Consuming Splendor: Luxury Goods in England, 1580–1680

Consuming Splendor: Luxury Goods in England, 1580-1680 was part of the Exhibitions at the Folger, opened September 15, and closed on December 31, 2005. The exhibition was curated by Linda Levy Peck and Rachel Doggett.

Demand for luxury goods—rich fabrics, lacquered furniture, tapestries, chimneypieces, silver, porcelain, crystal, paintings, watches, and fine jewels—grew dramatically in England during the first half of the seventeenth century. Exotic products, such as tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and tea from the Indies, Asia, and Africa penetrated the English market, creating new public spaces and private rituals. People at many levels of society more time and more money dressing themselves, decorating their houses, and whetting their appetites. To meet increasing demand, the first London shopping malls were created. New goods from home and abroad marked their purchasers as fashionable, cosmopolitan, and, in the words of contemporaries, "modern."

Consuming Splendor examined the ways in which the consumption of luxury goods transformed social practices, royal policies, and the economy in seventeenth-century England. It told the story of new goods, new aspirations, and new ways to shop; new building, furnishing, and collecting; and the new relationship of luxury, technology, and science. Over the course of the seventeenth century, luxury consumption and the appropriation of artifacts and skills from abroad transformed England into a center of European growth and innovation.

Exhibition material

Shops and Goods

"What is't you buy?"

The new and fashionable attracted shoppers, from the country girl who wanted to buy "London silk" from her local draper and haberdasher to the well-to-do who demanded and increasingly diverse range of luxury goods from abroad. Merchants used their knowledge to tailor goods such as Venetian glass and Chinese porcelain to the home market. As business prospered, they extended credit to those shoppers without cash on hand. At the same time, contemporary representations of shopping in sermons, plays, courtesy literature, and court cases dwelt on the dangers of shopping and the bargaining away of virtue and estate.

Tokens from the Seven Stars, the White Hart, and Mary Long's at the Sign of the Rose, were issued by tradesmen in part because of the scarcity of small coins, but they also served to advertise the businesses they represented. In the 1650s and 1660s, hundreds of shopkeepers issued and distributed such tokens, enabling eager shoppers to purchase items like the luxurious fur muffs shown in Czech artist Wenceslaus Hollar's engraving.

The muffs, lace collars, gloves, and fans so skillfully depicted by Hollar were also celebrated in the grand portraits of the period. Men and women sitting for portraits were sure to be depicted wearing the most sumptuous and fashionable clothes and surrounded by rich fabrics, tapestries, and other goods that signaled their wealth and nobility.

Items included

• Wenceslaus Hollar. A Group of Muffs and Articles of Dress on a Table. Etching. Antuerpiae: 1647. ART 250- 011 (size S). LUNA Digital Image.
• Tradesman's tokens from the Seven Stars, the White Hart, and the Mary Long in Russell Street Covent Garden, 17th century. ART H-P A1b nos.6, 8, 32.

Supplemental materials

Learn more from Linda Levy Peck's fascinating book, from Cambridge University Press, about the emergence of a consumer society in seventeenth-century England.

Peck, Linda Levy. Consuming splendor: society and culture in seventeenth-century England. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Folger Call Number: DA380 .P43 2005