We speak to people to find out about them and it is called conversation. But when we look at their objects and their homes to learn about them it is called snooping.  Yet often it is snooping that tells us more about the actual person.  The lecturer who appears to be sensitive to aesthetic impressions and creative acts will be at once revealed as an imposter when it is shown that he or she doesn’t care a fig about their interiors.  As the French proverb goes, tel logis, tel le maître – as is the home, so is its owner. The interior is a true creative expression of the person’s individual character.

Dennis Severs, the late owner of 18 Folgate Street in Spitalfields London understands this concept well.  Having brought to life a dilapidated 18th-century terrace house, he used interiors and its objects to tell us the life of his fictional Gervais or Jervis family and to convey the spirit of the 18th and 19th centuries.   His basic premise is that the house is a history lesson more comprehensive and more exact than any history book. In a way he is right, and we shall see how. But in his somewhat strained polemic against formal institutions of education argued in his book, he fails to recognise the gifts of his own creativity, which are the compositions of objects and fabrics arranged around the house. They are works of art in their own right without having to be merely the means through which a narrative is told or a cultural or personal history related.  In fact, the little notes stuck around the house giving us clues to the room’s ‘plot’, as he calls it, rather than stimulating the imagination and aesthetic appreciation of the interiors, hinder it and send it on a narrative path that tends to lead us away from a direct and sensual (in the strict sense of the word) experience of the rooms and the compositions in them.  

The lasting impression of the house is not necessarily the characters of the Jervis family and their place in different periods of history, but of moments of creative expression like a circle of  broken porcelain on the floor, the drapery of a window and, of course, the rooms themselves.  These details and the decoration of the rooms are arranged in the same way a painter or sculptor organises their compositions. Of course it was part of Severs’ intention that such things do tell history and tell us about his Jervis family, but the visual strength of these compositions cry out to be appraised in and of itself, just as we might look at art. As an artist, he does of course realise this, and in the end his real strength lies in the house rather than in his book. In taking the tour in silence, as is the rule, Severs acknowledges that his creation deserves the same contemplation that is ‘required for an Old Master’s exhibition.’

If part of the experience is a history lesson, the one we learn is a lively and comprehensive one. Taking the rooms as an archive of experience, Severs leads us through the development of the bourgeois interior, its wealthy heights and its poverty struck lows.  The interiors and the way we experience them allow us to understand comprehensively the spirit of the age. Rooms and objects of a period of time indicate its psychology and mood. The bulbous teapots, range, chairs and jars in the kitchen ‘join together to construct someone…of a certain bulbous likeness and type that would fit snugly into that chair.’ When we move into the elevated atmosphere of the 18th century, progressing from the strangely rich though austere dining room to the elegant drawing room and master bedroom, the way we move and the way we feel is shaped by the atmosphere of the rooms and the placing of its furniture and objects. 

Any plebeian and robust movement suggested by the bulbous kitchen furniture gives way to the light step of the 1760s engineered by a preciocity of delicate ornament and ‘occasional’ furniture. As much sociological survey as a historical one, we are made aware of the culture of the mid-18th century simply by what we see and how we move.  Things are scattered on the floor - slippers, ribbons, broken porcelain, a sugared marzipan fruit - which reflects a veritable obsession in 18th-century prints and paintings of domestic littering.  It is as if we have found ourselves in the visual art of the period. The frame has been removed that distinguishes art from life and we inhabit a picture, which in the case of one room, is Hogarth’s Midnight Modern Conversation.  Severs' point was not to  reproduce exactly the painting on the mantel piece in the room in front of it, but to evoke its effect, much as successive cultures have been evoked in the rest of the house without recourse to historical exactitude – that would be the domain of a museum, which this is distinctly not.

The journey through history unravels, past the powdered-periwig and makeup smeared days of George III right through to a Victorian parlour whose decoration can only be characterised in terms of chronic disease: like a cancer ornament and stuff afflicts every corner and walls are covered like mould with patterns. It is a stuffiness worthy of the Victorian morality that created it, as if the room were like a post-lapsarian Eve ashamed of her nudity. This is a fitting contrast to the shards of gleaming steel now rising around the East End. But before we leave c.1870, distant sounds of talking tell us the house is inhabited, though its rooms are empty. The Jervis family have left to allow us to snoop.

For Information on Dennis Severs' house, visit http://www.dennissevershouse.co.uk/