Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Chapter Four
The Antiquarian Interior
Scavenging on the field of Waterloo or wandering through the Elysian garden at Lenoir’s
Musée des Monumens Français, antiquaries, and others, were drawn by the artefacts of the past
into a narrative relationship with history. For most it was a narrative in which their role was that
of reader or interpreter, following a story in which they played no personal part. Someone with a
claim to historic significance in his or her own right, such as the Duchesse de Berry or the
putative Henri V at Abbotsford, might collapse the imaginative space and become a character in
the romance, but for most people, however closely they engaged with it, history remained in the
past.
Antiquarianism offered, however, other kinds of narrative-through-objects which, while
they drew on ideas about history, might approach more closely to theatre (which will be
discussed in a later chapter) or to autobiography. In this latter case it was the spaces created by
individuals, possibly in a single room or a whole house, sometimes in a church or even within a
museum, that were the occasions for such self-reflexive antiquarian experiences. Furnished and
occasionally entirely built out of a combination of old and new materials they are now generally
known as ‘romantic’ or ‘antiquarian interiors’. 1 These environments were the objective
expressions of the personality, thoughts, feelings and beliefs of their creators. Indeed in some
cases the creator was such an inextricable part of the creation as to become a living artefact,
apparently the product, as much as the projector of his material context. Such symbiosis is a
prominent theme in Notre Dame where Victor Hugo, who himself created spectacular romantic
interiors in his homes in Paris and on Guernsey, describes Quasimodo’s relationship to the
cathedral in these terms:
1
Wainwright, The Romantic Interior, was the first and remains the most authoritative monograph. It has given rise
to the expressions which are in general use among art historians and curators.
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