Overview

An examination of the development, role, and influence of the British decorative art dealers who invented an Anglo-Gallic style for elite interiors. In this volume, Diana Davis demonstrates how London dealers invented a new and visually splendid decorative style that combined the contrasting tastes of two nations. Departing from the conventional narrative that depicts dealers as purveyors of antiquarianism, Davis repositions them as innovators who were key to transforming old art objects from ancien régime France into cherished “antiques” and, equally, as creators of new and modified French-inspired furniture, bronze work, and porcelain. The resulting old, new, and reconfigured objects merged aristocratic French eighteenth-century taste with nineteenth-century British preference, and they were prized by collectors, who displayed them side by side in palatial interiors of the period.   The Tastemakers analyzes dealer-made furnishings from the nineteenth-century patron’s perspective and in the context of the interiors for which they were created, contending that early dealers deliberately formulated a new aesthetic with its own objects, language, and value. Davis examines a wide variety of documents to piece together the shadowy world of these dealers, who emerge center stage as traders, makers, and tastemakers.

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9781606066416

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Reviews

Brilliantly original. . . . A landmark book, beautifully written and executed, which challenges and redefines our ideas of both French and English taste. --Tom Stammers Apollo In a handsome hardback from the Getty Research Institute, Diana Davis charts the ways dealers--those 'pawnbrokers' . . . brought French style to the English interior. --Benjamin Riley, The New Criterion

Brilliantly original. . . . A landmark book, beautifully written and executed, which challenges and redefines our ideas of both French and English taste. --Tom Stammers Apollo

Author Information

Diana Davis specializes in the interface between collectors, dealers, and the art market in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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