The inside story

This posthumous book is the summation of a lifetime’s research into aspects of the 18th-century interior in the British Isles by the leading historian of the subject. I say British Isles, for John Cornforth had strong interests in Irish and Scottish Georgian architecture, as well as English. As the former architectural editor of Country Life and co-author, with the decorator John Fowler, of English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century (1974), he had already aired some of the themes developed here, and many of the subjects have appeared in articles in Country Life.

It is useful, however, to have them all melded together into a seamless celebration of the golden age of Georgian architectural decoration. The book is magnificently illustrated with specially commissioned colour shots as well as carefully researched archive photographs and views. The illustrations are a very important part of this book and form well-integrated support to the overall theses. Cornforth took unusual trouble to track down contemporary engravings and pictures which argued the points he was adumbrating in words as well as carefully supervising the exact subject and angle for the new views. This was to an extent standard Country Life practice, but he was a perfectionist, and it is the closely planned relationship of text and photographs which gives this book its special quality and also its highly personal character.

At the time of his death last year (aged only 66), he had completed the text and chosen and arranged most of the illustrations. Only the acknowledgments were lacking (and most of us have Burke’s on our shelves to supply the want), so Yale has been admirably faithful to the author’s intentions. This book will ensure that John’s specialist knowledge and love of the Georgian interior will live on.