Daniel Cottier: Designer, decorator, dealer
Yale University Press, US$50 hb, 260 pp
Realising the ‘home beautiful’
Among the most celebrated of nineteenth-century British decoration firms, but one that is almost completely forgotten today, was Cottier & Co., founded by the Glaswegian decorator and stained glass artist Daniel Cottier in 1869. The volume Daniel Cottier: Designer, decorator, dealer is the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of this decorator and his eponymous firm. With branches in London, New York, and Sydney, this was a remarkable international enterprise disseminating the principles of Aesthetic interior design, the movement that construed the role of art to be the provision of uplifting delight through visual beauty. A series of essays by a group of eminent art historians, including leading historian of nineteenth-century art Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, considers Cottier’s initial training as a stained glass artist in Scotland, the founding of his London decorating firm, the establishment of the New York and Sydney branches of the business, and the influence Cottier’s activities as a dealer had on the art markets in London and New York.
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