Q: Your recent post about “repair” refers to guests who “repaired to the drawing room.” That made me wonder about the origin of “drawing room.” I doubt it was ever a room set aside for sketching portraits.
A: The term “drawing room” began life as a shortening of “withdrawing-room,” a room for people to withdraw or retire to.
As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “drawing room” originally referred to “any private room or chamber to which people may withdraw, usually attached to a more public room.”
The dictionary’s earliest “drawing room” citation, which we’ve expanded, is an entry made April 30, 1635, in an account of expenses for work at Althorp House in Northamptonshire, England:
“To Leeson 1 day cutting bragetts [brackets] for the drawinge room.” From The Washingtons: A Tale of a Country Parish in the 17th Century, Based on Authentic Documents (1860), by John Nassau Simpkinson.
Later, the OED says, “drawing room” came to mean a room “reserved for the reception and entertainment of guests.”
“From the late 18th to the early 20th century,” the OED explains, “it was conventional in polite society for ladies at a dinner party to withdraw to the drawing room following dinner, while the gentlemen remained for a period at the dining room table before joining them.”
The dictionary cites an early example of that usage in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791). Here Boswell describes a dinner at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds on April 25, 1778: “We went to the drawing-room, where was a considerable increase of company.”
The first Oxford citation for the original term, “withdrawing-room,” is from Ram-Alley; or, Merrie-Trickes (1611), a comedy by by Lording Barry: “IIe waite in the with-drawing roome, Vntill you call.”
(The dictionary describes Barry as a playwright and a pirate. We’ll add theater owner, privateer, and ship owner. He also sailed with Sir Walter Raleigh on a 1517 expedition to Guyana in search of the mythical city of El Dorado.)
The OED notes that an even earlier term, “withdrawing chamber,” appeared in the late 14th century. The earliest citation combines the Middle English “withdrawyng chambre” with Anglo-Norman French in this passage from the official records of the English Parliament:
“Triours des Petitions … tendront lour place en la Chapelle de la Withdrawyng Chambre” (“The examiners of the petitions … shall have their meeting in the chapel of the withdrawing chamber” (from the Rolls of Parliament, 1392-3).
Getting back to “drawing room,” here’s an example we’ve found in Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, featuring one of our favorite fictional battle-axes, Lady Catherine de Bourgh:
“When the ladies returned to the drawing-room, there was little to be done but to hear Lady Catherine talk, which she did without any intermission till coffee came in, delivering her opinion on every subject in so decisive a manner as proved that she was not used to have her judgment controverted.”
Drawing rooms began falling out of favor in the early 20th century, as did sitting rooms, morning rooms, etc., according to an OED citation from Discovery magazine, July 1933:
“The sitting-rooms, parlour, drawing-room, morning room, study, library, ballroom and so on have all been kaleidoscoped into the living room.”
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