Curzon Street Baroque is a 20th-century inter-war Baroque revival style. It manifested itself principally as a form of interior design popular in the homes of Britain's wealthy and well-born intellectual elite. Its name was coined by the English cartoonist and author Osbert Lancaster, as Curzon Street in Mayfair was an address popular with London high society.Oscar Wilde mentions the street in four of his works: in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry Wotton lives on Curzon Street; in Lady Windermere's Fan, the notorious Mrs. Erlynne lives at 84A Curzon Street; in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, Lady Clementine Beauchamp lives on Curzon Street; and in An Ideal Husband, Lord Goring lives on Curzon Street. While previous forms of Baroque interior design had relied on French 18th-century furnishings, in this form it was more often than not the heavier and more solid furniture of Italy, Spain, and southern Germany that came to symbolise the furnishings of new fashion.Sitwell, Home Sweet Home, p. 64
While in vogue, roughly between 1927 and 1939, Curzon Street Baroque was also disparagingly known as "Buggers' Baroque" or "Decorators' Baroque".Calloway, pp.44–47 This was, according to author Jane Stevenson, because "a statistically implausible number of important men and women, and their decorators in the interwar arts, were gay".The Evelyn Waugh Society retrieved 4 July 2019 Among them were many of the leading writers, poets, and designers who used and promoted the style.
Naissance
True Baroque architecture, internal and external, employs architectural drama and surprise, chiaroscuro (light and shadow) pulse and a diversity of fanciful and joyous shapes and curves. However, Baroque has never been truly to the British taste. Having evolved as a derivative form of Renaissance architecture, in mainland Europe, in the mid-17th century, it made a brief appearance in Britain, at the beginning of the 18th century. It was pioneered in Britain, most notably, by Sir John Vanbrugh with his three principal projects Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard, and Seaton Delaval. Of these three monumental houses, only the earliest, Castle Howard, employs the true fanciful style of Baroque seen in mainland Europe; the remaining two rely heavily on mass and chiaroscuro to display their baroque qualities. In Britain, the style soon fell from fashion, and by the 1760s was replaced by the more serious and severe Neoclassical architecture. Osbert Lancaster put the British dislike of Baroque down to a national "ill-concealed dislike" of "cleverness", a virtue essential for any successful Baroque architect.
As a revival style, Baroque made a brief reappearance at the beginning of the 20th century, but in a confused form known as Edwardian Baroque architecture. As a revived form of interior decoration, it really dates from the 1924 publication of Sir Sacheverell Sitwell's book Southern Baroque Art, which concentrated on the ornate Baroque style then regarded as vulgar and excessive.Charlish Sitwell with his two siblings, Edith Sitwell and Osbert Sitwell, known collectively as the Sitwells, formed an identifiable literary and artistic clique around themselves in London during the period 1916 to 1930. The book's publication sparked an artistic reevaluation of the style. The painter Rex Whistler developed a Baroque influence to his work, while the society photographer Cecil Beaton has been described as full of "Baroque playfulness." This influence was soon picked up by the leading high society decorators of the period, who developed a pared-back 20th-century version of Baroque. Osbert Lancaster, a satirist, author, and cartoonist, then named it Curzon Street Baroque (Curzon Street being one of London's smartest addresses).
Often mixing antique and modern furniture in the same room, Curzon Street Baroque, has been described as a rejection of Modernism. However, as a reformation style, it was more a rejection of the dark and cluttered Victorian style. The opinion of Victorian Architecture and style was at an all-time low, with Osbert Lancaster's fellow wit and contemporary, PG Wodehouse, stating: "It is pretty generally admitted that few Victorians were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks." Curzon Street Baroque certainly avoided the straight clean lines of Modernism and the dark woodwork of the Victorian era in favour of curves of "overwrought iron and Knole sofas, forests of twisted baroque candlesticks and pickled-oak occasional tables with the early southern-German look inspired by the arty Sitwells."York, Peter. The Independent, 20 September 2008 "Review of Cartoons & Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster at The Wallace Collection, London W1, from 2 October to 11 January 2009". Retrieved 4 July 2019. Walls were painted pastel colours, often a shade of green, and where the patrons could afford it, at least one "feature panel" was installed in a room. These were large paintings or murals, often let into the newly repainted panelling, often in the form of trompe-l'œil. In the dining room at Sandringham, the panels were valuable tapestries given by King Alfonso XII of Spain.Country Life: "Sandringham – The Norfolk home of HM the Queen." 29 May 2008.
Externally, with a few exceptions, the revival style was less popular. However, the architect, Clough Williams-Ellis, would adopt a colourful Northern Italianate pastiche Baroque theme as the style for the design of Portmeirion. The late 17th-century Upton House was remodelled by the architect Percy Morley Horder between 1927 and 1929 for the 2nd Lord Bearsted with some external baroque motif, but chiefly the Baroque was confined to the interior.
