{{Short description|American interior decorator (1887 – 1968)}} {{Use mdy dates|date=April 2025}} {{Infobox person/Wikidata | fetchwikidata = ALL | dateformat = mdy }}
'''Rose Cumming''' (1887<ref>{{Cite book|title=Legendary decorators of the twentieth century|last=Hampton|first=Mark|date=1992|publisher=Doubleday|isbn=0385263619|oclc=24288083}}</ref> – March 21, 1968<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F06E0DD143BE73ABC4B51DFB5668383679EDE|title=Rose Gumming, 81, Decorator Oi 'Ancestral' Interiors, Dead; Famous in the 20s for Vivid Rooms -- She Deplored Bargain Hunters|date=1968-03-23|work=The New York Times|access-date=2017-06-18|language=en-US|issn=0362-4331}}</ref>) was a flamboyant and eccentric interior decorator whose career was based in New York.<ref>Jeffrey Simpson, ''Rose Cumming: Design Inspiration'' (2012) is the standard full-length biography.</ref>
== Biography == Rose Cumming was born on an Australian sheep station in New South Wales.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Deacon |first= Desley |date=2013 |title= From Victorian Accomplishment to Modern Profession: Elocution Takes Judith Anderson, Sylvia Bremer and Dorothy Cumming to Hollywood, 1912-1918 |url=https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/AJVS/article/view/9364 |format=PDF |journal= Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=40–65 |access-date=June 19, 2017}}</ref><ref name=":0">{{Cite news|url=http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/cumming-article|title=From a Different Cloth | Architectural Digest|last=Cunningham|first=Jeffrey Simpson,Billy|newspaper=Architectural Digest|access-date=2016-11-21}}</ref> In 1917 she came to New York with her sister, silent-screen actress Dorothy Cumming.<ref name=":0" />
Following advice of her friend Frank Crowninshield, editor of ''Vanity Fair,'' Cumming decided to become a decorator.<ref name=":1">{{Cite news|url=https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/cumming-article-012000|title=Design Legends: Rose Cumming | Architectural Digest|last=Tapert|first=Annette|newspaper=Architectural Digest|access-date=2016-11-21}}</ref> She worked for Mary Buehl before opening her own shop in 1921.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0nxzw0wdIREC&q=Rose+Cumming&pg=PA310|title=Women Designers in the USA, 1900-2000: Diversity and Difference|last=Kirkham|first=Pat|date=2016-11-21|publisher=Yale University Press|isbn=978-0300093315|language=en}}</ref> Cumming's shop was her decorating office and a retail shop for antiques and fabrics.<ref name=":0" /> She put her best furniture in the window of the shop left the lights on at night, which nobody had ever done.<ref name=":0" /> Her shop sold Bromo-Seltzer bottles and empty candy boxes alongside fine French furniture. As she explained, “It’s all salesmanship."<ref name=":2">{{Cite news|url=http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/a-thorny-flower/|title=A Thorny Flower|last=Petkanas|first=Christopher|newspaper=T Magazine|access-date=2016-11-21}}</ref>
She was known for ''chinoiserie'',<ref name=":2" /> displayed in the Chinese wallpapers of her often-photographed drawing room, and for baroque and rococo Venetian, South German and Austrian furniture,<ref name=":0" /> at a time when conservative New York tastes ran to Louis XV and English Georgian furnishings. Her color sense favored saturated, dramatic tones. She brought chintz to informal dressing rooms and bedrooms, inaugurated the vogue for smoked mirrors veined with gold and extended her love of reflective and lacquered surfaces to lacquered walls, satin upholstery and the metallic wallpapers she invented.
In Cumming's own town house, the living room had early-eighteenth-century hand-painted Chinese wallpaper with a silvery background and Louis XV furniture. Conventional lamps were one of her pet hates, so black candles lighted the room.<ref name=":1" /> At the top of her townhouse was the infamous “Ugly Room” filled with predatory images of snakes, vultures, boars and monkeys.<ref name=":2" />
Her clients included Marlene Dietrich, Mary Pickford,<ref name=":0" /> and Norma Shearer.<ref name=":1" />
She designed and printed fabrics. Her sister Eileen Cecil, a former editor of Harpers Bazaar, stylist, and advertising force in her own right, carried on the business after Cumming's death in 1968. Later the merchandise line was leased to Dessin Fournir, and currently to Wells Abbott.<ref name=":0" /> Her great-niece Sarah Cumming Cecil carried on the atelier "Rose Cumming Design", now based in Portland, ME, presenting a stripped-down simplified style.<ref>[http://rosecummingdesign.com/about.html Rose Cumming Design].</ref>
==Notes== {{Reflist}}
== External links ==
* [https://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/nyhs/pr393_cumming_cecil/ Rose Cumming, Russell L. Cecil, and Affiliated Families Photographs and Papers] at the [https://www.nyhistory.org/library New-York Historical Society]. {{authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cumming, Rose}} Category:American interior designers Category:1968 deaths Category:American women interior designers Category:20th-century American women inventors Category:1887 births Category:20th-century American inventors