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By columnist Paul Paradis, Art Historian, Specialist Consultant in French Furniture and Decorative Arts
12 November 2009
Chicago: A Final Curiosity
Strolling through the hallowed galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago last week, I noticed
an arrow pointing down the grand staircase indicating the Thorne
Rooms. Having spent sufficient
time in the spectacular French Impressionists wing (collection second only to
that in the Musée d’Orsay), I decided to be adventurous and explore. With only a vague recollection of the
Thorne name and expecting to find a couple of reconstituted period rooms with furniture
laid out à la Rothschild, I was in for a big surprise. Instead, there were 68 tiny scale model (one
inch to one foot) replicas of period rooms complete with woodwork, moldings,
woven rugs, paintings, porcelain and every type of objet d’art belonging to the period in question.
Mrs. James Ward Thorne (1882-1966), a wealthy Chicago socialite,
designed each room herself and hired highly skilled craftspeople to create the pieces
of tiny furniture and objects between 1934 and 1940. An impassioned hobby, albeit eccentric, became her life’s
work. The replicas of French
interiors are at times quaintly inaccurate, for example in the Louis XIV (pictured above) salon
a copy of a gilt-wood round table with an antique porphyry top conserved in the
Louvre is placed in the middle of a living room with a vase of calla lilies (a
20th century creation) on top as if in a private dwelling of a
bourgeois family expecting visitors.
The layout of the room is distinctly un-seventeenth century. However, the
technical skill and rigor applied to create the little cozy dioramas are
breathtaking.
French
Salon of the Louis XIV Period, 1660-1700, c. 1937 (Photo: Art Institute of
Chicago)
Certain pieces of furniture are copies of known examples from English
country homes, French châteaux, and important private and public collections, while
some seem to have been designed specifically for the project. The rooms are placed in approximate chronological
order, and cover France, Germany, and England from the 13th to 20th
centuries. It seems that Mrs.
Thorne’s knowledge of English and American decors was far deeper and more accurate
and these examples provide a precious overview of the evolution of interiors
from the 17th to 20th centuries.
English Dining Room of the Georgian
Period, 1770-90, c. 1937 (Photo:
Art Institute of Chicago)
Although details provided at the exhibition concerning the individual
rooms are sparse, the technical and creative energy that went into their
creation is well documented. (For
in-depth information, see Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms at the Art
Institute of Chicago,
2005) The visitor can observe preparatory
drawings of the scale furniture as well as the molds used to create the
period wood and stucco work. In
one moving example, we learn that the female artisan responsible for the
painstakingly accurate miniature woven rugs and tapestries trained in the art
especially to join Mrs. Thorne’s project. And so Chicago brings us full circle, from the monumental
architectural wonders discussed last week to this eccentric micro-world. I am sure that more surprises are
waiting to be discovered in a future visit.
Paris Update: Precious Ivory and Porcelain
Our
Marie-Antoinette miniature caused quite a stir in the auction room and reached
a final hammer price €11 200, quadrupling its low estimate. The delicate portrait on ivory is
likely after an original pastel by Joseph Ducreux (1735-1802) completed in 1769
when the artist was on mission in Austria for the express purpose of portraying
the young Archduchess for the eyes of the French court, and more importantly,
the future King Louis XVI. Ducreux
was the only student of the virtuoso master of pastel, Maurice-Quentin de La
Tour (1704-1788), and his work so pleased Marie-Antoinette that she later
appointed him her principal painter despite his lack of membership in the
prestigious Royal Academy of Painting and sculpture created in 1648. He was named Baron and became a famous
portraitist for the French Royal court as well as those of England and
Germany. The original pastel is
conserved at the Château de Versailles.
Pastel of Marie-Antoinette by Joseph
Ducreux, 1769. (Photo : Château de Versailles)
Miniature painting on ivory appeared in France around 1700 when it was introduced by the Venetian pastel artist Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757). However French artists maintained a preference for vellum (animal skin) until after the arrival of Pierre-Adolphe Hall (1739-1793), a Swedish miniature painter who came to Paris en 1766 and revolutionized the technique in France by using exclusively ivory. It would remain the preferred support for miniatures throughout the 19th century. Its transparency allowed nuances of color through the application of successive layers of gouache over a water color base. Miniatures were the equivalent of photographs of the day and were important diplomatic tools used to introduce people of rank outside their place of origin.
