Picturing Change: at Home with the Leisure Class in New York City, 1870s to 1910s

In ‘Picturing Change: At Home with the Leisure Class in New York City, 1870s-1910s’, Douglas Tallack draws on the work of Thorstein Veblen to explore the significance of the visual representation of domestic interior space within a leisure-class logic of consumption and display. Analysing photographic commissions undertaken by the Byron Company of the houses of New York's Four Hundred, and paintings by the American Impressionists William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam, he demonstrates that these images of luxury interiors did more than simply express the taste and lifestyle of the city's new money, however, composing and re-conceptualising the interior scene into a self-contained, private space of material objects shielded from external reality, the baroque saturation of which nevertheless exposes its illusion.