Christophe Huet, Singeries at the Hotel du Rohan

Famous for his magnificent monkey paintings - known as Singeries - Christophe Huet painted this extraordinary set of panels for the Hotel du Rohan, in Paris. Popular to this day, these cheeky and occasionally racy anthropomorphic painted scenes of monkeys cavorting in human garb were hugely fashionable in Eighteenth Century France.





Though Berain and Audran were justly as famous in their day, Huet has perhaps been better remembered because of the quality of his surviving examples at the Chateau de Chatilly. Bertrand du Vignaud, head of the World Monuments Fund in Europe, says, “I consider the Grand Singerie the most important décor in the chateau,” claiming that “It is Huet’s masterpiece."

I was thrilled to come across this practically unknown set of phototype plates of his Cabinet des Singes for Rohan from a volume called Les Vieux Hotels de Paris, printed in 1905. One of a series of large folios containing beautiful prints, these books were an attempt to archive surviving examples of interior and exterior decoration around Paris at the turn of the 20th century.




His work at the Hotel du Rohan is lesser known than Chantilly, but deserves recognition. Originally built in 1705, and home to successive cardinals and bishops, Huet's Rohan panels were eventually commissioned some time around 1750 by the Cardinal de Soubise, who gave the Hotel (by which term they mean mansion) a complete transformation. According to the book Debut de l'Imprimerie en France, Huet was assisted in painting the panels by Dutour, who painted the animals, and Crespin, who painted the landscapes. Huet is said to have painted the "flowers," by which I am assuming that means to include the ornamental borders and frames.




Those were heady times, to be sure. Marie Antoinette would regularly come poncing by for some cake with her entourage, before the whole party went tits up. Then, during the Revolution, it was placed into receivership and all its furniture and magnificent library were scattered to the winds. Later, after Napoleon had acquired it, the National Printing Press settled into it as their plush new 10,000 square meter HQ. It was eventually left to the National Archive in 1927, when Robert Danis was responsible for the gargantuan task of restoring the mansion to its former glory. Years of abuse, including the stripping out of the grand staircase to accommodate printing offices, left it a shell of its former self. Despite extensive efforts, much of the old decorations have not survived.



The panels have that unmistakable Huet look. His linework when seen up close and in black & white, has  the quality of an engraving that's received washes of color.

Thomas Jayne Wins Arthur Ross Award

I had the pleasure of restoring these antique Chinese panels for Thomas Jayne

Congratulations to Thomas Jayne for winning the Arthur Ross Excellence Award for Interior Design, announced by ICAA today. It's no surprise really, as Jayne and his team have been producing stunning interiors informed by history yet resolutely facing the future, for over two decades.

Beaux-Arts apartment in New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]

Schooled with the likes of Parish-Hadley and Kevin McNamara (who once quipped that "rich people don't need towel bars because they never hang up their towels"), and having received a scholarly education at Winterthur, the Met and the Getty, Jayne was a shoo-in for the Architectural Digest Top 100 list of best decorators in America.

Philadelphia townhouse [photo Peter Estersohn]

Join us on February 28th as we attend Jayne's lecture in promotion of his new(ish) monograph, American Decoration: A Sense of Place, published by Monacelli in 2012.

Cabinet Room, downtown loft, New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]

 His traditional schooling might otherwise imply the production of dry "period" rooms, but Jayne is always conscious of the current time and place. And that place, for him, is America.  In his most recent book he traces his lineage back 400 years in America, through each of his family's homes, citing the likes of America's very first interior designer, Elsie De Wolfe, as influences. He refers to her ability to reference and assimilate European taste and style into something quintessentially American, and while he allows that there is no such thing as an absolute definition of American decoration,  it is something he consciously strives to achieve in his own work.

[photo Peter Estersohn]

He also, somehow, finds time to write weekly for his blog, for a personal glimpse into the working mind of one of America's top designers.

Jayne also authored the renowned Finest Rooms in America, showcasing the very best in interior and architectural design, from classics like Frank Lloyd Wright and Frances Elkins, to contemporary designers such as Bunny Williams, John Saladino, and of course, Albert Hadley.

[photo Peter Estersohn]

[photo Peter Estersohn]

Guest bedroom, [photo Peter Estersohn]

West Side apartment, New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]

I'll Show You Mine, If You Show Me Yours [Part I]

Wiley Purkey

Well, there's been such a huge response that I'm going to be making this into a series of posts. I'm getting palpitations thinking about all the money I could blow on the books I don't have here. 

Artist Wiley Purkey submitted this great selection. The period in American Art around the 1920s is fascinating to me. Artists reacted in different ways to the mechanization of Industry. Disenchanted by the industrialization of America, the likes of Edward Hopper captured the sense of urban isolation felt by so many. An intensely private man, and a lifelong celibate, he painted this America from the inside. The Regionalists, on the other hand, represented an artistic belief that rural America and back-to-basics labor off the land could replace urbanization and the factory-line. Illustrators Howard Pyle, and his student N.C. Wyeth, espoused a similar (called Brandywine) Romanticism of New England. Burchfield portrayed similarly heightened visions of the American landscape, turning his back on the urban world of his old friend Hopper. Andrew Wyeth was called a 'Regionalist' by his detractors, but he painted a "Pennsylvania [that] seems to groom itself with a cold gray tongue" [source]. This was not quite the Romantic regionalism of his contemporaries. Wyeth's was darker, more private. A rural version of Hopper's urbanity. Impressionists in Winter is, in my opinion, the best of Impressionist art. When the artist's palette is reduced to almost nothing, there's a reliance on composition and value that is almost Japanese at times. Not surprising then to see a copy of Whistler's beautiful Etchings here too.

