The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present

Ronald Fleming and Vogue RegencyAuthor(s): Alan PowersSource: The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 - the Present, No. 19 (1995), pp. 51-58Published by: The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the PresentStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41805875 .

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Ronald Fleming and Vogue

Regency by Alan Powers

The history of interior decoration in the inter-war period has never been so well described as by Osbert Lancaster in Homes Sweet Homes.1 The text for 'Vogue Regency' reveals his own affection for this style shining through the satire. In a period 'in describing which the phrase Transitional, it is now apparent, is the grossest of understatements', the desire to connect with the later stages of the Georgian classical tradition was ascribed to 'the more sensible of modern architects' as the only solution to 'the desperate attempt to find a contemporary style'. Lancaster sagely warned against 'the will o'the wisp of period accuracy' in recognising that Vogue Regency was selective in its choice of ingredients according to visual rather than historical rules, thus permitting a mixture of old and new.

Lancaster's line drawing could be of a room by Ronald Fleming (1896-1968) from the middle thirties, particularly if the square chimneypiece were made of mirror glass, matched by the frame of the de Chirico-esque painting above it. Fleming had written in 1931, 'this is essentially a transitional period, but it is up to us to make the future'.2

His own career passed through a number of transitional phases, and does not accord to a clear pattern of antithesis between Modernism and tradition. In this he resembled a number of his architect contemporaries. As a figure situated on this boundary, he typified the eclectic and visually-based nature of Vogue Regency as described by Lancaster. As it happened, he also had a particular fondness for the Regency period from early in his career, owning an important Thomas Hope side table in his first London flat in Harriet Mews in 1927, a piece which later came to the Victoria and Albert Museum.3 The room in which it stood was described by Martin Battersby as 'an ensemble that would not be considered dated forty years later'.4

Battersby goes on to say that Fleming's 'taste and discrimination combined with a sure sense of colour and an expert knowledge of period styles brought him recognition as one of England's leading decorators', yet his name is now well remembered. His identity was submerged within other companies such as Keebles, Fortnum and Mason, Arundell Clarke, Kelso Ltd., and Dolly Mann for much of his career; but he left a collection of papers and photographs which passed from his friend the decorative painter Geoffrey Houghton-Brown (1903-1993) to the Victoria and Albert Museum, from which aspects of his career cane be pieced together, although there are many gaps and questions.5

Among these papers is a biographical introduction written by Houghton-Brown in 1973 to accompany a history of twentieth century interior decoration written by Fleming but never published. This describes Fleming's progress as a Scottish doctor's son to Epsom College and thence into military service in the First World War. Houghton-Brown, who knew Fleming well over a number of years, describes the lingering effect of his Scottish upbringing: 'He retained a Scottish reticence preventing any public expression of his innermost feelings or his deep and constant affections, and a refusal ever to be moved out of a calm acceptance of every situation, pleasing or displeasing, that life provided.'6 Roland Pym remembers Fleming as 'rather remote, sardonic but very

kind to me with jobs.... shortish, dapper, rather in the style of Jeremy Thorpe, very smartly turned out, an arbiter of taste'.7 Houghton-Brown identified Fleming's moral motive in his work, 'his missionary sense, against ugliness in things, in people, in thought, in action'.

Fleming's bravery in the Great War was remarkable. He was wounded in April 1915 and paralysed, but slowly recovered. He went to Paris in 1921 to attend the New York School of Architecture and Decoration, from which some small watercolour designs survive. Houghton-Brown wrote, 'Ronald Fleming was then twenty-five, very good looking, intelligent, amusing and anxious to enjoy all that cultured Paris had to offer.'8 He collected paintings by Juan Gris, Gino Severini, Pedro Pruna and other artists.

