Design & the Decorative Arts: Tudor and Stuart Britain 1500-1714 [V&A Publishing]

At the start of the sixteenth century, the great centres of European design and decorative art, as of wealth and power, lay to the south and to the east; it was beautiful things created in the workshops of Venice and Florence, Antwerp and Paris that were coveted in Britain, not those made in London or Edinburgh. Two hundred years later all this had changed. Britain was well on the way to becoming Europe's most successful commercial economy and British design and decorative art were no longer provincial. From furniture to fabrics, prints to pottery, British designers and craftspeople began to match their most eminent European rivals. Lavishly illustrated and unmatched in its coverage, this book explores design and the decorative arts from a number of points of view. It assesses their place in the wider history of Tudor and Stuart Britain. It examines style, the question of how things looked. It asks who led taste; who decided what was to be considered beautiful, fashionable and desirable. It looks at how fashionable things — from houses to clothing — were used. It asks what was new, examining new products and innovations in the ways they were made.

Together, the chapters provide an indispensable resource for the study of the visual culture of the Tudor and Stuart period.