’s cultural ties with France” (47). However, eager to dismantle the idea that the Anglo-Gallic interior involved slavish borrowing or mere copying of a signature French style, Davis also takes special care to establish how British dealers reinvented the Louis IV style and transformed it into the new interior style that developed in Britain between the 1790s and George IV’s death in the 1830s. According to Davis, though associated with the sumptuous taste of the eponymous French king, the Louis XIV style actually underwent a refashioning by dealers before making their way into the interiors of elite British homes. Moreover, Davis draws attention to the role played by dealers in redefining the concept of the antique. Whereas the term previously referred to “artifacts from the classical past, [it] now described objects from the early modern past, some barely twenty years old” (4). Davis rebuts those questioning the authenticity of ancien-régime-inspired objects and furnishings created by dealers by arguing that “objects have a continuing history” (6). Nevertheless, paradoxically, Davis also shows the dealers’ appreciation of the romantic, picturesque, and nostalgic associations of ancien régime objets d’art for their royal and aristocratic clients. For example, King George IV was “one of the first to acquire objects reputed to have come from the collection of Madame de Pompadour, whose portrait he bought in 1802” (65). Davis also cites the 1842 Strawberry Hill auction catalogue which appealed to the romantic imagination and its obsession with the past by stating that “an object is prized not only from its intrinsic value, but from its association with remarkable events or illustrious names” (65). 

No book on art history would be complete without visual illustrations accompanying the text. Davis lives up to the reader’s expectations by providing stunning plates on glossy paper between parts one and two of the book. The plates contain collectible pictures of Anglo-Gallic interiors such as William Henry Hunt’s painting of 1823 entitled “The Green Drawing Room of the Earl of Essex at Cassiobury” (104), along with images of objets d’art such as an Edward Holmes Baldock blue porcelain-mounted bureau plat (129), an Erard and George Henry Blake piano (130), a Thomas Parker gilt brass, turtleshell, and ebony center table (123), and a glass and marble clock cabinet by Robert Hume the elder (128).

The novelty of the book’s subject notwithstanding, writing about the aesthetic contributions of nineteenth-century art dealers is a challenging task as the latter are regarded usually as “wily” brocanteurs (64) or as commercial sellers of fashionable second-hand objects. As Davis herself laments, “archival evidence for dealers is limited and scattered” (7). Also, the creativity of nineteenth-century British dealers is undervalued by art historians in comparison to contemporary art collectors who are hailed as cultural ambassadors. The achievement of Davis lies, therefore, in showcasing the creative talent of dealers such as Edward Baldock in order to reveal their artistic legacy.