The MARIO PRAZ MUSEUM IN ROME

Although Praz left England in 1934, the year that Margaret Jourdain published the first book on Regency furniture, the period and its artifacts were already appealing to clever and fashionable people. On the one hand the period had its enjoyably naughty associations with the goings on of the Prince Regent (later George IV; r. 1820-1830) and his cronies at Brighton and elsewhere. On the other hand its architecture and design were seen as the last phase of classicism, offering a way forward to those seeking a new classicism for their own time. Thus not only did smart people such as the millionaire English politician Ronald Tree (1897-1976) buy Regency furniture but so did those with more taste than money such as the architectural historian Christopher Hussey (1899-1970) and his wife. Praz had contact with the literary world from the time he first went to England, but whether he knew any of the leaders of what is now seen as the Regency revival is not clear. Professor Stefan Susinno, who was one of the moving sp irits behind the acquisition of Praz's collection for the museum, thinks that Praz would not have been interested in the parallel between the Regency and the present, but rather in the parallel between the Regency and his own family background, since the Regency was the meeting point of the last aristocratic and first bourgeois periods. As Praz wrote: English in 1968 as On Neoclassicism). In 1945 he published La filosfia dell' arredamento, which was translated into English as Illustrated History of Furnishing in 1964, and reissued as An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration in 1982. Unlike La casa della vita, which was written in 1958 and published in translation as The House of Life in the United States and Britain in 1964, Interior Decoration is hard to read today since it is written in the tradition of prosa d'arte, which was fashionable in Florence when Praz was young. It was in this tradition that he approached the visual arts, and it was during the time when he wrote the book that he first began to buy furniture in England as well as in Italy This explains the unexpected presence of Regency furniture in a Roman palazzo.

So domestic, accessible Neoclassicism began, whose full spring came in the France of Louis XVI, whose summer was the Empire of Napoleon, and whose languid autumn the delicious awkwardness of the Biedermeir.

Whether parallels to that view could be found in more insular England, I do not know. However, Lord Gerald Wellesley (1885-1972), who practiced architecture in the 1920s and 1930s before he succeeded as the seventh duke of Wellington, was as keen on Regency taste as he was opposed to anything he thought middle class. In 1937 he wrote:

Regency is essentially a lean, muscular and austere style which came into being during a period of war and stress... All Jane Austens books emphasize the lightness, comfort and gaiety of the furnishing of her time compared with the formality in fashion fifty years earlier.

As was the case with many English collectors of furniture, Praz did not buy pictures at first. While he is now best known in one world for his interest in views of interiors they were, in fact, a comparatively late discovery of his, with most purchases made between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. He started with conversation pieces as early as 1930 and 1931 and then became interested in portraits in interiors. The conversation pieces were Italian, but it is possible that he first encountered this kind of painting in England, where it was avidly collected by Sir Philip Sassoon (1888- 1939) and Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tritton, and was written about by Sir Sacheverell Sitwell (1897-1988) in 1936. Praz continued to collect conversation pieces and portraits in interiors during the years when the A collectors Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon were buying English pictures with great avidity.