The Making of Home

by Judith Flanders

  But half a millennium of home-making had seen the number of possessions any family owned multiplied a hundredfold. ‘We have become urban nomads! Just as we ourselves have become mobile, we must have movable possessions,’ proclaimed the writer Alix Rohde-Liebenau in Soviet-occupied Berlin. Open-plan was in this respect the opposite of what Catharine Beecher had proposed. No longer ‘A place for every thing, and every thing in its place’, but now no fixed place for anything. Even some of the proponents of modernism wavered between commitment to its theory and an unrecognized adherence to older patterns of expectations of the requirements of domesticity. The German architect Alexander Klein was an early advocate of open-plan housing – his apartments featured a single area for living, cooking and eating, separated from areas for bathing, dressing and sleeping. The adoption of this style of living, he wrote in Functional House for Frictionless Living (1928), would avoid the problem that recurred in traditional housing, where family members constantly crossed paths as they went about their daily lives. Open-plan living created a domestic environment where individual family members’ daily routines could be kept separate. Instead of seeming modern, however, his concern is curiously reminiscent of nineteenth-century practice, where separation was the overriding desire.

  Henry James, hardly a proponent of modernism, did not notice Klein’s attempts to separate family members in their new open-plan living arrangements. He was, instead, horrified by the style’s desire to annihilate the distinction between interior and exterior, public and private. ‘This diffused vagueness of separation between apartments, between hall and room, between one room and another, between the one you are in and the one you are not in, between place of passage and place of privacy is a provocation to despair.’ Everything, he mourned, was ‘visible, visitable, penetrable’.

  Klein’s mixed motivations, his uncertainties as to whether it was openness or privacy that was being sought – all make clear how revolutionary were the changes modernism had brought. In only a couple of decades, modernism tried to overturn the organic development of 500 years of the making of home. It is unsurprising, therefore, that today’s homeowners tend to select a handful of design and technology elements from the twentieth century, and are otherwise content to hang on to the possessions that have come to signify ‘home’ over the centuries: their cushions, their upholstery, their privet hedges and picket fences. Walter Benjamin had promoted the use of glass because it was ‘the enemy of secrets … the enemy of possession’. Yet secrets, or at least privacy, and possessions – the many ways of having a room of one’s own, the possession of comfort, of nostalgia, of belonging, as well as the possession of possessions – are what homes are made of.

  Home vs modernism was never going to be a fair fight. Benjamin’s ‘secret’, in German, is Geheimnis, a word which encompasses not merely secrets, but a mystery, that which is concealed, and unknowable. Geheimnis derives, very obviously, from Heim, just as its opposite, unheimlich, the German for ‘uncanny’, is, literally, un-home-like. The weird, the unearthly, is embedded in German as being not-at-home, Dorothy once she has been swept away to Oz. Even if our own personal Kansas might be grey, dry and unlovely, at the end of half a millennium of adaptation and evolution there is still, finally, No place like home.

  1. Today, seventeenth-century Dutch paintings appear to epitomize ‘home’, but contemporary viewers would have known that these rooms never existed. Samuel van Hoogstraten’s View Down a Corridor (1663) was primarily intended to show off his skills as a painter of trompe l’œil, but it also had symbolic meaning: the broom, and the caged bird about to fly free, most likely represent the free Dutch Republic after the hated Spanish were swept from the country.

  2.& 3. Emanuel de Witte’s Interior with a Woman at a Clavichord (1665, top) and Gabriel Metsu’s Woman Reading a Letter (c.1665, above) are depictions of erotic upheaval rather than domestic harmony. There is a man in the bed in de Witte’s painting, his clothes hastily thrown on the chair, while the cast-off shoe in Metsu’s is a traditional symbol of sexuality, which is countered by the presence of the maid and her cleansing bucket of water.

  4.& 5. The crowded rooms in this dollshouse, top, from the late seventeenth century, may be closer to domestic reality than the serene minimalism of Pieter de Hooch’s At the Linen Closet (1663), above.

  6. By the seventeenth century, pervasive ideas of domesticity led to paintings where depictions of family harmony took precedence over those of dynastic grandeur, even for children, as in van Dyck’s The Children of King Charles I (c.1634).

  7. Portraits of the prosperous at home silently modified reality, depicting an ideal rather than the actuality, one where expensive consumer goods were highlighted, and other less desirable objects omitted, as in Arthur Devis’ Mr and Mrs Atherton, c.1743.

  8. The opening of trade routes and the increased availability of consumer goods to more of the population encouraged household display. Frequently, most disposable income was spent on beds, which were given the maximum exposure in the main room of the house, as in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (1434).

  9. Rooms remained multi-purpose in most houses for centuries. In David Allan’s Claud and Peggy (1780s), cooking, eating, reading, socializing and sleeping (the bed is at the rear, above) all take place in the main room.