Meanwhile, an important collection of French porcelain was offered last week by the auctioneers J.J. Mathias, Baron-Ribeyre & Associés. The factories of Chantilly (est. 1730), Mennecy (est. 1735) and Saint Cloud (est. 1666) are well represented with 130 lots mostly of soft-paste porcelain. The history of porcelain production in France is perhaps too long to cover in this format, however, the distinction between soft and hard paste porcelain is an important one. The secret of hard-paste porcelain was likely invented by the Chinese during the Tang period (618-906) when the key ingredient for obtaining translucence (the defining characteristic of porcelain), kaolin, was blended in the clay mix. The molecular structure of kaolin, a naturally occurring mineral substance, renders a high degree of malleability to the clay for molding and sculpting objects, but when fired at high temperature (1400° C) becomes extremely hard and, as mentioned above, translucent.
The Muslim world became familiar with Chinese porcelain through diplomatic gifts and trade, and hence began experimenting as early as the 10th century in Iran for example, where soft-paste porcelain is thought to have emerged. Soft-paste porcelain does not contain the key ingredient of kaolin, but a specific mixture of salts and minerals which were blended together and fired to create a compound or base which rendered the final object only partly translucent. Europe began creating soft-paste porcelain in the 16th century, developed most notably under the patronage Francesco de Medici (1541-1587) in Florence. The blue and white decoration was clearly meant to emulate Chinese porcelain.
A Medici porcelain ewer, 1575-1587
(Photo: Musée du Louvre)
In France, experimentation with porcelain became more intensive during the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715) fueled in part by the emerging taste for coffee, tea and hot chocolate. The faience (clay pottery covered in a pewter-based enamel) manufactories of Rouen (1673) and Saint-Cloud (1678) developed their versions of soft-paste porcelain under Louis Poterat and Pierre Chicaneau respectively. The secret of the salt-mineral mix died with Poterat, but Chicaneau passed on his recipe to his sons at Saint Cloud. A source of kaolin would not be discovered in France until 1768, long behind the footsteps of Meissen in Germany which began producing hard-paste porcelain as early as 1713. The Sèvres factory would develop hard-paste porcelain from 1769 which became the staple behind its reputation. The fascinating history of the Vincennes and Sèvres factories under the patronage of Louis XV (r. 1715-1774) and Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764) deserve their own stories and will be discussed in a future article.
This diversion is only to set the
stage for a charming piece offered at the auction, a soft-paste porcelain statuette
of a leopard by the Chantilly factory, dated 1735-1740. Louis Henri de Bourbon Condé
(1692-1740), grandson of Louis XIV, created the Chantilly Factory in 1730 under
the direction of chemist Cicaire Cirou who developed a formula for soft-paste
porcelain. The Prince’s passion
for Japanese porcelain fueled the desire to develop his own version and a
penchant for hunting and animals influenced the choice of objects produced in
his factory.
Statuette of a seated leopard,
Chantilly 1735-1740, estimate 30 000 \ 35 000 € (Photo: J.J.
Mathias, Baron-Ribeyre & Associés)
The “leopard” is reminiscent of a
Chinese Fu lion in its pose, but the strange combination of tiger stripes on
the legs and spots on the body are probably linked to the depiction of tigers
in Korean painting. Like the
dragon, the tiger was considered a protector and was a popular subject in Korean
art, which in turn influenced Japanese artists who had never seen a real
tiger. A similar statuette is
conserved in the Jack and Belle Linsky Collection at the Metropolitan Museum in
New York where it is described as a “Japanese tiger”. Tiger or leopard, this rare little creature is a precious
example of the historic passion in France for things oriental and the technical
and artistic progress it inspired.
The results of this sale will follow next week.
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