"...above all, I became increasingly unhappy about the way we tend to approach interior design, decoration and the decorative arts of the period in the British Isles. Art history here has concentrated on the history of style in painting and sculpture and to a slightly lesser extent in architecture, with the decorative arts tending to be regarded as second class in the ladder of studies and still largely ignored. As a result, the history of interiors is seen as architect-driven, and at the same time there is little discussion of architects' interests in interiors and the planning of houses..."
"...idealized rooms appear in conversation pictures from the early 1730s onwards, but usually they are as stiff as the figures posed in them. Thus, although patrons and architects were fascinated by proportion and the relationship of spaces, rooms were arranged in a two-dimensional way, with furniture always planned in relation to walls rather than spaces, hardly ever being designed to be free-standing in a room..."
[while speaking of Deportment, and the masculine manner of bowing (Honours) and, lastly, of how a lady should carry her head]: "...that was a visual expression of a highly ordered society that encouraged a sense of looking up, not only metaphorically but literally; it applied to how people looked at each other and also how they looked at rooms. Eighteenth-century rooms were designed, perhaps unconsciously, to be taken in at eye level and upwards, rather than at eye level and down. That can be seen in such points as the way pictures were hung high, portraits were so composed as to read best when looked up to rather than at eye level as they are so often today, and attention was concentrated on entablatures, cornices and the coves of ceilings..."