Fleming designed some rooms for Lady Rothermere in 1923. At the same period he inspired Mrs. Seton Henry, the owner of the Villa Corne d'Or at Cannes, with an enthusiasm for decoration. She employed Eugene Boudin of Jansen to create austere rooms, some with Empire furniture. Fleming later wrote of the dining room, 'The Louis XVI style was strictly adhered to, yet the room lacked pomposity and had a simplicity in its treatment.'9

Among the documents in Fleming's papers is a draft contract with Léonce Rosenberg of the Parisian gallery and journal L'Effort Moderne to set up a London branch on his return in 1925. The proposal failed because Fleming could not raise the necessary capital and about this time he went to work for Keeble Ltd., an established firm of decorators in Soho, on a freelance basis. Meanwhile, he carried out designs such as the set for The Constant Wife by Somerset Maugham in 1927 which was described as a drawing room in pine, with silvery-green taffeta curtains with tulle-like net, walnut piano and writing table and beautiful bowl of blue-green glass flowers.10

In his unpublished history of twentieth-century decoration, Fleming describes the achievement of a handful of Edwardians, professionals and amateurs, who brought intelligence to bear on rooms in a period of philistinism, reflecting that 'it is only tragic that this glorious age of prosperity and peace before the crash of 1914 left so little of artistic merit in architecture, pictures, decoration or furniture'.11 Fleming was particularly keen on the work of Walter Thornton Smith whose 'genius was for clearing away of the old order and creating a fresh atmosphere with a sense of space and symmetry in the arrangement of furniture'. Under his aegis 'house decoration gradually became a form of self-expression and emancipation, and fashionable pastime, ceasing to be taken for granted except by the most conservative and dull'. Thornton Smith was an important early influence on Syrie Maugham.

The world of London decorating which Fleming joined in the mid 1920s was in a state of 'carefree, irresponsible reaction to the 1914-18 war', to which he made his own contribution. Keeble was doubtless lucky to get him. Houghton-Brown describes the hard life of an upper middle class professional decorator of the period working all day and returning to his flat in Harriet Mews to dress for an evening of dining out, during which he might meet potential

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Fig. 1 Ronald Fleming's own flat at Harriet Mews. (All illustrations courtesy of The Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum)

clients. He also alludes to 'the unconventional and rather "shocking" parties given by his friends, for some of which he designed the décor'. One of these was the Circus party given by Norman Hartnell at Strathmore House in 1929, described by tne o ally txpress: Mr. Konaid rleming planned the decorations with great taste, as well as with bizarre fancifulness. The supper room was as dim and cool and blue as a canal in Venice: the ballroom in striking contrast was a Florentine blaze of red and gold.' 12 In 1928, he decorated the 400 Club with his own murals showing 'scenes of exotic bar life in foreign parts'.13 Fleming's Harriet Mews flat (fig. 1) had 'dead white walls, pine skirting and cornice, mole colour carpet with coral red painted floor'.14 The Thomas Hope table stood at one end, and along the side wall stood three bookcases designed by Fleming in waxed pine with a thin painted line of red.

This was the verve which Fleming brought to Keeble, while in turn he learnt more about the practical aspects of decoration. They employed fine craftsmen specialising in lacquer and were busy responding to the demand of the period for antique oak panelled rooms. An example of Fleming's work in this style was the flat of Mrs. Garland Emmet at Devonshire House (fig. 2), 1929, which had convenient built- in book-cases in a panelled study and a sitting room with Chinese wallpaper.

Carlisle House was a fine 1660s building which served as a showroom for Keeble, but Fleming, given a free hand, installed an eighteenth-century pannelled room. In 1929, he created a modern room on an upper floor.15 This year was one of sudden awakening among English decorators and designers to the practical possibility of using some of the effects they had observed on the continent in the preceding years. The young Australian Raymond McGrath's mirror- glass interiors at Finella, Cambridge for Mansfield Forbes were under construction from 1927, and were published in 1929. Serge Chermayeff, previously employed by the 'period' decorators Ernest Williams, had staged the 'Exhibition of

Modern Furnishings' for the Modern Art Department at Waring and Gillow over the winter of 1928-29, with many geometric rugs, simple wall treatments and use of mirror.16 The Waring and Gillow show may be significant in suggesting to Keeble how a firm previously associated with reproduction furniture could also develop modern styles.

