A grammar of decoration: John Cornforth was a pioneering historian of interior decoration whose last work lays the scholarly foundation for the study of eighteenth-century interiors. Ian Gow celebrates the book and the career of its author, who was a cult figure for a surprisingly large readership

Apollo, June, 2005 by Ian Gow

Early Georgian Interiors

John Cornforth

Yale University Press, 60 [pounds sterling]/$85

ISBN 0 300 10330 1

If one had to summarise with a single quotation and illustration this immense volume, which has been published posthumously, and is appropriately as handsome and monumental as a memorial tablet fit for the wall of a parish church, one would unhesitatingly select for the first an entry from the diary of Mary Frampton, covering the years 1779 to 1846: 'To show the progress of luxury, I must mention that at that time my father, with a fortune of 4,000 [pounds sterling] a year, with an excellent house, &, lived entirely in one of the worst rooms in it, where we breakfasted, dined and supped; and even with company in the house, excepting on the rare occasions of a large party. We used to go out of the room for a short time after dinner, and return to it again after tea'. The illustration would be the interior of the Nostell Priory dolls' house, which kicks off the resplendent colour illustrations in this book with a full page to itself, revealing a rather lop-sided brilliance in favour of its glittering drawing room while its lesser rooms are almost literally drab. Together they crystallise the Cornforth method of abstracting the telling quotation, as often from an obscure but published secondary source as from the muniment room, and placing it alongside an unexpected illustration. This testifies to the assurance of his 'eye', which was not too proud to pause before a mere dolls' house and see its point--I cannot remember ever being with anyone who looked longer at things than John Cornforth.

Both the quotation and illustration are concerned with his main purpose in this book: the elucidation of the hierarchical way in which houses were fitted up in the past and the teazling out of the grammar that governed their apparent oddities and anomalies--so different from our modern expectations of country-house presentation, described by Cornforth as 'rather like the same amount of jam on every slice of bread, with the strawberries spread evenly'.

Perhaps because of the lowly status the British accord to the decorative arts and interior decoration in the hierarchy of art history, Cornforth developed a breezy and self-deprecatingly dismissive description of his methods as a protective carapace from such darts as the description of him as 'the fringes and tassels correspondent of Country Life'. He included himself among 'country house buffs' and described his books as being like a patchwork by a 'squirrel who likes seemingly useless pieces of information to do with attitudes to patterns, the applications of patterns, materials, colours and so on--often tiny fragments that may come in useful some time'. But with his death we have been deprived of one of the most serious and original scholars of the British country house as well as a leading, and very active, campaigner who promoted their preservation and financial wellbeing for an uncertain future.

In the preface he sets out the genesis of this book, which he had all but brought to completion when his fatal illness was diagnosed. He must have been writing this alongside the autobiographical fragment that introduces his unpublished bibliography (amongst his papers, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of art and design), which was his last patchwork quilt, as he had kept no record of the publications that grew to 900 titles and it thus had to be assembled painstakingly.

Even before he could read, Cornforth's 'eye' was being formed by the illustrations in bound volumes of Country Life, to which his grandfather had subscribed. It now seems almost inevitable that he should have been employed by the magazine after graduating from Cambridge, where he had the distinction of being a pioneer of undergraduate art history before the course proper was established by his supervisor, Michael Jaffa.

At 'Comic Cuts', as he would sometimes refer to lofty Country Life, his career was to be shaped by the magazine's architectural editor, Christopher Hussey, who crucially introduced him to the National Trust, which was to be central to his life. He was unwittingly inspected by their Great and Good through the period medium of a cocktail party--'Lady Rosse, I seem to remember, wearing an imposing hat of the kind still worn for cocktails'--and his passing successfully through the mysteries that governed this initiation was signalled by an invitation to join the Trust's Historic Buildings Committee.

Although the National Trust's country houses scheme appeared to be essentially conservative in attempting to preserve a house with its resident family, and thus also ensure the more tricky survival of the integral collections in the house, in practice this ambition led to the Trust pioneering a radical new approach to the problems of preserving and presenting works of art in situ, where tried and tested museum solutions could often be a hindrance and destructive of a quirky historical integrity.

It was soon realised that the Trust's curators--the Historic Buildings Representatives--needed their own handbook to assist in the challenges of their new tasks and this appeared in 1974 as English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century, with Cornforth in the role of Boswell to John Fowler's Johnson. Few historic houses had come to the Trust with rooms preserved in their entirety, as at Tyntesfield, and so the HBRs had to struggle with aberrant paint colours and missing carpets. Even today, although there is Jacob Simon's excellent 1996 The Art of the Picture Frame exhibition catalogue, there is no readily available manual of historic picture hanging to issue to museum-trained young curators to help them through the pitfalls of recreating a Georgian dining room.