House Proud

In the nineteenth century, it became highly fashionable for aristocratic and upper-class homeowners in Europe to commission watercolor paintings of their domestic interiors and to collect them in albums to be passed on to children, given as gifts to visiting royalty, and displayed in drawing rooms. House Proud commemorates the recent gift of a group of eighty-five nineteenth-century watercolor interior drawings - the largest collection of its kind in America - to Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum by Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw. Essays analyzing these beautiful, exquisitely detailed watercolors and their significance to the Museum's collection, accompanied by the watercolors and related objects from the permanent collection, document the evolution of the domestic interior in the nineteenth century, revealing the impact of economic, social, and political developments on the concept of home. AUTHOR: Gail S. Davidson, Ph.D., is curator and head of drawings, prints, and graphic design department at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Her published articles and books include Rococo: The Contining Curve, 1730-2008 and Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape. Floramae McCarron-Cates is associate curator of the drawongs, prints, and graphic design department at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. She is the co-author of Frederic Church, Winslow Homwe, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape. Charlotte Gere is a nineteenth-century decorative arts specialist who has pbulished numerous scholarly books and articles on a wide variety of subjects, including Nineteenth-Century Design from Pugin to Mackintosh, An Album of 19th-century Interiors, The House Beautiful, and Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser. ILLUSTRATIONS 125 images