Coloring Their World: Americans and Decorative Color in the Nineteenth Century A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History of the College of Arts and Sciences by Kelly F. Wright B.A. College of William and Mary 1985 M.A. University of Cincinnati 2001 Committee Chair: Wayne K. Durrill, Ph.D. i ABSTRACT Certain events in recent history have called into question some long-held assumptions about the colors of our material history. The controversy over the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel posited questions about color to an international audience, and in the United States the restoration of original decorative colors at the homes of many historically significant figures and religious groups has elicited a visceral reaction suggesting the new colors challenge Americans’ entrenched notions of what constituted respectable taste, if not comportment, in their forebears. Recent studies have even demonstrated that something as seemingly objective as photography has greatly misled us about the appearance of our past. We tend to see the nineteenth century as a faded, sepia-toned monochrome. But nothing could be further from the truth. Coloring Their World: Americans and Decorative Color in the Nineteenth Century, argues that in that century we can witness one of the only true democratizations in American history—the diffusion of color throughout every level of society. In the eighteenth century American aristocrats brandished color like a weapon, carefully crafting the material world around them as a critical part of their political and social identities, cognizant of the power afforded them by color’s correct use, and the consequences of failure. In their “classless” and not fully literate society glossy colorful carriages spoke with grandiloquence about their owners’ place in the world. In an aristocracy of the untitled, verdigris parlors bore the same power to intimidate as a gilded family crest. But their time was the last time that color could be so easily wielded. From the first flushes of pink and green in the early nineteenth-century homes of American elites, to the industrialized, commodified, synthesized hot pinks and electric blues available to literally everyone by century’s end, color collapsed class lines. No longer even remotely a trapping of aristocracy by the beginning of the twentieth century, color’s caché was replaced by a confidence in its easy access and ubiquity. But this access came with new rules, and self-appointed arbiters of taste dictated its use more and more. This process took place in several stages which form the parts of this dissertation. Part One explains how color first made its way into the interior of the country from 1800 to 1840, a process facilitated by the Market Revolution. Part Two describes how the harnessing of steam power and industrialization gave every class of Americans unprecedented access to all forms of decorative color. Within each phase Americans manipulated and consumed decorative color in distinctive ways, and the evidence of that is built into their material culture. As shocking as it may be to some, our past was a colorful place. Scarlet, not sepia, was its color. This dissertation is an attempt to explain why. ii iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To Mom and Dad and Bean, with all my love. You made this possible. Wayne, I owe you a bottomless cup of really, really good coffee. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Contested Colors 1 Chapter One: Colonial Colors 25 Landscape Part One: Kaleidoscopic Colors, 1800-1840 90 Chapter Two: Color Comes to the Frontier 122 Chapter Three: Chintz and Calico, Quilts and Coverlets 202 Landscape Part Two: Industrial Colors, 1840-1870 244 Chapter Four: Picturesque Color 275 Chapter Five: Field and Factory, Quilts and Coverlets 325 Bibliography 366 v Introduction Contested Colors 1 June 2, 1982 Miss Christina Pundeff Associate Editor Architectural Digest 5900 Wiltshire Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90036 Dear Miss Pundeff: Enclosed please find my thoughts on the subject of the refurbishing of the Governor’s Palace and what is happening in comparable historic buildings. I hope it fits your bill. Please feel free to change it around to suit your needs… When do you expect it to appear and when do I get paid for it? I trust the latter happens before the former. Yours sincerely, Graham Hood Chief Curator Enclosure 2 GUEST COMMENTARY FOR ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The winds of change are stirring—some would say howling—in historic houses today. Accepted canons of “good taste” and the traditional harmonies of faded old colors seem no longer to apply. Conventional groupings of ornate furniture are disappearing. Curtains are coming down, oriental carpets are coming up, and brighter colors, often accentuated by unoccupied spaces in the middle of rooms, are causing people to blink—or wince—as they revisit their old familiar shrines. These changes do not stem from whim or willfulness on the part of today’s temporary custodians of historic buildings. It is not the natural iconoclasm of the young we are seeing. Rather, it is the fruit of extensive and intensive research. Building on the achievements of its predecessors, the present generation of curators is asking questions hitherto unasked, is looking at familiar evidence from fresh vantage points, and drawing new conclusions about the tastes, preferences, and living habits of those whom we all thought we knew so well—the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and so on…1 1 Graham Hood, June 3, 1982. 