Edith Blake Brown and the rise of professional interior design
Date
2001
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This thesis examines interior design in late nineteenth-century America through a careful study of one project, the renovation and redecoration of the home of Almeric and Pauline (née Whitney) Paget at 11 East 61 st Street in New York City. An unprecedented number of documents relating to the project survive in the archives of Edith Blake Brown, a designer from Boston. Brown served as the interior decorator and general contractor for the project in 1897. McKim, Mead and White, New York's leading architects, were commissioned to renovate the house; the correspondence between Stanford White and Edith Blake Brown which survives in her archives is the only surviving record of this commission. This archive also records the work of upholsterers, painters, wallpaper hangers, lighting experts, and antiques dealers on the project. ☐ In the late nineteenth century, professional interior designers or “artistic decorators” offered to coordinate a client's interior renovation from start to finish, serving as artistic guide and general contractor to properly furnish a late nineteenth-century room or house. As industrialism expanded the variety and availability of consumer goods, Americans became increasingly conscious of what their homes revealed about their moral character and their affluence. Securing the services of an artistic decorator ensured that one's house would be both beautifully and appropriately furnished. Most scholarship on early interior designers has focused on large firms; very little has been written about independent designers in the late nineteenth century, particularly early women designers in the field. The papers of Edith Blake Brown in the Joseph Downs Collection of Archives and Manuscripts at the Henry Francis duPont Winterthur Museum facilitate this study of one of the field's earliest practitioners.