  10. & 11. The two functions windows serve – light and ventilation – were treated separately for centuries. The top section was glazed, for light, and did not open, while the unglazed lower section, covered with shutters, was for ventilation (top, Robert Campin, Werl Altarpiece, 1438). Sometimes there was an unglazed, shuttered mid-section, and a lower section with a wooden lattice, or wooden shutters, as in Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece (c.1427–32, above).

  12. & 13. Shutters were for protection, not privacy. Until textiles became relatively inexpensive, curtains for privacy were a luxury, and for decorative purposes were almost unknown. Wolfgang Heimbach’s Steward at Rosenborg Castle (1653, top) is thought to be the first painting to show a pair of curtains, rather than a single one – that is, for decorating rather than utility. Over a century later, Richard Morton Paye’s The Artist in his Studio (1783, above) shows that many houses still did without, the window here equipped merely with a window-board, which pulled up out of a slot in the panelling to give privacy.

  14. & 15. By the nineteenth century, cheaper textiles meant decorative curtains were available to many more of the population: William Bendz’s A Smoking Party (1828, top) shows a group of young men in a room where the great swag above the window appears to have no functional element; privacy in Mrs Duffin’s Dining-room at York (above) is achieved by both roller-blinds, as in Bendz’ painting, and also a green baize screen, while the curtains themselves are for decoration only.

  16. & 17. The nineteenth century’s Tudor architecture was very different from the sixteenth century’s. Then, exterior beams were rarely exposed, and never painted. Instead they weathered to the same buff shade as the plaster beside them, creating a unified façade. In the nineteenth century, authentic Tudor buildings were ‘restored’ to what was assumed to be their original state, using paints and colours unknown earlier, as can be seen in these photographs of Staple Inn, in London, before and after their transformation.

  18. & 19. The newly industrialized world created a desire for a simpler, imagined past, and in the nineteenth century in the USA, the log cabin became a symbol of this desire. Abraham Lincoln’s early homes had long vanished by the time he became president, but this did not stop his supposed birthplace being put on show (top). In Britain, the architects of the Arts and Crafts movement emphasized architectural elements that were redolent of enclosure to create ideas of home and the past, as in Charles Voysey’s 1908 house-plan, above.

  20. & 21. For much of history, furniture we regard as essential was a luxury. As late as the seventeenth century, few households had enough chairs for everyone to sit. In Jan Steen’s A Peasant Family at Meal-time (c.1665, top), only the man of th
e household has a seat, while the rest of the family eats standing up. A century later, in a scene that appears to us spartan, Joseph van Aken’s Saying Grace (c.1720, above) is in reality a depiction of prosperity, with its display of textiles, earthenware, pewter and chairs. (There may even be running water, suggested by the pipe at the top of the chimney-breast.)

  22. & 23. Lighting technology barely changed for centuries. The woman in Judith Leyster’s The Proposition (1631, top), in the technologically advanced Netherlands, sews by the light of a lamp that consists of a wick floating in a dish, the only development from Roman lamps a millennium earlier being the clamp enabling the light source to be raised or lowered. In the USA, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century betty lamps (above) were little different, simply replacing the clamp with a chain.

  24. Most households had multi-functional rooms. In this anonymous portrait of John Middleton with his Family in his Drawing Room (c.1796, above), the prosperous shopkeeper and his family worked and ate in their elegant sitting-room, as indicated by the dining table that pulls out on the left, and the dresser, at the rear, right, which holds a knife-box, for cutlery.

  25. Heating technology was slow to develop, even in the harsh North American climate. The Dining-room of Dr Whitridge’s, as it was in the Winter of 1814–1815 (1814–15, above), in Rhode Island, shows a Franklin stove, an open fire with a metal surround. The bundled-up figure beside it indicates the room’s probable temperature.

  26. & 27. Lighting was expensive, and therefore often used as a symbol of wealth, or even profligacy, as in Hogarth’s 1733 depiction of a gambling den in The Rake’s Progress (top). Quiet domesticity, as well as new technology, is illuminated in Georg Friedrich Kersting’s The Elegant Reader (1812, above), where the new Argand lamp sits on its own special stand.

  28., 29. & 30. What looks to us like abject poverty was actually the result of the abundance of consumer objects newly affordable to the masses. But as late as this 1910 photograph (top), the design of many households had not kept pace with the increasing number of items they contained. In 1869, Catharine Beecher had outlined her dream of a kitchen where there was ‘A place for every thing, and every thing in its place’ (above left), but her rationalization of household space would have to wait for the twentieth century for most. Grete Schütte-Lihotzky’s famed Frankfurt kitchen (above right) of 1926 was the ancestor of many more fitted kitchens.

  31. & 32. Objects of luxury and display changed in type, but pride of ownership remained constant, whether it was the newest porcelain tea-service painted so carefully by Arthur Devis in Mr and Mrs Hill (c.1750–51, top), or the television that two centuries later replaced the fireplace as the focal point of every sitting-room (1957, above).

  Notes

  Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

  HOME THOUGHTS: AN INTRODUCTION

  ‘one wanted to be’: ‘There is no place like home’: L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz ([1900, as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz], London, Hutchinson & Co., [1926]), p. 34.

