Professor Clare Taylor

Clare Taylor is Professor of Art History and Material Cultures. Her research focuses on the historic interior and its decoration and the relationship between consumers, designers, makers and objects. She joined the Open University in 2011, having previously taught at Middlesex & Bucks Universities and for the Open University as an Associate Lecturer. Clare has also worked as an curator in museums and galleries across England, Scotland and Wales, and for English Heritage.

Clare's book The Design, Production & Reception of Eighteenth-century wallpaper in Britain www.routledge.com/9781472456151 (Routledge) was shortlisted by The Historians of British Art Book Prize in 2019. Her monograph aligned the growth of wallpaper with developing cultures of luxury, sociability and global trade through study of sites, archives and museum collections across the UK. It argued that wallpaper was a key new material of the long eighteenth-century which made a significant contribution to design, including Chinoserie and a taste for imitation in 'mock India' (English wallpapers imitating Chinese) and 'mock flock' wallpapers. It also showed how the nascent wallpaper industry successfully competed with other trades and spawned new materials for use in decorating the interior, such as papier mâché.

Clare's next book project uncovers the role of gilt leather hangings and related objects in the creation of interiors. She is conducting the first full investigation of the people, places and objects associated with Gilt Leather Rooms across the British Isles, researching not just archival and museum sources, but extant schemes in buildings from castles to the country house, inns to college rooms. She was awarded a Mid-Career Fellowship and a Research Support Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to support her research in connection with this project. The project aims to throw new light on the global nature and usage of gilt leather and on the relationship between printed sources, architectural structures and wall decorations.

A third area of interest is the ways in which the historic interior has been re-interpreted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular investigating the work of decorators, dealers and scholars in promulgating the idea of the 'Georgian' and the ways in which the long eighteenth-century has been viewed through tropes such as the country house style.

Clare welcomes enquiries from potential research students, and would be happy to supervise topics related to her specialisms, in particular on eighteenth-century material culture, issues of gender difference and on twentieth century design as well as in the field of the interior. Contact: clare.taylor@open.ac.uk

Completed students:

Amanda Stevens   ‘Home on the Rails: the Design, Fitting and Decoration of Train Interiors in Britain, c.1920-1955’, CDA with the Science Museum Group (National Railway Museum, York).

Emma Hardy  'A Modern but Useful Art: William Morris, Jeffrey & Co and the Morris & Co wallpapers 1864-c.1928', CDA with the Sanderson Archive Emma Hardy | Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership (oocdtp.ac.uk)

Studentship recruiting Closes midday 7 January 2025: 

Art on the Underground, 1986-2020: contemporary legacies of a modernist project | Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership

Current students:

Lesley Burch 'Sir Alfred East (1844-1913)' (M Phil)

Kerry Apps 'Imagining Asia at Ham House: c.1637-1698', CDA with The National Trust Kerry-Louise Apps | Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership (oocdtp.ac.uk)

Selected publications  

Books

The Design, Production & Reception of Eighteenth-century wallpaper in Britain (The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting,1700-1950, Routledge, 2018) www.routledge.com/9781472456151 

Chapters in books

(forthcoming) ‘In search of the Georgian period room, c.1900-c.1945: Scholars, Dealers and Decorators’, in Howard Coutts, Mark Westgarth and Jane Whittaker (eds) The Period Room: Museum, Material, Experience.  

 ‘ “Modern Swedish Rococo”: the Neo-Georgian interior in Britain c.1920-c.1945’  in Holder, J. and McKellar, E. (eds) Re-Appraising Neo-Georgian Architecture: Colonial, Domestic and Pastoral Visions 1850-1970 (Swindon: Historic England, 2016), 151-166

‘ “Painted paper of Pekin”: eighteenth-century Chinese papers in 1920s Britain’, in Huang, M. (ed.) The Reception of Chinese Art across cultures (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014) 44-64

‘Chinese papers and English imitations in eighteenth-century Britain’, in Stavelow-Hidemark, E. (ed.) New Discoveries, New Research : Papers from the international wallpaper conference at the Nordiska Museet, Stockholm, 2007 (Stockholm: The Nordiska Museet, 2009) 36-53

Journal articles

 ‘Old blocks and modern papers: the enduring appeal of eighteenth-century wallpaper patterns’, The Wallpaper History Review (2024), 55-58

‘Musical instrument covers and their makers in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain and Ireland’, Galpin Society Journal (2024), 138-142

‘Gilt Leather at Gwydir Castle’ PMC Notes, 20, Winter 2022, 21-28 https://issuu.com/paulmelloncentre/docs/pmc_notes_20

'Revisiting London paper-hangings tradesmen I: Crompton & Spinnage', The Wallpaper History Review (2020) 44-50

‘Leather, flock and paper: Early wall coverings at Greyfriars House, Worcester’, Arts, Buildings & Collections Bulletin, The National Trust, Summer 2018, 19-22

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/art-and-collection-resources

‘English wallpaper manufacture, c.1700-c.1800’, The Quarterly: Journal of the British Association of Paper Historian, 83 (July 2012), 13-23

‘Eckhardts & Co and the supply of wall decorations for Shugborough’, Georgian Group Journal, xix (2011), 145-150

 ‘Reading the cards: trade cards as sources for studying the British Eighteenth-century wallpaper trade’, The Wallpaper History Review (2008), 29-32

‘The Division of the Wall: the use of wallpapers in decorative schemes 1870-1910’, Journal of the Decorative Arts Society, 12 (1988), 18-25

Online contributions

Fota House and its Wallpaper Archive (wallpaperhistorysociety.org.uk) 2022

‘She is now of the family of Champcommunal and other money makers’: women, antiques and interiors in mid twentieth-century London | antiquedealersblog for the AHRC funded research project ‘Antique Dealers: The British Antique Trade in the 20th Century, a cultural geography’ University of Leeds, 2021

Solving the puzzle: Unexpected findings inside A History of English Furniture | antiquedealersblog for the AHRC funded research project ‘Antique Dealers: The British Antique Trade in the 20th Century, a cultural geography’ University of Leeds, 2021

'Margaret Lambert' blog post as part of LSE Women, 2018 http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2018/03/09/margaret-barbara-lambert-1906-95-a-thorough-and-energetic-investigator/