1929 was also the year of publication of The New Interior Decoration by Dorothy Todd and Raymond Mortimer, that strange compilation in which avant-garde Paris meets the Bloomsbury Group in search of an English version of

Modernism. It put forward the claim that artists could teach architects much about decoration, although it showed no work by professional London decorators. Nonetheless, the illustrations of interiors by Djo Bourgeois, William Lescaze and Paul Nelson, with their blocky furniture and elimination of mouldings, were similar in style to the modern rooms by Ronald Fleming designed in the early thirties.

Fig. 2 The flat of Mrs Garland Emmet at Devonshire House, 1929.

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Fleming's 'Modern Room' at Keeble (fig. 3) had a mirror- faced chimney breast taken back to form a recess with a decorative painting over it. The large rug was by Marion Dorn. Between the windows was an abstract decoration by Geoffrey Houghton-Brown. The furniture was covered in a shiny material, and the walls and ceiling were equally glossy in texture. A skyscraper-style bookcase stood at the end of a very square sofa. The other end of the room had an arrangement of ribbed mirror glass, set in a surround of plain mirror, over a cupboard with a fluted front. This is as much as black and white photographs can reveal, but even without the essential element of colour, it is enough to reveal Fleming as a radical Modernist; the aspect of his work that has been effaced by his post-war career and by the polemical intentions of historians of decoration.

Fleming's enthusiasm for Modernism in the first years of the 1930s can be seen in his own flat in Spencer Street, Westminster (fig. 4), which include much use of mirror to set off semi-Surrealist decorative paintings by Houghton- Brown and John Armstrong. This flat had a large studio, sometimes used for fashion shoots, which included a large Mandarin painted screen and a seventeenth-century Brussels tapestry, showing how, as at Keeble, Modernism could be used selectively for certain rooms.

The way in which this new simplicity was adapted for clients can be seen at 70 Portland Place, decorated by Fleming in 1930 (fig. 5). He left the existing classical mouldings but cased in the fireplace and added low furniture to enhance the scale. The paintings were firmly fixed* in the architectural scheme and the curtains were unpelmetted. Light relief was added by the chintz of the curtains and the flower arrangements. The elements of Vogue Regency were all present here without any overt Regency references.

Fleming's radical stance sprang from impatience with the status-quo in decoration. His talk of 193 1 was a continuation of the clearing out process begun by the Edwardians. He emphasised the potential for harm from ugly objects kept for sentimental purposes, saying that 'sentimentality is out of fashion'. In a 1932 article for Harper's Bazaar, Fleming appeared at his most revolutionary, suggesting that architects were exerting a restraining influence on the spirit of the age. 'Can't we be ourselves in 1932? If we know what we are and some of us think we know: but the architects are afraid of us it seems. Fear is their strong characteristic.' 17 It is difficult to define exactly what Fleming did believe to be the spirit of 1932, but the text suggests that colour was important to modify the starkness of modern rooms: 'why not have the walls in tones of colour - warm greys,

pinks and golds?' The intimate encouragement of the conclusion perhaps reflected why Fleming was described in 1939 as 'the most kind-hearted person in this section of Britain's furnishing business'.18

Fig. 3 Fleming's 'Modern Room' at Keeble.

Fig. 4 Fleming's Spencer Street interiors, Westminster, C.1930.

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Fig. 5 70 Portland Place, 1930.

No, you must give way a little; we can give you comfort and warmth, light, gaiety and space - a background for your belongings and personality. We can stimulate you to a realisation of the present and its possibilities. You need not feel 'arty and crafty' but practical and efficient, as in your car and aeroplane and at the same time satisfy your artistic inclinations. Was this a call for the style which Fleming recalled when

writing about the entrepreneurial decorator Arundell Clarke, with whom he was briefly in partnership?

