In a conceptually wide-reaching and useful introduction to Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, editors Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg ask, “Can the settee speak?” (2). That this question remains relatively novel suggests the importance of the book. Their answer, of course, is affirmative; and the twelve essays that constitute this collection provide ample new, thoughtful, and frequently surprising revelations about what exactly eighteenth-century furniture said to a broad range of makers, users, and audiences. Written by scholars in the fields of history, literary studies, and art history, the essays are methodologically diverse yet unified by an interest in the social and cultural uses and meanings of objects and interiors in the eighteenth century.

The study of French furniture has proved particularly responsive to cultural analysis, and has been attended to in some depth by recent scholarship. Leora Auslander’s Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), Carolyn Sargentson’s Merchants and the Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), Katie Scott’s The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), and Scott and Deborah Cherry’s edited collection, Between Luxury and the Everyday: Decorative Arts in Eighteenth-Century France (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005) provide good company for this collection, of which nine of the essays are concerned with French topics, trailed by two essays on American furniture, and just one dealing with England. Such a lopsided study renders suspect the scope of the “European and American Past” claimed by the book’s title, though the cultural specificity it affords helps to contain an otherwise unwieldy topic. Future studies considering a wider range of examples will be a welcome addition to this growing field.

The book is divided into four sections composed of three essays each. An opening section, “Mapping Meaning Globally,” considers the role of colonialism and global trade in eighteenth-century furniture production, consumption, and criticism. Madeleine Dobie and Chaela Pastore’s essays on the mercantile taste for, and colonial origins of mahogany in eighteenth-century France nicely complement one another, providing a useful socio-political corrective to a purely aesthetic, apolitical understanding of French furniture and its materials that tends to dominate conventional furniture history and museum display. David Porter’s essay, “A Wanton Chase in a Foreign Place: Hogarth and the Gendering of Exoticism in the Eighteenth-Century Interior,” questions William Hogarth’s rather curious disparagement of chinoiserie, which Porter rightly demonstrates closely adhered to the aesthetic principles laid out in his 1753 treatise, The Analysis of Beauty. While the full range of Hogarth’s principles are not explored, Porter’s essay usefully lays bare the connections between interior decoration, aesthetic theory, and gender politics in the mid-eighteenth century.

The second section of the book, “Diffusing Furniture, Fashion, Taste,” is concerned with the dissemination of fashionable goods and trends in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Natacha Coquery’s study of the sales registers and account books of the Parisian upholsterer Mathurin Law provides useful quantitative evidence for the popularity of new consumer goods among a range of social classes. David Jaffee’s thoughtful essay, “Sideboards, Chairs, and Globes: Changing Modes of Furnishing Provincial Culture in the Early Republic, 1790–1820,” explores the rural American markets that craftsmen expanded into during the post-revolutionary period, arguing that they created styles that were at once cosmopolitan and fashionable, yet stylistically distinct from metropolitan examples. In “Goddesses of Taste: Courtesans and Their Furniture in Late-Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Kathryn Norberg focuses on a small group of elite courtesans who acted as tastemakers in eighteenth-century Paris. Norberg’s essay provides a useful corrective to models of aristocratic distinction and emulation, illuminating the contested values highlighted by taste and social status. I would like to have seen her arguments pushed further, to address how these women compared to other contemporary elite female tastemakers, and particularly, how her perceptive contention that intimacy and comfort were key values promoted by courtesans through their furnishings related to broader concepts of commodité (a concept that embraces both “comfort” and “convenience”) and specialization in the French interior. Such broader connections to recognized historical and stylistic trends are effaced in some of the essays throughout the book, which may prove irksome to readers more familiar with the history of European furniture than the broad interdisciplinary audience for whom the book is primarily intended.