  ‘steady heartbeat’: The notion that Crusoe’s success is in part owing to its exploration of daily life is from Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972), p. 74; a fuller discussion of this, and the idea of comfort that follows, John Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 154–5. The citations are from Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, Michael Shinagel, ed. (New York, W. W. Norton, 1994), pp. 50, 51, 139.

  ‘[land and his house and his home]’: origins of word ‘home’: Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages: A Contribution to the History of Ideas (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, facsimile of 1949 edition, 1988), pp. 458–9; 1275 poem: cited in the OED’s definition of ‘home’, the verses ‘The Latemest Day’, B. Cotton MS Caligula A, ix, can be found in Carleton Brown, ed., English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century (Oxford, Clarendon, 1932), line 22, p. 50.

  ‘to maintain them’: French: Martine Segalen, ‘The House Between Public and Private: A Socio-Historical Overview’, in Anton Schuurman and Pieter Spierenburg, eds, Private Domain, Public Inquiry: Families and Lifestyles in the Netherlands and Europe, 1550 to the Present (Hilversum, Uitgeverij Verloren, 1996), p. 240, and Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999), pp. 64, 151; Russian: Martine Segalen, ‘Material Conditions of Family Life’, David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli, eds, The History of the European Family, vol. 2: Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1789–1913 (London, Yale University Press, 2002), p. 10.

  ‘one element among many’: community or house as focus: Amos Rapoport, House, Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 70

  ‘any house they knew’: ‘Costly and Curious’: Sir Richard Carnac Temple, ed., The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667 (Cambridge, Hakluyt Society, 1925), vol. 4, p. 70.

  ‘were artists’ props’: John Loughman, ‘Between Reality and Artful Fiction: The Representation of the Domestic Interior in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art’, in Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant, eds, Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance (London, V&A Publications, 2006), p. 95.

  ‘one from this time’: the detail of the reality of furnishings in Dutch houses in these paragraphs comes from C. Willemijn Fock, ‘Semblance or Reality? The Domestic Interior in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting’, Mariët Westermann, Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt (Zwolle, Waanders, 2001), pp. 83–95, unless otherwise noted.

  ‘therefore, is unknowable’: porcelain and patterned fabrics: John Loughman and John Michael Montias, Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses (Zwolle, Waanders, 2000), p. 15; ‘in their stalle’: Temple, The Travels of Peter Mundy, vol. 4, p. 70; millions of paintings: Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips, Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003), p. 184; dollshouses: it is Muizelaar and Phillips, Men and Women, p. 196, who suggest relying on them. Two of the three surviving dollshouses are in the Rijksmuseum, the other is in the Centraal Museum, Utretcht.

  ‘God’s truth is eternal’: The Procuress: Svetlana Alpers, ‘Picturing Dutch Culture’, Wayne E. Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 57–67; children as stand-ins for the new republic: Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London, Collins, 1987), p. 499; the symbols of Dutch art and their meaning, apart from those noted above, are drawn from: Eddy de Jongh, ‘Realism and Seeming Realism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting’, Franits, Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, pp. 48–52, Mary Frances Durantini, The Child in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting (Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1983), pp. 27–31, 87–9, 114, 183, 190, 215–17.

  ‘every eight Amsterdammers’: Dutch maids, almanacs, plague statistics: Muizelaar and Phillips, Men and Women, pp. 14, 26; ‘wonderful Nett and cleane’: Temple, The Travels of Peter Mundy, vol. 4, p. 71.

  ‘a spitter’s poor aim’: ‘I find very convenient’: Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds (London, Bell & Hyman, 1983), vol. 3, p. 262; spitting-sheet: the Latham and Matthews edition is the most complete, but makes no mention of the phrase in its fifteen-page glossary, nor its extensive notes. The out-of-copyright Project Gutenberg version, available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4200/4200-h/4200-h.htm (accessed 11 March 2013), is edited by David Widger, the author of ‘??’, and is based on Henry B. Wheatley’s very good 1893 edition.

  ‘indoors as well as out’: ‘I was not troubled at it at all’: Pepys, Diary, M
onday, 28 January 1661, vol. 2, p. 25; ‘in great discomfort’: the author was Jean-Nicolas Parival, and he wrote in 1669; cited in Paul Zumthor, Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland, trs. Simon Watson Taylor (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), pp. 137–8.

  ‘a matter of routine’: German spittoons: Daniel L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 57, 59; American mother of 1851: cited in Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett, At Home: The American Family, 1750–1870 (New York, Abrams, 1990), p. 68. She too uses the word ‘none’ in reference to the lack of reproductions of spittoons in professional or amateur art.

  ‘behaviour commonly existed’: Punch cartoon: Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 44; illustrations of men: those that spring to mind are two in Richard Doyle’s Manners and Customs of ye Englishe, Maginn’s illustration to ‘Story without a Tail’ and Maclise’s ‘The Fraserians’. My thanks to Guy Woolnough, D. E. Latané and Patrick Leary for helping me gather even this small handful.