Enfilade

With a 6.3€ million restoration completed, the question of the future of the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris has been brewing for over a year now (see, for instance, this March 2009 story in Le Figaro or this February 2009 piece in The Art Tribune). On Friday, The New York Times chimed in with the following report:

“Navy Buildings’s Next Tenant Has Paris Guessing,” by Steven Erlanger and Maïa de la Baume, The New York Times (6 August 2010)

Place de la Concorde, Paris, Hôtel de la Marine to the right, photo by Tristan Nitot (Wikimedia Commons)

The building where Marie Antoinette’s death certificate was signed, and from whose balcony her execution by guillotine was witnessed, may soon be up for grabs. The building, the massive Hôtel de la Marine, sits on what is now the Place de la Concorde, one of the choicest and most expensive bits of land in Paris. It has been the operational headquarters of the French Navy and its top command since 1789, when revolutionary mobs pushed King Louis XVI from Versailles and forced him to Paris.

But France is building a modern military headquarters in southwest Paris, and the navy is expected to leave the Hôtel de la Marine by 2015. The old building’s fate has not been decided, and it has become something of a parlor game here to suggest uses for its 215,000 square feet and 553 rooms. “The navy has been here for 220 years,” said Olivier Laurens, 63, a vice admiral now working in the Department of Naval Heritage, escorting a reporter on a rare visit to the building. “There is nostalgia, of course. But we are greatly attached to this building and wish to see it preserved.”

The navy mattered even more in the 18th century than it does now, and Louis XVI’s minister of the navy found space in the building, which was then being used to store royal furnishings near the king’s Tuileries Palace. Designed by the royal architect Jacques-Ange Gabriel and constructed between 1757 and 1774 at the request of Louis XV, possibly for the dauphin, the Hôtel de la Marine is one of the jewels of 18th-century Paris. Much of it is largely untouched. Its splendid ceremonial rooms were recently restored for $9.5 million by the French industrial and construction group Bouygues. The work, which took more than two years and was finished in May 2009, included renovation of the columns of the facade, known widely as the Balcony of History, from which the executions of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were viewed. . . .

In an era of tight budgets, many plans and rumors of plans have been floated: for a museum of French history, a museum of decorative arts, a branch of the national library, an annex of the Louvre, a reception area for foreign dignitaries or even a center for human-rights organizations. . . .

For the full story, click here»

For its regular ‘Home & Garden’ shopping column, The New York Times recently (21 July) featured Susan Weber — Director, Founder, and Professor at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts (and, as the story notes, the former wife of George Soros). Persistence is the key theme of the profile — perhaps a virtue that fits well with our recent discussion of the status of eighteenth-century art historical studies. In any case, it’s a notable instance of mainstream exposure for an academic working in our period — however exceptional Weber may be — as well as exposure for a still relatively new program that’s already produced exciting results.

From ArtInfo (13 July 2010). . .

Eighteen months into his tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas P. Campbell is beginning to make significant hires at the museum. Earlier this month he stole American painting and sculpture curator Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser from the Wadsworth Atheneum, and now Artnet is reporting that the museum has snapped up Xavier Salomon, the chief curator of London’s Dulwich College Picture Gallery, to join the Met’s Italian painting department. . . .

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In a 30-minutes audio interview available at Yang-May Ooi’s Fusion View (and occasioned by the 2007 Canaletto exhibition at Dulwich), Salomon discusses

his own pan-European roots and about the fusion art of Canaletto, the great Venetian painter who came to London in 1746. Canaletto painted famous London scenes with his Italian eye, staying in this vibrant city for 10 years. Xavier talks about what London might have been like at that time and why Canaletto came here for his painting. He also talks about his personal experiences of European art and what it takes to become the curator of one of the most respected art galleries in the UK.

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A 2008 feature from the Dulwich website indicates a variety of Salomon’s preferences including bespoke suits, scallops, Palermo, Verdi, and Venetian velvet slippers. What’s not to like? Well . . . maybe the camel (though even at that, I’ve never been on one; so who knows? Perhaps taste depends on trust more than we might like to admit).

Press release from the Huntington:

Teapot, ca. 1750, Strasbourg, Paul Hannong factory, petit feu faïence. Gift of MaryLou Boone. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Art patron and collector MaryLou Boone has given The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art each a group of important French ceramics from her collection. The works of faïence and soft-paste porcelain represent all of the major centers of production in France from roughly 1600 to 1900. The Huntington received 27 objects and LACMA received 26 that were selected to complement the existing holdings of each institution. They include teapots, potpourris, tabletop sculptures, inkwells, sugar casters, large plates, pitchers, tureens, and cups and saucers.

