The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires

DETAIL : John Singer SARGENT, The fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy 1907, The Art Institute of Chicago, American Art Collection

DETAIL : John Singer SARGENT, Almina, daughter of Asher Wertheimer 1908, Tate, London, presented by the widow and family of Asher Wertheimer in accordance with his wishes in 1922


	Gallery

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Interiors

There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can
set upon the freedom of the mind.
Virginia Woolf A room of one’s own (1928)

Middle-class Edwardians were the backbone of the nation: solid, respectable people who tried to keep up appearances and took pride in their homes.

Paintings of intimate interiors showed comfortable drawing rooms with women and girls sitting in quiet contemplation. Like characters in period fiction, they seemed trapped in their domestic lives. Other paintings presented sunlit rooms with open curtains, letting in light, air and the outside world.

As well as depicting scenes of domestic interiors, artists were also commissioned to create decorations for rooms, for example, Charles Conder’s watercolours for the homes of Sir Edmund Davis and Pickford Waller.