Moving away from considerations of production and dissemination, three very different essays in the book’s third section, “Making Meaning in the Domestic Interior,” focus on the social and aesthetic meanings of specific decorative strategies and objects in the eighteenth-century French interior. Using inventory records, Donna Bohanan considers the role of unified color schemes that came to characterize late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French decorative style in relation to the political needs of provincial nobles. In a revelatory essay that should become standard reading for students of eighteenth-century French visual and material culture, “The Joy of Sets: The Uses of Seriality in the French Interior,” Mimi Hellman explores multiple reasons why sets, serial designs, and matching objects became characteristic features of the eighteenth-century French interior. Deftly weaving formal, cultural, and historical approaches to specific objects, Hellman deploys a wide range of theoretical insights, from anthropology to psychoanalysis, to argue that, “serial design was a crucial site for the enactment of elite self-fashioning, an eloquent representational system that elicited performances of social mastery” (147). Furthering the concept of signifying objects, Mary Salzman’s careful analysis of Jean-François de Troy’s pendant paintings The Garter and The Declaration of Love (1724) argues that decorative objects in de Troy’s paintings constitute a form of visual rhetoric that communicated with savvy viewers for whom judgment was an important critical activity.

With “Forms, Functions, and Meanings,” the book concludes with three very strong essays that explore the social and cultural contexts of new eighteenth-century furniture forms and technologies, specifically the tea table, the secrétaire, and locking case furniture. Ann Smart Martin’s essay, “Tea Tables Overturned: Rituals of Power and Place in Colonial America,” persuasively draws together a range of methods, from studies of inventories and probate records to visual and textual analysis, to explore the rhetorical, social, and formal meanings of a new furniture form in colonial America. Dena Goodman’s “The Secrétaire and the Integration of the Eighteenth-Century Self” provides another standout essay that should find its way onto the syllabi of courses in eighteenth-century art, literature, history, and visual and material culture, for it skillfully blends literary and visual analysis to argue that the eighteenth-century secrétaire was a material form that both expressed and facilitated the development of the modern values of intimacy, individuality, and the classed and gendered expression of each. In a brilliant conclusion that likens the eighteenth-century secrétaire to the modern-day laptop computer, Goodman’s essay provides a useful contribution to the historical study of contemporary visual and material culture as well. Carolyn Sargentson’s concluding essay, “Looking at Furniture Inside Out: Strategies of Secrecy and Security in Eighteenth-Century French Furniture,” fruitfully complements Goodman’s study, providing a rich, nuanced analysis of the spatial and technical complexity of case furniture that included myriad hidden drawers, compartments, and locks. Providing an exhaustive formal analysis primarily of three extraordinarily complex pieces of furniture now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sargentson demonstrates the benefits of careful looking at objects that are too often thought to be self-evident. Combining this precise formal approach with an insightful critical analysis of such furniture’s contribution to eighteenth-century concepts of space and secrecy, Sargentson further exemplifies a sophisticated art-historical approach to objects and their cultural meanings.

The book is unusually densely illustrated for a collection of essays, with Sargentson’s contribution claiming a dazzling twenty-six images that are helpful for following her analysis. Unfortunately, in other parts of the book many of the black-and-white photos are extremely dark and several are blurry or pixilated. An inset of fifteen color images is welcome, but, printed four to a page, some are so small as to be of limited use. This is particularly regrettable in the case of Salzman’s rich formal analysis of de Troy’s pendant paintings, whose details are almost entirely illegible.

Nevertheless, the book is a remarkable accomplishment in bringing together a range of methodological and theoretical approaches to a category of objects that until recently was considered beneath the consideration of serious critical analysis. Furnishing the Eighteenth Century demonstrates how diverse interdisciplinary interests can converge upon a single topic in ways that enrich both the object of study and the assumptions of the separate disciplines from which they emerge. The book makes a major contribution to the study of eighteenth-century culture, and many of its essays should provide models for future scholarship on the study of furniture and decoration within and beyond eighteenth-century France that takes seriously objects, their cultural and historical contexts, and the ideas and meanings they generated.