[Clarke] had a considerable success at this period, was revolutionary, if not particularly constructive, in that he emptied rooms of all contents save essentias. The walls were rough white, with indirect lighting, built-in bookshelves, bar and gramophone; with a few outsize easy chairs or a settee, and some small tables. The rugs were often white, as were the curtains. They were essentially 'cocktail party' rooms and suited to the mood of the moment. It was rather a negation than a style, however, and never developed. Fleming always seems to retain a more humane quality

and understood that the decorator's job was different from the architect's. He also seemed to understand what Todd and Mortimer recognised, the need for a version of Modernism adapted to English living.

In 1932 Fleming organised an exhibition of mural panels and designs for murals at Carlisle House. Opened on 24 May by Osbert Sitwell, it attracted considerable press attention. It was to some extent a fulfilment of Fleming's earlier ambition with Léonce Rosenberg to extend the role of contemporary art in England. Although there had been earlier exhibitions of mural painting, they had been in the context of art galleries or Arts and Crafts exhibitions, often with a high-minded civic message. The Carlisle House exhibition was the first to recognise the importance of mural painting as an aspect of interior decoration, giving the artist an entry into the creation of a room that could go beyond the accepted stylistic

categories and the reductive minimalism of Modernism. The selection of artists was eclectic, including young academic painters such as Edward Halliday, decorative painters of a nostalgic turn, among whom Rex Whistler was supreme, and the avant-garde of the time represented by John Banting's Surrealism. Another contributor was Oliver Messel, with whom Fleming collaborated in the 1950s on the penthouse at the Dorchester. The commentator in the Sketch picked up the message about mixing styles:

I ... admired the rich colour of the classic designs for an overmantel panel by Edward Halliday. Vanessa Bell and Edward Burra were

responsible for some definitely modern sketches. The dull old oak panelling backing the neo-Georgian designs gave a pleasant assurance that "crabbed Age and Youth can live together" - in art, anyway, if not in actuality.19 The Listener also emphasised the compatibility of old and

new, which was evidently part of the message of the exhibition.

One of the most startling points about this exhibition, in fact, is the compatibility between the old and the new in the English tradition; not only mural decorations but furniture, textiles, rugs and metalwork by the modern craftsman and his predecessors, seem to be steps in a logical progression when placed side by side in these typically English rooms.20 The Scotsman was one of the few papers to admire

Fleming's 'Modern Room' as the most interesting thing in the show

[although] the real triumph is not with [Wadsworth and McKnight Kauffer] but with the electricians or whoever designed for them the lovely and efficient light fittings of all sorts .... Personally, were the room mine, I could bear to dispense with the mural decorations, but the furniture and the electric light fittings are a sheer delight.21 Fleming had been quick to pick up the importance of

Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious's decorations for Morley College, another of the wonders of 1929, and Ravilious showed a large watercolour of fireworks in back gardens as a study for a mural.22 In a general way, the exhibition carried through the suggestion made by Dorothy Todd and Raymond Mortimer that new styles in interior decoration were being created above all by artists. Fleming continued to keep his finger on this pulse at his next job working in Fortnum and Mason's decoration department.

Fleming claimed that the mural exhibition took place in 1929 and that he moved to Fortnums in 1930 to open the decorating department. The dates are obviously wrong and it appears that he moved soon after the mural exhibition in 1932.

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Fig. 6 Gertrude Lawrence's flat at 73 Portland Place 1933.

The existence of a modern decorating department at Fortnum and Mason becomes more under- standable when one learns (from Fleming's un- published book) that the business had been bought in the early 1920s by the Thornton Smith brothers, Ernest, a financier and Walter, the decorator who had learnt his trade under Lord Waring and whom Fleming greatly admired. Ernest Thornton's obituary in The Times declared that 'Fortnums as it exists today, including the distinctive building, was the creation of Ernest's financial powers and Walter's artistic sense'.23 The building of 1926-28 by Wimperis, Simpson and Guthrie belongs to the decorative world that Fleming himself had only lately left.

