Vive le Regent!
Philip Mansel
REGENCY DESIGN, 1790-1840 by John Morley Zwemmer, £85, pp. 476 Loss of simplicity dominates the world of Regency design. John Morley writes that, between 1790 and 1840,
playful and luxurious allusiveness has vanished to be replaced by a serious and occasionally grim attempt at authenticity.
Fortunes began to be spent on the evoca- tion, in stone, of classical Rome, Eliza- bethan England, China or Versailles. By 1816 Humphrey Repton, who claimed to have invented the term landscape garden, had 'improved' over 400 sites. Yet it is hard not to sympathise with the opinion of a vis- iting Bavarian in 1816, that English gardens were 'oppressed with the burthen of their own ornaments'. The tyranny of the deco- rator had begun. Cockerell wrote to his son in 1817: You will find more importance attached to the decorations of a Saloon than to the build- ing of a Temple: if you can therefore bend to the consideration of what is called the fittings up of the best Hotels and Palaces of Paris, the graces of their Meubles and the harmony of their Colours in Hangings, painting and
gilding you may be the general arbiter of Taste.
The gilding on the wall has infected the language of John Morley, former Director of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, and Presi- dent of the Decorative Arts Society. Terms like 'eclectic antiquarianism', and 'associa- tionalism', vie with such phrases as
London's specious stucco facades are not inappropriate to the ephemeral nature of commercial dominance.
(What was ephemeral about London's commercial dominance?) Morley writes of a 'vigorous' rosette, an 'aspiring' bed. The Regent's sideboards are 'magnificently unbridled', while his Golden Drawing Room is accused of 'Louis XIV tenden- cies'.
Four hundred and seventy-six pages long, analysing in detail the gardens, buildings, interiors and furniture of the period 1790 to 1840 in the British Isles, Regency Design is both learned and sumptuous. It is certain to appeal to art historians and antique- dealers. Many of the 339 black-and-white illustrations and 132 colour plates, are pre- viously unpublished. Almost everything has been included: flock wallpaper, garden seats, cottages ornes, George IV's redecora- tion of Windsor.
Morley shows that, despite the revolu- tionary and Napoleonic wars, France was the leading model for Regency design. Already in the 1780s, in their two pleasure domes of Carlton House and Bagatelle, the future Kings George IV and Charles X had employed the same decorators and archi- tect. Within a few months of assuming the Regency in 1811, the Regent boasted that he would 'quite eclipse Napoleon'. The apogee of political and cultural intimacy between France and Britain occurred after 1814, when the Regent's anglophile friends Louis XVIII and Charles X reigned in the Tuileries. Like half London, the Regent's architect Nash took the opportu- nity of the Bourbon Restoration to inspect Paris.
As a result, Carlton House Terrace was modelled on the Place de la Concorde, Regent Street, with interiors in the richest Parisian style imaginable', on the Rue de Rivoli. The Regent walked on carpets and lounged on sofas strewn with golden fleurs de lis. He helped create the Louis XIV revival style, which was to be favoured, not by Frenchmen, but by the Dukes of Rutland, Wellington and Sutherland and the Marquess of London- derry.
Illuminating, in part creating the Regen- cy landscape, were three European figures whom Morley calls 'the three greatest cre- ative connoisseurs of the Regency period': Thomas Hope, William Beckford and the Regent himself. The most appealing of the three is the Regent, 'the first gentleman' in his own eyes 'the Liberator'— 'of Europe'. The Wyatville plans for the interi- ors of Windsor Castle, drawn for the King, are especially seductive: clearly they should be restored exactly as they were. (Inciden- tally Talleyrand's famous remark, that George IV was le demier roi grand seigneur, referred not to his court or his manners, but to his lavish expenditure on personal pleasure — before 1789 the distinguishing mark of a grand seigneur).
George IV combined a sharp eye with a flair for grandeur not always found in con- noisseurs. Regent's Park, Carlton House Terrace and Buckingham Palace ('I am too old to build a palace . . . but I must have a pied-a-terre' ), though much mauled, are his finest monument. They are a reminder of how much London owed, and still owes, to the Monarchy.
Aloupka Palace, the Crimea, 1836-7, designed by Edward Blore
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