Introduction
The Domestic Interiors Database is a major outcome from a broad-ranging analytical survey of the ways in which the interior has been represented since the Renaissance in Western Europe and North America. It was compiled by staff at the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior between September 2001 and August 2006 and is a contribution to the AHRC’s mission to “ensure that knowledge and understanding generated by arts and humanities research is widely disseminated for the economic, social and cultural benefit of the UK and beyond.” With over 3,000 entries, the database cannot claim to provide a comprehensive or exhaustive compendium of representations of the interior across six centuries. Rather, it brings together a carefully selected group of representations that are, nonetheless, far more extensive, numerous and accessible than anything of the kind previously available.
The main focus of the database is on the changing appearance and layout of rooms in a range of domestic buildings; the objects that furnished those rooms and the ways rooms and objects were represented; how people used rooms and furnishings; and how they thought about them. It is conceived primarily as a scholarly research tool that includes textual and visual sources and points the researcher towards analytical issues associated with representing the interior. It also helps identify useful source materials for specific research projects. The database distinguishes, for example, between types of interior depicted and described (from tenements to palaces); domestic objects represented (from furnishings to utensils) and uses of space (from sweated labour to genteel leisure). In addition, it identifies key intellectual questions relating to the changing ways the domestic interior has been represented at different times and places.
The database is designed to include interpretative data as well as standard reference information, with a broad range of thematic fields that provide information about representational strategies. One source might depict only a fragment of an interior, perhaps a bed or table, another might involve a plan of a complete, but unfurnished interior space, or perhaps illustrate the intended use of a space or a domestic object. The database allows the user to identify these different strategies for representing the interior. It also enables users to explore the ways representations of the interior have articulated ideas about, for instance, gender, privacy, consumer practices, spatial organisation, leisure and class. A ‘commentary’ field offers a statement by the researcher who collected the original source material on the thinking behind the selection of each entry in the database, whether it be typical of its time and place, or strikingly unusual. These are searchable by category or individual word, making possible a myriad of unforeseen connections.
Textual sources in the database cover novels, poetry, manuscripts and inventories, diaries and correspondence, accounts, trade literature and advertisements, periodicals and advice manuals. Visual sources extend from Renaissance paintings to eighteenth-century graphic satire, from nineteenth-century design books and popular magazines to dolls’ houses, from twentieth-century photographs and computer stills to interior design drawings.
The Domestic Interiors Database is one of two major collaborative research outcomes from the core project of the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior. The second is the publication, Imagined Interiors, representing the domestic since the Renaissance, edited by Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant, V&A Publications, London, 2006. In this book, the theme of representing the domestic exterior within the same geographical and chronological range as the database is developed in 10 essays and 22 feature spreads, written by CSDI staff and contributing scholars.
