Laura C. Jenkins

Civilising Decoration: French Interiors in the American Gilded Age

Supervised by Professor Katie Scott FBA

My research focuses on French eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interiors in New York during the so-called Gilded Age. From the early 1880s, the movement of French eighteenth-century decorative arts from Paris and London to New York coincided with a growing fashion among the wealthy of that city for rooms in French historical styles. Assisted by decorator-dealers such as Jules Allard (1832–1907) and Joseph Duveen (1869–1939), the Vanderbilt and Astor families created private ballrooms, salons, and bathrooms that were reminiscent of the courts of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI. While these rooms were inspired by actual interiors, preserved after the French Revolution by Restoration and Imperial régimes, they were also the product of nineteenth-century imaginations, and were designed both to showcase US art and its markets internationally and to accommodate the architectural demands of a self-fashioning American elite. Focusing on palace homes or mansions on the city’s Fifth Avenue, my thesis considers period-style decoration as an agent of civilisation, elucidating the relationship of ‘Frenchness’ broadly to historically specific concerns from leisure to cleanliness.