Architectural Colour in British Interiors 1615-1840

For many years, historical architectural colour has been an elusive topic, since paint fades and discolours, and most early schemes have been obliterated by succeeding phases of redecoration. In parallel with this, the taste of later generations has also overlaid earlier ideas of colour with a mass of subjective opinion and received wisdom. To remedy matters, this objective study combines information from documentary sources with data obtained from the technical investigation of significant interiors by important architects of the period, and presents for the first time a coherent outline of true historical practice. It is an essential complement to more conventional architectural studies of form and space. In a series of chapters, the noble interiors of Inigo Jones are contrasted with more intimate spaces of the period; and the succeeding drabness adopted in many rooms of the second half of the seventeenth century is set against its taste for marbling, graining, and imitation japan. It is shown how the new foundation established by the Palladians came to provide the basis for the lively use of colour by Robert Adam and his contemporaries; and the study concludes by showing how the development of colour theory in the early nineteenth century superseded eighteenth-century ideas and, combined with the Regency taste for the exotic, led to an entirely new outlook, much of which still forms present-day preconceptions.