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Victorian Rise of Domesticity Among Decorative Arts

The subtleties of decoration within the home were a part of Victorian life. The interior design of the home was there to make family life more comfortable and to be architecturally pleasing. Victorian country life resulted in many enlargements and improvements of homes and the items within, as new domestic values of loving the home became popular. According to John Gloag, magazines, books, and newspapers became aimed at all wealth classes so they could decide upon the designs and furniture they would use in their homes. Katherine Wheeler remarked that John Ruskin's ideas about about how emotions influence people’s lives pertained also to design and architecture, as emotions influenced the way people saw interior design. She further stated that if the wrong emotion and value was entwined into the architecture, the design would prove to be problematic as the Victorians envisioned beauty in its most natural form.

Per Kevin O'Brien, architecture in the domestic setting allowed the interior design to be brought forth, which made the entire home encompass the feelings of its inhabitants. Victorian men and women would follow this principle, as well as others, in order to preserve the maintenance of the home. Some would only keep items in their house that were useful or beautiful, as Victorians valued utility, efficiency, and did not want to waste anything, which resembled the public sphere of work. Kevin mentioned how many started preferred the simple tools and simple lives, and in relation, they chose to use items that were “perfectly bare or ornament” rather than machine made ornaments.

In the domestic sphere, men and women would carry out specific activities in the home per the rules of society. For women, bedrooms had to be cleaned and they also had to “throw the bed clothing over the foot of the bed and open the bedroom window when she leaves the room so air passed through,” as John Gloag declared. Men would typically do nothing in the bedroom, as that was often left to the services gof the housemaid or the women who lived there, which resulted in the men receiving an untidy connotation. According to research and observations of the Victorian home life from John, women would not even expect the men to do anything or expect any help from them for their absurdities. They were meant to create the mess and work for the others and to not do it themselves.

Comforting Designs and Furniture

Rooms/Bedrooms

John Gloag provided evidence that, displayed across varying Victorian-style homes, large windows characterized what the people preferred in their homes. These were seen as bringing character to each room regardless of the house's size. Furnishing the home became a haphazard event and the attention to cleanliness and comfort in the homes rose, especially seen in the relaxing designs. The master bedroom, noted as the “suite”, adorned masterful details, from wood working to cloth designs, as John also detailed. Cottage style furniture became popular and the middle class especially took into these designs as they were often inexpensive, yet true to Victorian style.

Chairs and Seats

The chairs and seats available for people were more revealing than any other articles about the postures and manners encouraged by the philosophy of comfort. An example of Victorian chairs, such as easy chairs, were highly enjoyable. The most fashionable easy-chair, the ‘Fireside’, allowed people of all ages to enjoy the high backs and shoulders, inclined support for the back, and a hollow seat for rest. John Gloag explained that this chair remained a standard pattern for many upholstery. Women’s easy chairs had unbuttoned upholstery, low arms and a circular seat with a padded shell back for comfort, but their chairs did not support lounging. Another seat, the rocker, resembles the modern day rocking chair. The rocker combined comfort and elegance and formed a new social habit, with its sleek and decorous designs, and soothing capabilities for many. John also made sure to contend that although women's seats may have seemed comfortable, men more than women would strive for comfort before elegance, as women were meant to uphold themselves in a high manor in "costume". Therefore, the men's easy chair differed from the women's, as the men's easy chair was meant for lounging, with a longer cushion to prop their legs up.

File:Comfort and Elegance.jpg

|Victorian man displaying "Comfort before elegance" while the woman must tend to other activities

Also, they utilized what was known as a steamer chair, which often had six legs and a detachable leg rest, which could also be used as a bed. Women would not particularly partake in the use of these types of chairs, for elegance before comfort would remain their social model to conform to.

Fireplace

Fireplaces were a popular household item to have in Victorian homes and they represent a form of comfort for Victorians. Poking the fire was seen as a pastime. To poke the fires, shovels, or tongs that were made of steel or brass were very decorated and therefore were therefore never used to poke, but only for the main decoration. Another less decorated fire poker was actually used for the poking purposes. They were also highly decorated with mantel pieces and clocks made of marble with many ornaments and decorations for show. While they had decorative properties, they also had comfort purposes. For example, John Gloag's Social remarked that fireplaces were set in a room that would warm the room, yet also scorch the people in that room because of uneven heat distribution.

The Drawing Room

Judith Flanders, after analyzing her data about drawing rooms, contended that this room promoted domestic happiness and morality as it received the most fashionable updates and was kept tidy and neat. The room adorned high ceilings and contained a long bay window to look from, so people could be relaxed and enjoy the utter happiness that filled the space. Some of these rooms were darker and more ‘manly’, and others were more ‘feminine’ with light-colors, as were the values that the Victorians upheld. Drawing rooms, as claimed through Judith Flanders, could be decorated in a plethora of ways, because each individual had personal preferences to which were utilized.

Oscar Wilde's Aesthetic of Victorian Decoration

Chief among the literary practitioners of decorative aestheticism was Oscar Wilde, who advocated Victorian decorative individualism in speech, fiction, and essay-form. Wilde’s notion of cultural enlightenment through visual cues echoes that of Alexandre von Humboldt who maintained that imagination was not the Romantic figment of scarcity and mystery but rather something anyone could begin to develop with other methods, including organic elements in pteridomania[].

By changing one’s immediate dwelling quarters, one changed one’s mind as well[]; Wilde believed that the way forward in cosmopolitanism began with as a means eclipse the societally mundane, and that such guidance would be found not in books in classrooms, but by Platonic epistemology. An aesthetic shift in the home’s Victorian decorative arts reached its highest outcome in the literal transformation of the individual into cosmopolitan, as Wilde was regarded and noted among others in his tour of America.

For Wilde, however, the inner meaning of Victorian decorative arts is fourfold: one must first reconstruct one’s inside so as to grasp what is outside in terms of both living quarters and mind, whilst hearkening back to von Humboldt on the way to Plato so as to be immersed in contemporaneous cosmopolitanism, thereby ideally becoming oneself admirably aesthetical.

John Ruskin

The most prominent art critic during the Victorian era was John Ruskin, who published two major works on architecture in addition to numerous lectures on the subject. For Ruskin, architecture was not merely a building, but a work of art, and should be treated as such. This distinction was defined by the emotion the architect put into the building. This carried on in his opinions on architectural style. Ruskin encouraged the Gothic style of architecture, which he believed had the most emotion, and discouraged the classical style, believing the focus on proportion stifled its emotional impact. Perhaps most important to Ruskin was the idea that architecture could inspire action and ultimately change society. Ruskin’s ideas, while popular, were also criticized by architect Robert Kerr, who objected to Ruskin’s anti-professional view of architecture. Nevertheless Ruskin was so influential that some buildings were said to be ‘Ruskinian’ in nature; Ruskin was also able to shine light on lesser known artists and designers to sway trends.Ruskin's views also influenced other prominent critics at the time, such as Oscar Wilde. Wilde; Wilde, like Ruskin, believed that art was not merely for aesthetic enjoyment, but could affect oneself on a deeper level. Wilde also had similar aesthetic tastes to Ruskin, preferring abstract and geometric patterns, believing that innovation in design showed innovation in thought on part of the designer.