Epilogue

View of installation, Victoriana exhibition, Brooklyn Museum

of Art, New York, 1960. Collection of the Brooklyn Museum

of Art, Brooklyn, NY.

In the first half of the twentieth century, decorative arts scholars and museum curators denounced Victorian furnishings for their excessive ornamentation, ponderous scale and often rampant eclecticism.  Arbiters of taste perpetuated the myth that sophistication and elegance in American decorative arts concluded with the Federal period and that everything made after 1830 was of poor design and inferior craftsmanship.  A renewed appreciation of Victorian decorative arts emerged around the middle of the century in counterpoint to the reductive aesthetic and severity of Modernism.  The varied outlines, complex ornamental patterns and vibrant colors characteristic of Victorian furnishings provided a welcome relief from the hard edges, monochromatic schemes and subdued decoration of much twentieth-century design.  Scholars, curators, and historians finally acknowledged the merits and aesthetic significance of American decorative arts produced during the years following the neoclassicism of the Federal period and the modernism of the early twentieth century.

View of installation, Victoriana exhibition, Brooklyn Museum

of Art, New York, 1960. Collection of the Brooklyn Museum

of Art, Brooklyn, NY.

In 1960, a pioneering exhibition on Victorian fine and decorative arts was held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City.  Simply titled Victoriana, this exhibit was one of the first to seriously examine Victorian design in America.  A decade later, The Metropolitan Museum of Art organized in celebration of its one-hundredth anniversary the pioneering exhibition 19th-Century America, which encompassed Victorian paintings and sculpture as well as a broad range of furniture, silver, pottery, porcelain, glass, and lighting dating between 1800 and 1914. Two catalogs accompanied the exhibit.  One examined furniture and other decorative arts, providing valuable information based on extensive research conducted by noted scholars and curators.  Such exhibitions brought about a revival of interest in Victorian decorative arts at both the scholarly and popular levels. Previously relegating Victorian furniture and other decorative arts to storage areas, museums began to proudly display these objects in the galleries while acquiring additional examples in order to form a comprehensive collection.

View of installation, 19th-Century America exhibition, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, 1970.  19th-Century America: Furniture
and Other Decorative Arts (New York, 1970).

Academic and public interest in Victorian decorative arts intensified in the late twentieth century.  Noted decorative arts scholars and experts researched and published surveys of American Victorian design, in addition to writing books that focused on specific types and styles of decorative arts in the nineteenth century.  These texts expanded on the information provided in the catalog 19th-Century America: Furniture and Other Decorative Arts, published in conjunction with the exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970. 

For many, Victorian objects have come to be regarded as symbols of a romantic, pre-technological age when society was more refined and genteel.  They reflect an era that recognized the value of cultivating a comfortable and tasteful domestic environment that served as a sanctuary from the harshness of the outside world.  At the scholarly and academic levels, Victorian material culture represents the transition from handcraftsmanship to machine production; the diversification of styles, tastes, and fashions that resulted from the increased availability of household goods at every level of society; and the competing aesthetic approaches to design stemming from the growing consumerism and mechanization of the period.