3 When the Chief Curator of arguably the most venerable living history museum in the United States began this editorial he was defending his employer, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, from a complaint it may have been hearing for the first time in its half century of existence—the charge of having bad taste. In 1982 the Foundation had just finished an expansive and expensive reinterpretation of several of its eighteenth- century buildings inside and out, a wholesale refurbishment designed to reflect the most recent scholarship in the material culture of that period. That reinstallation included the stripping of fancy appointments for more period-accurate simplicity, and painting some exciting new colors in the most prominent and beloved building on the grounds, the Governor’s Palace. The near hysterical reaction to that change provided “an excellent case in point” for the curator to state his position: Since it was reconstructed on its original foundations in the early 1930s and furnished by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his advisors…it has 4 established itself as a mecca of good taste—mellow, rich and entirely admirable. Its elegant interiors have delighted over twenty million people. Any thought of changing it, therefore, had to be approached with considerable trepidation. Yet our investigation proved that the taste stood up better than the evidence.2 The Palace had been one of the first buildings to be rebuilt and interpreted when Rockefeller undertook his project around the time of the Great Depression to restore the City of Williamsburg to its eighteenth-century appearance. Rockefeller had insisted upon “the creation of authentic restorations and reconstructions based on exhaustive historical, archaeological, and architectural research regardless of the cost in time, money, or effort.” As they surveyed the interior and exterior finishes of Colonial Williamsburg’s building stock they found many grey blues and grey greens, and lots of grey itself--dusty colors befitting the dusty town Williamsburg was in the eighteenth century when Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry took tea and talked insurrection at the Raleigh Tavern. Their interpretation usually featured rich, elegant upholstery with subdued tints on the walls and woodwork. 2 Ibid. 5 6 7 The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation took color so seriously that they even published their findings and granted the John Masury Paint Company a license to reproduce them for retail sale in 1936. “Raleigh Tavern” was their liveliest green offering, a greyish green which today we would most likely call “sage.” (Most monitors and printers will make the chips below look brighter than they really are.) 8 In the 1960s Williamsburg partnered with Martin Senour Paints, promoting a line of insipid colors chosen primarily for their marketability and in which only a few selections were actually based on those found on the buildings in Williamsburg. Even then, some of the most interesting shades derived from Victorian-era repaints of the buildings, not 3 from the colonial period. 3 Frank S. Welsh, "The Early American Palette: Colonial Paint Colors Revealed," in Paint in America : The Colors of Historic Buildings, ed. Roger W. Moss (New York ; Chichester: John Wiley, 1994) 70-71. 9 Over fifty years, while Colonial Williamsburg kept brushing those stale old colors on their buildings, they also successfully branded themselves as the authority on both antique colors and the study thereof. That reputation remained unchallenged until the 1980s, when new social historians came to Williamsburg, but lots of other Americans stayed away. Revisions to old scripts and old buildings were one way to increase the accuracy of the site’s presentations and perhaps a way to convince visitors to come back. Back in the beginning Rockefeller and his staff had indeed amassed a great deal of data on colonial finishes and they had used the best science at the time to study them. They conducted paint archeology: diligently seeking out the original finishes in Williamsburg by prying off trim and peeling back wallpaper, scraping and sampling as they went throughout the town, and copying the surviving colors onto chips so that they could be replicated for many years. The paint scrape approach to paint analysis is still used and taught in the United States, and it is described and promoted in numerous homeowners’ building restoration guidebooks and other publications.