Components of the style
According to Osbert Lancaster, key constituents and elements of Curzon Street Baroque included Venetian hand-painted furniture and art in the style of Canaletto (often of doubtful provenance). An ecclesiastical air could also be employed, which could be achieved by twisted Baroque candlesticks, old leather bound hymn books hollowed out to become cigarette boxes, and ancient gilt prie-dieux transformed into cabinets for the disguising of gramophones. Further objets d'art would include plaster saints suffering torment in coverings of iridescent paint.
Lancaster also stated that French furniture, much of it gilt and with cabriole legs, which was such a large part of 17th-, 18th-, and early 20th-century Baroque furnishings, was no longer considered fashionable. Lancaster's own illustration of the style includes a French style occasional table with cabriole legs. However, such furniture was still used within the style by some decorators including Elsie de Wolfe, who worked in a particularly feminine and flamboyant style.Sparke, p.20.
An important feature of the style, not always possible due to the expense, was the feature wall. Often this was a trompe-l'œil mural meant to create the Baroque element of surprise and illusion. The era's most celebrated painter of these was Rex Whistler, most notably his Tent Room at Port Lympne and his Italian panorama in the dining room at Plas Newydd of 1938. The setting of such murals and other paintings and tapestries was often in panels rather than frames, a Baroque feature dating from the 17th century. It was also acceptable to mix old and new furniture together in the same room. A further feature, although often not present because of cost or architectural restraints, were wrought iron gates in place of doors or window shutters.
Examples
Outside of London, Baroque was frequently employed by the newly rich when rebuilding their newly acquired country houses. When the wealthy merchant banker Vivian Smith, 1st Baron Bicester, acquired Tusmore Park, Oxfordshire, in 1929, he immediately brought in the architects Imrie and Angell to sweep away the heavy Jacobean woodwork and introduce a Baroque interior, which culminated in the staircase hall, with a double staircase, heavy with wrought iron, segmented arches, and a gilded chandelier hanging from a ceiling embellished with a gilded starburst.Worsley, p.145 (This house was demolished circa 1960) At Upton House, Lord Bearsted's architect continued his baroque theme within, installing ornate overmantels, columns, panelling, and a curved interior balcony, all in the fashionable pared-back Baroque style.The Gardens Trust Retrieved 17 July 2019
One of the best examples of Curzon Street Baroque can be found in the Italian Drawing Room at Eltham Palace; although the interior is of an art deco design, Curzon Street Baroque was chosen for the principal drawing room. The house, a historic former royal palace, was vastly extended between 1933 and 1936 for Stephen Courtauld and his socialite wife Virginia. In the Drawing Room, their interior designer Piero Malacrida de Saint-August installed all the requisite features of the style, such as antique wrought iron from Spanish churches, acquired from Mayfair antique shops, heavy furniture, and gilt light fittings with parchment lampshades.
Disparaging descriptions In 2008 the architectural historian Gavin Stamp described Osbert Lancaster's Pillar to Post (1938)—later revised and combined with the sequel Homes Sweet Homes (1939)—as "one of the most influential books on architecture ever published–and certainly the funniest".Stamp, p. 44 Lancaster felt that architects and architectural writers had created a mystique that left the lay person confused, and in the two books he set out to demystify the subject, with, he said, "a small mass of information leavened by a large dose of personal prejudice."Lucie-Smith, p. 146 Lancaster, no doubt, intended his description of the new Baroque interiors as 'Curzon Street' to be a gentle criticism, suggesting they were lightweight compared to the original form. He disparaged and renamed other forms of contemporary architecture too, with titles such as Bankers' Georgian, Stockbroker Tudor, Aldwych Farcical and By-pass Variegated. Curzon Street Baroque stuck and has been used by architectural historians since. Simon Jenkins in his description of the redecoration of Sandringham House in the 1920s and 1930s, when dark Edwardian panelling was painted lighter colours and paintings were fitted into the moulded panels, risked a hypothetical charge of lèse-majesté by describing the decoration as Curzon Street Baroque.Jenkins, p. 530
The parodying and disparaging of new architecture and styles in the 1930s was a fashionable thing to do and not confined to Lancaster; Evelyn Waugh mocked the modern movement in his novel Decline and Fall, when he described the new country house of Margot Beste-Chetwynde, King's Thursday, as "in the style of a chewing-gum factory." While closer to Curzon Street Baroque, he parodies one of its designers, Lady Sybil Colefax, as the horrendous interior designer Mrs Beaver in A Handful of Dust.The Evelyn Waugh Society, Colossus of Snobbery Retrieved 4 July 2019.
Buggers' Baroque
The term "Buggers' Baroque" was not intended as gentle or even fashionable, witty criticism. "Bugger" being one of the cruder words for a homosexual, it was an attack on the style and, more pointedly, on those using and employing it. During the 1930s, the unattributed sobriquet Buggers' Baroque was used to describe the style more often than any of the other alternatives. As an attack, it was serious: homosexuality was a crime at the time and carried a prison sentence.So adverse was public opinion to homosexuality that in 1929, when the style was still in its infancy, then Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks threatened to bring legal proceedings against the author Radclyffe Hall unless she withdrew from publication her novel The Well of Loneliness on the grounds that it was gravely detrimental to public interest.