Anca I. Lasc is Associate Professor of History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute, USA

Introduction
1 The collector as taste advisor and interior decorator: popular advice manuals and the orchestration of the private interior
2 The inventor of interiors: old professions in search of a name
3 Private home, artistic stage: the circulation and display of interior dreamscapes
4 The image of furniture: department stores and the trade in interior decoration designs
5 Beautiful disorder, exception to the rule: the development of a new design aesthetic
Epilogue: the presentness of historicism: the Musée centennal du mobilier and the legacy of proto-interior designers
Index

This book explores the origins of interior design in nineteenth-century France. It shows how new, modern techniques of image-making and reproduction enabled the still-unnamed profession of the interior designer to take shape.