Volume 49, Number 18 · November 21, 2002
Making It by Making It
By James Fenton
The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors
by Eileen Harris
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 378 pp., $85.00
Robert Adam, the leading British exponent of the neoclassical style in architecture, furniture, and interior design, was born in Scotland in 1728 and died in 1792. He defined an urban style in London (the Adelphi) and in the New Town in Edinburgh. His grandest interiors are in such English stately homes as Syon House, Kenwood, and Luton Hoo (see the illustration on this page). They are very grand indeed. And yet the term Adam Style may suggest, at the back of the reader's mind, something rather more domestic and genteel than the great marble halls, the porticoed facades, or the beds that look like garden pavilions. That is because, between the age dominated by Robert Adam and our own, there comes a style properly known as Adam Revival, and what we may be remembering is the revival rather than the thing itself. The revival (to get it out of the way) began at the Paris Exhibition of 1867, with the display of a large cabinet in classical eighteenth-century style, with a broken-apex pediment and urns and swags for finials, and inset with Wedgwood pottery plaques.
Review, 2628 words
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