Fleming's debut was the 'Exhibition of Contemporary Decoration' in October 1932, opened by Noel Coward, who was photographed in front of a mural painted by Roland Pym for Bishop Paget of Chester, in a bathroom in the house in Cloth Fair occupied by the architects John Seely and Paul Paget, the Bishop's son. Pym was one of a 'stable' of artists for mural and other decorative work, including Allan Walton, whose business selling silk-screened textiles was established in 1931, Cedric Morris, one of Walton's designers, and Nicholas de Molas, an artist and sculptor of flamboyant and often-illustrated works about whom little is know. The murals erected ror display at Fortnum's included paintings on glass which have a slightly neo- Victorian air.24

A review in The Times suggests the character of the exhibition in relation to the more austere exemplars of Modernism: '"con- temporary" is a better word than "modern" for the purpose because it does not suggest anything more distinct than the time of day, whereas "modern" is apt to suggest - quite unreasonably - a conscious break from the past in style... [There is] a mixture of chrome and glass furniture with a "cosy" sort.'25 A cutting from an

unidentified French newspaper among Fleming's papers reveals something of the ambition of the department: 'À Londres, un grand magasin de nouveautés de Picadilly, "Fortnum & Mason", entend s'ériger, par des expositions appropriées, en centre de l'ésthetique decorative moderne (Centre for New Methods of Contemporary Decoration).'26

If Fleming's album is a guide, there was no market for these works, in spite of one press comment that 'for some time past it has been noticeable that everyone really "in the movement" has had his or her house adorned with frescoes or other decorations by the most modern of the young

Fig. 7 Gertrude Lawrence's flat at 73 Portland Place 1933.

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Fig. 8 Gertrude Lawrence's cocktail cabinet exhibited at the 'Exhibition of Contemporary Industrial Design in the Home', Dorland Hall, Regent Street, 1934.

artists'.27 In 1933 he decorated Gertrude Lawrence's flat at 73 Portland Place (figs. 6 & 7), perhaps his best known interior. The room had the absence of ornament a Modernist might desire, but the choice of objects included amusing items like the drum side-table.

Fleming wrote self-deprecatingly in 1959: 'Mirror and white walls were relieved with a scarlet carpet and pale grey covers. It made a somewhat severe background for a vivid personality, and any furnishings of quality were sadly lacking.'28 Gertrude Lawrence's cocktail cabinet was exhibited as part of an ensemble of celebrity cocktail sets at the 'Exhibition of Contemporary Industrial Design in the Home' at Dorland Hall, Regent Street, in 1934 (fig. 8).29 This was exhibited as the work of Kelso Ltd., the firm for which Fleming worked from that year onwards, although Gertrude Lawrence's bedroom was illustrated by H.G. Hayes Marshall as the work of Fortnum and Mason.

Hayes Marshall and Fleming appear to have been working simultaneously at Fortnum's and comparison of the two editions of Derek Patmore's Modern Furnishing and Decoration (London 1934, 2nd ed. 1936) brings out the possibility of rivalry between them. Plate one, the same image in both editions, was initially credited to Marshall alone while in 1936 the caption recognised Fleming as 'the original architect' of the room which included Aalto tables and an Aal to chair, and a portrait of Gertrude Lawrence. It is uncertain if Fleming was involved in the first exhibition of Aalto furniture to be held in Britain which took place at Fortnum and Mason in November Ï933.

This was organised by P. Morton Shand acting for Aalto,

while the contact at Fortnum and Mason, by his own account, was Hayes Marshall. A testimonial from Keeble dated 30 May 1933, among Fleming's papers, suggests that he was already seeking to move on by this date.

