Joseph Friedrich zu Racknitz. A Rare Treatise on Interior Decoration and Architecture: Joseph Friedrich zu Racknitz’s “Presentation and History of the Taste of the Leading Nations.” Translated and edited by Simon Swynfen -Jervis. Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 2019. 360 pp.; color and bw illus., bibliography, index. Distributed by University of Chicago Press. $85.00.
Many readers of American Furniture will know Simon Swynfen Jervis as a curator and historian of British decorative arts. His seminal study Victorian Furniture (1968) still graces the libraries of many students, curators, and collectors. Just after writing that book, in 1969, Jervis was wandering in the stacks of the National Art Library at the V&A and came across a beautifully illustrated late eighteenth-century treatise on interior decoration: Joseph Friedrich zu Racknitz’s Presentation and History of the Taste of the Leading Nations (hereafter referred to as Presentation), originally published in four volumes in Leipzig between 1796 and 1799. Some thirty years after this encounter, which Jervis recounts in the preface to the present volume, he returned to Racknitz. A Rare Treatise on Interior Decoration and Architecture is a scholarly contextualization as well as a translation and illustrated republication of the historic German text.
Racknitz was a typical Enlightenment polymath. A wealthy collector, writer, and scholar born near Dresden, he was best known in his time for his published analysis of the mechanical chess-playing Turk, an automaton designed and exhibited internationally by Wolfgang von Kempelen. Rachnitz published an illustrated treatise decrying this piece as a fraud and explaining its inner workings. Although famous for this exposé, Racknitz also had more serious ambitions. Presentation is a survey of twenty-four different styles of decoration, a universal vision and an antecedent of works like Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856).
The original publication comprised four volumes, with chapters and plates devoted to specific areas: Greek Taste, Old German Taste, Modern Persian Taste, etc. Each chapter offers a brief history and advice on the application of a given style for architects, builders, and, most of all, their patrons. At the end of each chapter, Racknitz lists his sources. Kudos to Jervis for translating these references, which open fascinating insight into the reading habits of the eighteenth-century scholar. Jervis discusses this bibliography, as well as Racknitz’s biography, and the (limited) publication run and critical reception of Presentation in a series of deeply researched introductory essays.
This volume is worth reading for the illustrations alone. Like the lavishly illustrated eighteenth-century studies of the ancient world (such as Sir William Hamilton’s vase publications of 1766–76, for example), Presentation was a fundamentally visual project. Jervis, in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute Press, has beautifully reproduced the colored plates that accompanied each chapter (there are forty-eight in total). The work of two German artists (Samuel Benedikt Arnold and Christian Friedrich -Schuricht), these images are wonderfully quirky. Half of them show rooms decorated in a particular national taste together with one of the finer buildings of that nation. So, for example, in the plate representing the Roman taste, we see the interior wall of a Pompeian garden house through which one can glimpse . . . the Pantheon (p. 284). The following image, and the other half of the plates in the book, shows furniture and materials from a given nation; in this case a tripod stand and other ancient bronzes. As a collection of images, the plates offer a fascinating mash-up of the period’s travelogues and design treatises.
Although many of the styles Racknitz surveys are predictable—Egypt, Rome, Old England, for example—a few chapters focus, rather surprisingly, on cultures from the Americas and beyond. Not the then-young nation, but more interesting points farther afield. “Artists have also found objects worthy of their attention in these distant lands,” Racknitz proclaims at the opening of his disquisition on the “Tahitian Taste” (p. 129). He then proceeds to marvel at the wonder of tapa cloth, a fibrous textile made from indigenous tree bark, examples of which are precisely and exquisitely rendered in the plate that accompanies this text. (Tapa was a mainstay of European and even early New England collectors, who found the idea of transforming wood into cloth highly intriguing.) Other chapters explore “Kamchatkan Taste” and “Mexican Taste.” Racknitz’s accounts of these places and styles clearly are written from a distance, and they reflect a troubling Eurocentric prejudice. Of Tahiti: “the taste of uncultivated nations . . . simply follow their natural instincts” (p. 129). Of Mexico: “the conquest of Mexico . . . was one of the most important events for mankind” (p. 184). Despite this language, the attention Racknitz gives to the Americas in both his text and the plates is worthy of note and singular for design publications of the time.[1]
Like Morrison Heckscher’s grand 2019 edition of Chippendale’s Director, Jervis has offered the decorative arts world a new edition of an important and visually remarkable source that is sure to entice the critical eye of graduate students and curators. After spending time with his handsome volume, the reviewer hopes the Getty Research Institute or some other scholarly publishing house might update other period treatises more familiar to the American Furniture reader, such as George Hepplewhite’s Guide and Thomas Sheraton’s Drawing-Book. Jervis shows us that the genre of design history and its close cousin, the sourcebook, is richer and more complex than often understood.
Ethan Lasser
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston