5 The Decorative Interior
It is essential to realise that our decoration is as much a characteristic product
of our civilisation as our newspapers, our poems, our dances and our morals.
Dorothy Todd and Raymond Mortimer^1One of Elsie de Wolfe’s most memorable proclamations was made in 1913.
‘You will express yourself in your home whether you want to or not’,
the decorator explained.^2 In the era of industrial modernity the use of
decoration in interiors enabled large numbers of occupants to express
themselves within them. Although the idea of ‘decorating’ the interior had
become commonplace by that time the words ‘interior’ and ‘decoration’
hadn’t always denoted a single concept. The term ‘interior decoration’
was in fact a French invention, but it had entered the English language
soon afterwards.^3 It first appeared in print in the title of Charles Percier
and Antoine Fontaine’s Receuils de decorations interieures, which was pub-
lished as articles in 1801 and as a book in 1812.^4 In the English language
the term was first used in 1807 in the title of Thomas Hope’s publication
Household Furniture and Interior Decoration. At that date the concept
was linked exclusively to the household and did not extend to the public
sphere. Its emergence coincided with that of industrial modernity com-
ing at the moment, that is, when the middle classes either began to ‘hunt
out their own wallpaper, much in the modern manner’, or to seek the
services of an upholsterer, or ‘upholder’, as they were called then, who
could supply them with all the necessary components for their interior
schemes.^5 An 1829 publication defined interior decoration as ‘the planned
co-ordination for artistic effect of colours and furniture, etc., in a room
or building’, demonstrating that aesthetic self-consciousness was a defin-
ing feature of the concept of interior decoration at an early date.^6
However, the idea that a room’s decoration necessarily expressed its
occupier’s modern personality, mental life and emotions, emerged a lit-
tle later in an 1841 publication by Andrew Jackson Downing in which he
discussed the idea of a ‘permanent dwelling that we can give the impress
of our own mind and identify with our own existence’.^7 By the middle of 91