work, Christopher Hyland
remarks, "France has a
deep and very long history
of
understanding
the
importance of the decorative
arts, both to the economy
and politics of each era,
something that de Nicolay
records in her books, which
are catalogues of French
excellence in the decorative
arts."
In America, in only the last
generation or so—with
the notable exception of
the Winterthur Program in
American Material Culture,
established in 1952—
has there been an advent
of
university
graduate
programs dedicated to the
history of the decorative
arts. Before that, it fell to the
auction houses to teach what
was almost an underground
discipline, under the rubric
of connoisseurship. De
Nicolay is emphatically part
of that tradition; her books
form a syllabus in the history
of French taste.
HYLAND
