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5 <strong>The</strong> Decorative <strong>Interior</strong><br />
It is essential to realise that our decoration is as much a characteristic product<br />
of our civilisation as our newspapers, our poems, our dances and our morals.<br />
Dorothy Todd and Raymond Mortimer1 One of Elsie de Wolfe’s most memorable proclamations was made in 1913.<br />
‘You will express yourself in your home whether you want to or not’,<br />
the decorator explained. 2 In the era of industrial modernity the use of<br />
decoration in interiors enabled large numbers of occupants to express<br />
themselves within them. Although the idea of ‘decorating’ the interior had<br />
become commonplace by that time the words ‘interior’ and ‘decoration’<br />
hadn’t always denoted a single concept. <strong>The</strong> term ‘interior decoration’<br />
was in fact a French invention, but it had entered the English language<br />
soon afterwards. 3 It first appeared in print in the title of Charles Percier<br />
and Antoine Fontaine’s Receuils de decorations interieures, which was published<br />
as articles in 1801 and as a book in 1812. 4 In the English language<br />
the term was first used in 1807 in the title of Thomas Hope’s publication<br />
Household Furniture and <strong>Interior</strong> Decoration. At that date the concept<br />
was linked exclusively to the household and did not extend to the public<br />
sphere. Its emergence coincided with that of industrial modernity coming<br />
at the moment, that is, when the middle classes either began to ‘hunt<br />
out their own wallpaper, much in the modern manner’, or to seek the<br />
services of an upholsterer, or ‘upholder’, as they were called then, who<br />
could supply them with all the necessary components for their interior<br />
schemes. 5 An 1829 publication defined interior decoration as ‘the planned<br />
co-ordination for artistic effect of colours and furniture, etc., in a room<br />
or building’, demonstrating that aesthetic self-consciousness was a defining<br />
feature of the concept of interior decoration at an early date. 6<br />
However, the idea that a room’s decoration necessarily expressed its<br />
occupier’s modern personality, mental life and emotions, emerged a little<br />
later in an 1841 publication by Andrew Jackson Downing in which he<br />
discussed the idea of a ‘permanent dwelling that we can give the impress<br />
of our own mind and identify with our own existence’. 7 By the middle of 91
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