Boone, a resident of Pasadena, Calif., and a longtime supporter of LACMA and The Huntington, began collecting French ceramics more than 25 years ago while traveling through France with her late husband, George, also a great patron of the arts. She is the author of the catalog that accompanied a 1998 exhibition of highlights from her collection at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif. She will help produce a catalog of her entire collection, numbering around 150, working with Catherine Hess, chief curator of European art at The Huntington, and Elizabeth Williams, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Assistant Curator in the decorative arts and design department at LACMA. An exhibition of the works will take place at LACMA from October 2012 to January 2013. (more…)

As reported by the AP, “a first edition of the first U.S. census signed by Thomas Jefferson in 1791 is heading for the auction block in New York City.”

Here’s the description from Sotheby’s:

N08653, Wednesday, 14 April 2010, 2pm, Lot 98

Return of the Whole Number of Persons within the Several Districts of the United States. Philadelphia: Childs and Swaine, 1791

Estimate: 50,000-70,000 USD

8vo (8 x 4 3/4 in.; 204 x 125 mm). Signed on the final text leaf (“Th:Jefferson”); minor worming in lower left margin affecting the title-page and first text leaf, some marginal spotting. Contemporary Dutch-combed marbled paper wrappers; right edge of upper wrapper frayed, lower half of backstrip perished, wormhole in lower left corner of upper wrapper, some remnants
of paper adhering to joints. Green cloth folding-case, tan morocco
spine lettered gilt. . . .

CATALOGUE NOTE

First edition of the first United States census, signed by Thomas Jefferson on the final text leaf. The enumeration was evidently printed in a very small edition for distribution by the Secretary of State at whose urging the census was undertaken. Rare, only two other copies have appeared at auction since 1975: the Park and the Sedgwick-Norton copies.

In its January 2010 issue, The Magazine Antiques profiles a remarkable collection of eighteenth-century decorative arts. It’s notable both for the quality of the objects–including a looking glass from Spencer House–and the fact that the Met’s Wrightsman Galleries (just recently reinstalled) provided the design inspiration. As Martin Chapman writes:

View of the entrance hall, with a grouping of objects around a large gilded wood jardiniere attributed to Giuseppe Maria Bonzanigo (1749-1820) of Turin. Photo by Aya Brackett.

One of California’s finest collections of eighteenth-century English and European decorative arts is to be found in San Francisco in a large Queen Anne revival house in Pacific Heights. Carefully chosen to evoke the atmosphere of an English country house or a French château, these objects shine brilliantly against the dark brown paneling in the main rooms. When the eminent San Francisco decorator Michael Taylor (1927-1986) worked here in the 1960s, the first thing he wanted to do was bleach the paneling to off-white tones, but the owners persisted with their original idea of preserving the dark character of the walls to act as a foil for their collections. The results are extremely effective. These rich and jewellike interiors were achieved with the services of another notable San Francisco decorator, Anthony Hail (1925-2006). They work most beautifully at night when warm subtle lighting provides an entrancing background for the objects.

On the opposite wall of the entrance hall is an English Palladian looking glass attributed to John Vardy (1718-1765), ca. 1755-1758, one of a pair from Spencer House, London. The neoclassical console table, also one of a pair, is stamped by Georges Jacob (1739-1814, m. 1765), the Chinese porcelain cachepot has French mounts of the 1840s, and the chinoiserie mirrored wall sconces were formerly in Government House in Cape Town, South Africa. Photo by Aya Brackett.

What strikes the visitor most about the main rooms is the owners’ extraordinary facility for choosing fine objects and putting them together in striking groupings. This singular talent was found most famously in the work of John Fowler (1906-1977), the English designer who did so much to create English country house taste after World War II. Almost as famous, and certainly as influential on the Continent, were the interiors of the amateur Carlos de Beistegui (1895-1970). Beistegui’s Proustian evocations of the past at the Château de Groussay outside Paris beginning in the 1940s were more formal than Fowler’s, although they retained the relaxed ambience of the English country house. But it was the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that most directly influenced these collectors. They were so impressed by the installation of those galleries in the 1960s that they asked Hail to use them for inspiration in their house. In the last ten years the owners have made a series of acquisitions that have added another dimension to the interiors. The main rooms all combine comfort with a measure of formality, but it is the arrangements of objects that give
them scale and richness. . . .

For the full article and lots more photos, click here»