Diana Davis's important new book, The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865, tackles three interlinked subjects: the rise of the antique dealer in London from c.1785 to 1865; the development of the market for ancien régime objects; and the creation of Francophile interiors in which, Davis argues, dealers rather than collectors, architects or interior designers played the key role as taste makers. The beginning of this period saw London taking over from Paris as the European art market center following the turmoil of the French Revolution, which provided unrivaled opportunities for British collectors. This state of affairs continued under Napoleon, who, despite emulating the formality of the court of Louis XIV and harnessing the arts to glorify his reign, had little interest in preserving the arts of the ancien régime.

The story of this extraordinary chapter in the history of collecting has often been told, most recently in another Getty publication, London and the Emergence of the European Art Market 1780–1820, edited by Suzanna Avery Quash and Christian Huemer (2019). But whereas that publication does a very thorough job in analyzing picture prices, it largely overlooks the decorative arts, which, whatever one's notions of artistic hierarchies, were far from being minor arts in financial terms: George IV, for example, spent considerably more on a wine cooler from Rundell, Bridge and Rundell than he paid for his most expensive Rembrandt.

Davis's book, therefore, fills a significant gap, building upon some of the insights in Avery Quash and Huemer's book, particularly in her investigation of the role played by French dealers, though Davis's focus is on dealers in decorative arts rather than on picture dealers. Dominique Daguerre was the earliest and most important of these, a crucial linkman between London and Paris in the closing years of the ancien régime, whose shop in Paris had a monopoly on the sale of Wedgwood. He worked for Marie-Antoinette before fleeing to London and finding employment with George IV, supplying most of the furniture for the earlier phases of Carlton House. Daguerre was a marchand mercier (described in Diderot's Enyclopeda as “marchands de tout, faiseurs de rien” [dealers in everything and makers of nothing]), but he was succeeded by, among others, Martin-Eloi Lignereux, who, following the abolition of the French Guild regulations, was both a maker and a dealer. One of the interesting themes in Davis's book is the exploration of the way in which these two roles were intertwined or interchanged. This was particularly true in the London furniture trade, where such upwardly mobile dealers as Edward Holmes Baldock and John Webb began their careers as cabinetmakers. Baldock, as Davis astutely observes, emulated the traditions of the French ébenistes by stamping the furniture he supplied “EHB,” while at the same time adding Sevres porcelain plaques (or, in the case of one piece in the Wallace Collection, using recycled plates) or neo-rococo ormolu mounts to pieces of Sèvres in order to create confections that, however questionable to purists, were arguably in the traditions of the eighteenth-century marchands-merciers.

The study of the rise of the antique dealer in London was brilliantly pioneered by the late Clive Wainwright and has been championed more recently by Mark Westgarth. But their main focus has been on romantic antiquarianism and the rise of the curiosity trade in London. Davis's book, with its emphasis on the collecting of French decorative arts, both the new and currently fashionable (in the 1780s) and the antique (particularly post-1815) tells the other side of the story. It also examines, with great insight and perspicacity, the confusingly termed “Louis Quatorze” (in fact, more neo-rococo) interiors created from the 1820s onward at Belvoir Castle, Windsor Castle, and Apsley House (and later by Earl de Grey at Wrest Park), arguing that dealers were the key tastemakers. There are some weaknesses in her account: Davis is very good on furniture dealers and porcelain dealers such as Robert Fogg, but the important Boulle revival cabinetmaker Louis le Gaigneur gets only a passing mention and Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, who did so much to promote both French neoclassical taste and rococo revivalism in silver, are rather underlit. Lastly, perhaps, mention should be made of Walsh Porter, the writer and marchand-amateur-cum-interior-decorator who was responsible for the highly theatrical makeover of Carlton House c. 1806–1809, when, according to Joseph Farington, Porter “destroyed all that Holland has done and is substituting a finishing in the most expensive and motley taste” (Carlton House: The Past Glories of George IV's Palace [1991], 15).

Ultimately, though, one has to wonder whether dealers really were the taste makers or whether they were catering for tastes that had been established by others, notably pioneering collectors such as William Beckford, whose audacious purchase in Paris at the height of the Terror of the Comte d'Orsay's desk (Wallace Collection) shows him to have been way ahead of the market; and Horace Walpole, who created an armory at Strawberry Hill long before the arms and armor trade took off in London. There were also other agents at work: architects such as Henry Holland, who collaborated with Daguerre in the 1780s at Carlton House; and Benjamin Dean and Matthew Cotes Wyatt, both pioneering creators of Louis Quatorze interiors and, in the case of Wyatt, also a supplier of boiseries to the Duchess of Rutland. Nor should one forget George IV's chefs: his confectioner Benois at Carlton House and his pastry cook Louis Weltje at Brighton, both of whom acted as agents in sourcing French works of art for the prince regent and played key roles in the formation of the Royal Collection. Dealers were not the only tastemakers, but they were certainly highly influential, and by 1865, when this book closes, they were playing a crucial role in the staging of the seminal exhibitions, the building of the great museum collections, and the development of scholarship in the decorative arts in the mid-Victorian period. Lavishly illustrated, impeccably researched, and beautifully written, with some invaluable biographies at the end, Davis's book makes a pioneering contribution to the history of collecting.