Review: Kristin Nord Takes a Walkabout at Yale's Edwardian Opulence Exhibit

Ah, the Edwardians – with their sumptuous clothes and candelight dinners, their bone china, their silks, their gleaming silver. Merchant and Ivory and the BBC have made fortunes selling fanciful pastiches of this era to the viewing pubic, all the while touching lightly on a less seemly back story.

Photograph: Unknown maker, probably English, Mrs. James de Rothschild's Ostrich Feather Fan, 1912–13, ostrich feathers, blond tortoiseshell, platinum, and diamonds, Waddesdon, The Rothschild Collection (Rothschild Family Trust). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT

Edwardian Opulence at the Yale Center for British Art digs a little deeper to hint at this underside, in a stimulating exhibition more than 10 years in the making. The paintings, photographs, and artifacts included in this exhibit roughly correspond with the reign of King Edward VII (1901-1910) and immediately prior to the First World War in August 1914, beginning with a remarkable gown embellished with traditional Indian embroidery and beadwork and moving through a series of galleries that explore the ways in which Edwardians were on the cusp of change.

In this world an aristocracy clung to habits and shrinking holdings while the leading tastemaker, the wife of the Viceroy of India, was in fact, a wealthy American. Suddenly women to the manner borne were posing for photographs beside their first automobiles instead of sitting for oil portraits with their whippets.

Opulence for this group seemed rather often synonymous with excess. Men rang for port on a Faberge bell pushes; women wore tiaras and broaches made of blood diamonds from South Africa. Up close, these people could have served as character studies for the very wealthy a century later, safely hidden behind closed gates. It was during this time that Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class – and no wonder.

Yet there were forces conspiring to challenge this increasingly decadent world – as women organized for suffrage, and an emerging middle class fought for workers’ rights. American money was flowing into the British Isles, underwriting the construction of cathedral-like department stores that would soon supply goods to the upwardly mobile. In this exhibition it’s oddly touching to see portraits of a nouveau riche floozy in a bit of a faceoff against a female aristocrat. It’s as if each could have just dressed for dinner with the Bloomsbury group – only the woman literally spilling out of her black evening gown will just get so far.

This exhibition offers a wonderful inside tour of the ups and downs of this age – and the many innovations that were fueling a change in how people lived and the stations to which they aspired. There are audio and film galleries where you can hear rare tapes of prominent people and see footage of London where automobiles and horse-drawn carriages are struggling to accommodate each other. There are photographers using cameras as tools for art making, and artists capturing the excitement of London’s theater district. In the powerful portrait of the unknown soldier, one senses war has officially ended this era; one world has drawn to a close as another chafes in the wings.

Yet the fairy-tale version of this era continues to capture our imaginations.

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Review: Kristin Nord Takes a Walkabout at Yale's Edwardian Opulence Exhibit

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