An undated cutting from The Times announces that 'Roland Fleming (late of Keeble and Contemporary Furniture Department of Fortnum and Mason) has now JOINED his [Arundell Clarke's] FIRM. Roland Fleming will be able to give his clients all the resources of a modern decorator, including furniture, fabrics, pottery, lighting, house decorating etc.' Given Fleming's views on Clarke, already quoted, this episode was probably short-lived, and probably came between his time at Fortnum's and his move to Kelso Ltd., where he seems to have been established by 1934. In 1934 he exhibited an

'1834 Room' at the Ideal Home exhibition (fig. 9), a good example of his continuing interest in the

interchange between the past and the present. The Regency Revival began before 1914, but only after 1930 did it acquire a wider popularity, partly as a result of the cycle of taste, partly stimulated by the theatre and also helped by the cheaper prices of Regency antiques. A typical commentary from the House and Garden Book of 1937 explains:

Regency houses were the first of the small elegant houses, and therefore everything in them was, as a rule, on a much smaller scale than the Queen Anne and Georgian houses that were their forerunners. So Regency decoration is excellently suited in scale to the restricted spaces in which we now live compared with those of the 1 8th century. And

Fig. 9 The '1834 Room' at the Ideal Home Exhibition, 1934.

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Fig. 10 20 Thurloe Place, where Ronald Fleming had the ground floor flat and Geoffrey Houghton-Brown the first floor.

Regency furniture is snapped up at the sales where many of the bigger and finer things go begging. Becky Sharp's little house in Mayfair is still the ideal of today and the colourful surroundings of the gay Regency rakes have become more and more essential as (so we are told) with the passage of time the climate becomes more and more gloomy. Regency carpets and Regency wallpapers and especially Regency swags and drapes, are now very much in fashion.30 Judging from photographs,

Fleming's style remained constant in the later 1930s within the fairly wide eclectic limits he had set himself. His mixture of Regency furniture with pieces of his own design corresponds to the feeling of affinity between the 1830s and the 1930s that was widely felt at the time and often used to justify a wholly modern style. Vogue Regency was not, however, Regency Revival; it was more an inflection of Modernism than a period style.

Mrs. Herbert Agar's flat at 20 Sloane Avenue, of 1934, had a circular table and matching console table set against a floor-to-ceiling pier glass, with incised lines running down each side. The mirror was used in a decorative way, evoking historical styles, as in the console table and matching pier glass for Mr. & Mrs. Anthony Norman at 18 Montague Street of 1938. The importance of colour in the Vogue Regency style was emphasised in the newspaper account of Ralph Dutton's house at 21 Chapel Street: 'curtains of Regency striping in white and grey-blue are lined with a strong Wedgewood blue, matching the carpet and contrasting with ice-blue walls. Brick, blue and white cover the chairs. The curtains take the form of a Sheraton draping over a long rod.'31

Fleming does not seem to have been able to commission many murals during the 1930s; one exception was work by Roland Pym in the flat of the actress Helen Gilliland.32 These, prime examples of Vogue Regency, comprised an overmantel of Venus on a shell and mermaids with water-lily leaves and, in the bathroom, fishes under the sea.33

A room for Lady Leucha Warner at 34 Grosvenor Gardens, of 1938, with walls covered with squares of golden straw paper laid in a chequerboard of alternating directions, is known from striking colour reproductions.34 The effect is reminiscent of the Parisian designer Jean-Michel Frank, combining his use of squares of parchment for the Vicomte de Noailles and his use of straw wall covering in his own house.35 Of Frank, Fleming wrote :

If he had lived, he might have developed a new, significant French modern style. He was a brilliantly clever young man, who managed to combine modern fabrics and colours with plain utilitarian pieces of furniture, very severe in

form, but at the same time with a great sense of style. He was continually experimenting with new materials, new wood veneers and wall-coverings and his inventive mind seemed to be limitless.36 Does this suggest that Fleming himself envisaged

developments within Modernism that remained unfulfilled? His rooms continued to be eclectic, with a mixture of antique and simple solid modern furniture. 18 Montague Street included a pine panelled drawing room, dramatically curtained along one side, and a dining room in a restrained mid-eighteenth-century style.37 A flat in Carlos Place illustrated in Fleming's album, and dated 1939, had simple French antiques in a style closer to John Fowler than Fleming's earlier work.

