Peter Thornton on comfort

Regular readers of this column will have noticed that Witold Rybczynski, in his Home: A short history of an idea, failed in my opinion in a recent post to define comfort or to identify at what point “home” came to represent “comfort”.  Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to assume that the last two thousand years has seen some kind of development towards an idea of comfort that most people are familiar with today. Look at any contemporary advert for a sofa, and you can see a very clear and tempting idea of comfort being presented to you.

Undeterred by the lack of a clear signpost in the book on home, I have moved on to the books Rybczynski quotes as his inspiration: titles by Mario Praz and Peter Thornton, both writers known for their writings on interior decoration. Thornton’s Authentic Décor: the domestic interior 1620-1920 is a fabulous visual index of interior views, each of them created at the time of the original décor, and so authentic. It’s a lovely idea and one that, I felt, could provide clues towards identifying comfort and what it comprises.

Does Peter Thornton explain comfort? Not really. Nonetheless, there are a couple of tantalizing mentions of comfort, which provide some guidance. Thornton quotes Henry Wotton's  Elements of Architecture 1624): “Well building hath three Conditions – Commoditie, Firmness and Delight”. He continues:

The word comes from the French commodité, which means convenience but carries an implication of comfort. Creating commodité was indeed an important aim of leading French architects in the second half of the seventeenth century. One might even say that comfort as we understand it was invented by them during that period. 

Nonetheless, Thornton almost invalidates the whole idea of comfort in his dismissive description of the other title of inspiration for Rybczynski: Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration. I haven’t been able to get hold of this book yet, but Thornton (quoting Hugh Honour) describes it as “not interior decoration but the visions and fancies prompted by paintings of interiors”. Well, It’s those “visions and fancies” that interest me. I’m not so interested in the specific items of furniture in use at a certain time, rather in what that furniture (or lack of furniture) meant to the people involved.

To give you a visual idea. It looks to my untrained eye that there was a development towards comfort at some point in the period covered by Thornton’s book, and perhaps it took place in the seventeenth century. Compare the following two illustrations:

In the first picture, from 1630, a family is arranged for a group portrait. They look stiff and formal, and the room in which they are based is not geared around comfort – no carpet, no soft chairs (it looks like the man is sitting on a wooden bench). 

Now move to the elegance of a Parisian house in the 1640s. There is a fire burning, women are seated around a table conversing comfortably, perhaps reading books to each other. There are what appear to be soft chairs In a row under the window. The windows have some kind of curtain. There are wall-hangings. All in all, this second picture presents to me a vision of comfort, while the first picture does not. Whether that means a decisive shift in taste in just ten years is something to be investigated further; but the contrast between these images is, I think, very clear. One displays comfort, one does not. Now, you could argue that these images represent very different situations. One is a formal family portrait, the other a relaxed gathering. Perhaps that suggests that comfort was invented by the French, rather than the Dutch, and the Dutch only discovered such ideas much later.