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Style evolution is confusing for a raft of reasons, some almost impossible to know unless you lived in the era. Take, for example, the American car companies of the 1950's. Who would have thought that they would get into a style war in the most ephemeral fashion--tail fins and chrome and white wall tires? I am simplifying a bit as there were such innovations as power steering, power brakes and automatic transmissions that made driving much easier and safer. However, it seems in retrospect that the non-North American car companies were busy designing cars for ordinary humans, especially for people who could not afford even the standard boat-sized Chevy. (The Corvair--unsafe at any speed--was developed to compete with the imports an it was a disaster.) The Japanese cars that arrived en masse in the 1960's were ridiculed for being tinny, but they competed well for having great fuel consumption and just plain being affordable. It is hard to understand in retrospect the American design zeitgeist unless you lived in it--people were so into these massive cars Detroit created. It was a thing and even when the fins and the chrome had died away, the huge boat like vehicle was still the norm. And Detroit, market share eroding, defended itself with nativistic fury--buy American--which missed the point altogether and encouraged design entropy. It's a tough history to write, no less believe.
The English furniture styles that evolved in the early part of the eighteenth century were, as I said last week, dependent on continental models. It remains a mystery, for example, where exactly the ball and claw foot was first interpreted by Europeans and, what the inspiration was and where is that example? In a way, the question is not important--what's important is how various cultures ran with the concept--the British being among the foremost adopters of the claw and ball foot. It is interesting, as the French hardly used the ball and claw at all. Was it because the ball and claw could be aligned with the Protestant countries? There are other aspects to design that also resisted crossing borders, despite the fact that craftsmen crossed the borders all the time. For example, the grand baroque of the French and Dutch of the mid-1650's transformed into a cleaner, less palatial, baroque, possibly because the market was broadening, and then dived headlong into the rococo. In England, there was something called Palladianism that emerged as the English baroque--It's one and the same thing, just purely English. Eventually, it too dives into the rococo style.
Palladianism was the philosophical greenhouse for the new ideas infusing English design. William Kent, the father of English baroque, spent a number of years in Italy and, when asked to help create the furniture at Houghton Hall, relied on the Italian baroque as a resource for his ideas. Italian baroque is different from French and Dutch baroque--it has a freedom that the more northern neighbors might have considered slapdash. Even though the gardens of Bomarzo are centuries earlier than the 17th century, I think of them whenever I think of Italian Baroque. from the Renaissance. (Bomarzo was filled with fantastical, huge and weird garden sculptures.) There is a wildness and unpredictability to it, something William Kent tried to capture--for example, look at the bed (click this link to see) at Houghton Hall. Huge and abundant--an extraordinary tour de force of design--baroque but an emblem of British Palladianism. (Horace Walpole mimicked it with a garden bench at hi home, Strawberry Hill.) And Kent had ideas aplenty as you will find in his furniture and other creations. His Temple of Worthies at Stowe House, a garden sculpture that is really a monument, is emblematic of his adherence to the new British baroque and it is so very British. Maybe the American car companies had a similar compulsion--to create an identifiably American product that the world would not forget once they saw it. Indeed, that did happen, but it might be hard to label it a success.
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