Fleming's work is hard to distinguish from that of John Hill of Green and Abbott, another exponent of Vogue Regency. Nothing is exaggerated or theatrical at the expense of comfort and aesthetic balance. Fleming's retrospective comments on the Gertrude Lawrence flat reveal his awareness of the risk of overplaying the effect over quality of furnishing. Although Fleming had contributed some of the wilder moments of inter-war decoration, he was proud of his professionalism and this meant service to the client. Colour, the element so lacking from most records of inter-war rooms, was the means of unifying different styles and periods.

Fleming spent the War abroad working for the Foreign Office, and afterwards joined forces with the pioneer of Regency taste, Mrs. Dolly Mann, prospering despite the adverse conditions while regretting the loss of pre-war standards. He lived at 20 Thurloe Place (fig. 10), in a flat in the home of Geoffrey Houghton-Brown, which he decorated with panache in a more crowded and brightly coloured style than before the War. He retained a painting by Severini over the chimneypiece as a relic of his early enthusiasms, although many of his other Parisian paintings had been sold.38 The

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far end room was given trompe l'oeil figures in niches by Roland Pym.39 The unidentified example of his own post- war work which Fleming chose to illustrate in his 1959 article for the Saturday Book looks unremarkable.

Apart from his involvement with Oliver Messel at the Dorchester, Fleming was one of three decorators given individual suites to decorate there. He worked closely with Ralph Dutton on the furnishing of his re-Georgianised country house, Hinton Ampner, particular in the choice of textiles; and at the time of his death in 1968, Fleming was redecorating and simplifying the interiors of Mapledurham Manor. His unexpected post- War work included a palace for the Regent of Iraq, of which no visual record appears to survive. Becoming increasingly involved in antique dealing, Fleming was nonetheless the first dealer to create fully-decorated stands for the Dorchester House Antiques Fair.

The survival of Fleming's views on interior decoration between the wars makes him a particularly valuable witness of the period. Ralph Dutton's obituary of Fleming states that 'his designs were, on the whole, conservative' and his post- war work does little to challenge such a judgement; but Fleming was typical of many of his generation who were briefly taken up by the excitement of Modernism in the 1920s before reconnecting themselves more fully to tradition in defence against an increasingly hostile world. Houghton- Brown writes of Fleming in the 1950s, 'he regarded his efforts to restore some elegance to English life as a sort of crusade. Shabbiness for him was one of the major sins.'40 Fleming himself closed his history of decorating with the watchword 'Resistance' : 'resistance to the disintegration of our inherited culture and civilisation, however insular it may be.'41

To arrive at this position after the excitements of the period 1929-34 may seem a circular journey, but the transition towards which Vogue Regency was moving was not simply from period to modern. From today's viewpoint, the Vogue Regency of the 1930s looks an impossible style, incapable of revival despite its obvious stylishness; but its value may be recognised as a passage on the journey towards freedom from dogmatic opposition between tradition and Modernism and as such the precursor of some of the best aspects of English decoration in the 1950s and 1960s.

Notes 1. Osbert Lancaster, Homes Sweet Homes , London 1939, p.74 2. Ronald Fleming, 'Home Decoration', transcript of Radio talk

(18 July 1931), Archive of Art and Design, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum (hereafter A AD), 1/2- 1981.

3. V&A Museum no. W19-1976, purchased with the aid of a donation from Mrs George Levy in memory of her father, the late Philip Blairman. Formerly owned by Arthur Boys.

4. Martin Battersby, The Decorative Twenties, London 1969, p. 134.

5. Houghton-Brown was described by James Lees-Milne as 'dilettante and painter' in A Mingled Measure : Diaries 1953- 1972, London 1994, note on p. 269. Houghton-Brown worked as a decorator in the 1920s and 1930s. Around 1954, he began dealing in antiques, sharing the shop of Collin and Winslow in Fulham Road with Francis Collin. Information provided by John Harris.

6. Geoffrey Houghton-Brown, introduction to Fleming, 'Decoration in England 1900-1950', AAD 1/7-1981.

7. Roland Pym, letter to author, 1 January 1995. 8. Ibid. 9. Ronald Fleming, 'Fifty Years of Rooms', Saturday Book XIX

(1959), p. 196. 10. Morning Post (8 April 1927). 11. Fleming, 'Decoration in England 1900-1950', AAD 1/6-1981.

