The Tastemakers
British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865
By Diana Davis
Getty Research Institute
Departing from the conventional narrative of dealers as purveyors of antiquarianism, a new volume by Diana Davis repositions them instead as innovators.
The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865 (Getty Publications, hardcover, $65.00) demonstrates how, during this period, London dealers invented a new and visually splendid decorative style that combined the contrasting tastes of two nations: France and Britain. Davis illuminates these dealers 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, bronzework, 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 first in-depth study of the assimilation of French taste in early nineteenth-century elite British interiors, 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.
Diana Davis specializes in the interface between collectors, dealers, and the art market in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Publication Information:
The Tastemakers
British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865
Diana Davis
Getty Research Institute
320 pages, 7 x 10 inches
60 color and 64 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-1-60606-641-6, hardcover
US $65.00, UK £50.00
US Publication Date: July 7 2020
UK Publication Date: July 9, 2020
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