Also the source of the other quotations in this paragraph.

12. 'The Talk of London', Daily Express (3 July 1929). 13. Vogue (May 16, 1928). 14. Annotation by G. Houghton-Brown in Fleming's photograph

album, AAD 1/302-1981. 15. The date is taken from Fleming's album, although the creation

of this room is also linked with the mural exhibition of 1932. Fleming's dating is unreliable.

16. See Barbara Tilson, 'The Modern Art Department, Waring and Gillow, 1928-1931', Decorative Arts Society Journal vol. VIII (1983), pp.40-49.

17. 'New and Old in Decoration', AAD 1/3-1981. 18. 'Furnishing commentary I' Cabinet Maker and Complete

House Furnisher (13 May 1939), p.212. 19. Sketch (1 June 1932). 20. The Listener, VIII (1 June 1932), p.781. 21. 'London Art Shows', The Scotsman (5 May 1932). 22. Illustrated in Helen Binyon, Eric Ravilious , Guildford 1983,

p.56, where it is dated 1933, the date signed on the painting. It was exhibited in Ravilious' s one-man show at the Zwemmer Gallery in November 1933 but remained unsold. Stephen Calloway, Twentieth-Century Decoration, London 1988, p. 2 15 confuses Fleming's 1932 exhibition with the 'Exhibition of British Industrial Art in the Home', Dorland Hall, June-July 1933. On the latter see, Alan Powers, 'Oliver Hill as an exhibition Designer', Thirties Society Journal, 1 (1991), pp.28-39.

23. The Times (1 December 1951), p. 8. 24. Walton's painting on glass is illustrated in Calloway, op.cit.,

p.235. 25. The Times (21 October 1932), p. 12. 26. George Hilaire, 'Tendences du decor en Angleterre: un

entretein avec le peintre Henry de Buys Roesingh', nd (c. 1933).

27. Unidentified press cutting, 'Walls Dressed by Moderns', in Fleming's album. AAD 1/302-1981.

28. Saturday Book, op.cit., p. 200. 29. Fleming erroneously annotated the photograph as 1932 in his

album. On this exhibition, the second organised by Oliver Hill and others, see Powers, op. cit.

30. J. McM., 'Decoration à la Mode', House and Garden Book , (17 February 1937), p. 9.

3 1 . Unidentified cutting in AAD 1/3020198 1 . 32. Vogue (12 June 1935), p. 118. 33. Information courtesy of Ronald Pym. 34. Illustrated in Derek Patmore, Colour Schemes and Modern

Furnishings, London 1945, pl. 31 and Calloway, op.cit., pl.294. 35. Todd and Mortimer op.cit., pls. 45-46. 36. Fleming, AAD 1/6-1981. 37. Fleming, AAD 1/6-1981. 38. This interior is illustrated in Calloway, op.cit., pl.420. 39. Other murals painted by Roland Pym for Ronald Fleming were

a grisaille decorative scheme for Lord Faversham at 4 Halkin Street, SW1 1953; paintings of jumbled classical ruins and columns for Lady Fleming at Albany 1954; and classical scenes of Armida and Daphnis and Chloë with figures in niches for the dining room of the Dorchester penthouse decorated by Fleming, 1956,. The artist recalls, 'R.F. disapproved of exposed breasts in latter and ordered me to cover them - the gay point of view. Danny Kaye stayed there for a night at vast expense.' Letter to author, 1 January 1995.

40 AAD 1/7/1981. 41. AAD 1/6-1981.

Alan Powers is Librarian at the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture in London. He has written numerous articles on twentieth-century architecture, decorative arts and murals, and books on H.S. Goodhart-Rendel, Oliver Hill, Shop Front and Modern Block Printed Textiles. He was the organiser of the World Congress on Art Deco in Brighton, July 1995, and is the Vice-Chairman of the Twentieth Century Society.

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