Book Links: 

The Regionalists, by Nancy Heller

Charles Burchfield

Impressionists in Winter

Andrew Wyeth

James Montgomery Flagg
Maxfield Parrish

Theresa Cheek, of Art's The Answer!

Art's The Answer! is the fantastic blog written by Theresa Cheek, who clearly has a passion for the decorative arts, and for sharing all she comes across. Konemann does a great job of bringing out large format, lavishly photographed, and reasonably priced books on architecture and ornamentation. This is just a tiny selection of Theresa's vast collection on a huge variety of subjects. Be sure to check out her blog. And just peeking in on the far right is a book that's very popular with my West Coast friends, called Ca'toga. It's about the Dali-meets-Baroque-meets-Antiquity estate of Venetian artist Carlo Machiori. I've yet to come across a book dedicated solely to the painted surfaces of Versailles, but I'm sure it's out there. Until then, I love to browse through books such as Splendors of Versailles, for snippets of Oudry's landscapes and Fontenay's flowers and vases. Incredible stuff.

The St. Laurent book is a rare glimpse into the decor stylings of one of the 20th Century's very best designers. Jacques Grange features heavily in the selections, and though the lavishness of the homes becomes makes me feel a bit claustrophobic after a while [I want to run off and live in Wyeth's cabin by the end of the book], it's well worth the investment.

Koneman titles

Ca'toga
The Private World of Yves St. Laurent & Pierre Bergé
Splendors of Versailles

Karen

The 1920s once again putting on a strong show, this time from a European design perspective. Karen of Chicago's Des Travaux sent us this great shot, showing some of the stalwart classics we all know and love, along with some real treasures. Jansen Furniture is a great book about the powerhouse Paris-based design company, who's ebony and ivory geometrical inlay doors are a real treat. I narrowly missed the opportunity to create replicas of those doors once. Jean Dunand is also a master interior designer, and perhaps the greatest lacquer artist of the Art Deco period. I've downloaded any image of his incredible standing screens that I can get my hands on. Paul Poiret is the creator of the most beautiful dresses ever made. Click the link and you'll see what I mean. It's tragic that he was ruined completely by WWI and made bankrupt. As someone who'd backed myself into a rarified corner of decorative painting, I'm all too aware that tough times reveal the precariousness of this business. Elkins, on the other hand, thrived, and by the end of her illustrious career had created a huge number of interiors for the West Coast glitterati. And what I wouldn't give for that copy of Antonio Basoli's stunning designs.

Jansen Furniture

Jean Dunand

Poiret (Rizzoli)

Frances Elkins

Antonio Basoli

Early American Decoration

Chinoiserie (Phaidon)

Art Instruction books that I see on a lot of shelves (including my own):

The Art of Faux (P. Finkelstein)

Handbook of Painted Decoration (Y. Guegan)

Okay, gotta go. Keep sending them in! I'll upload more shots when I have a chance.

l'Art des Chinois: Sir William Chambers and Chinoiserie

Sir William Chambers, Yale University Press

With a whopping resumé of English and Irish stately buildings to his credit, William "Knuckles" Chambers (1723-1796) was definitely up there with the heavyweights of Neo-Classical Architecture in the Eighteenth Century. By 'heavyweights' I'm really referring to Robert Adam, who (though a rival) considered him "a Prodigy for Genius, for Sense & good taste."

Take a look for yourself, and download his book Desseins des edifices, meubles, habits, machines, et ustenciles des Chinois (1757)

As an impressionable young teenager he travelled by sea to Canton where he made the sketches that served as the basis for his book Designs for Chinese Buildings (1757). He will always be second fiddle to Robert Adam in terms of architecture, but he was almost single-handedly responsible for popularizing Chinoiserie. This, to my mind, is his greatest legacy.

After this voyage he "quitted the sea" and took up architecture in earnest, making a considerable name for himself working for King George III who paid him the princely annual sum of $500 and for whom he designed (among other works) "twenty classical and exotic temples" at Kew Gardens including the pagoda and orangery.

The Victoria and Albert has a great collection of his drawings online.

Amazing Bird Photos from Taiwan

Audubon and Edward Lear just don't quite cut it when you're researching birds for that Chinoiserie mural you've been asked to paint. Yeah, those guys could paint, but they're just not exotic enough. Here are hundreds of amazing photographs of native Taiwanese birds that are perfect reference material for that De Gournay hand-painted wallpaper you're working on, or just for some trippy blown-out Photoshop fun.

Jean-Baptiste Pillement, Chinoiserie

Known primarily as the artist responsible for the popularity of Chinoiserie, Jean Pillement was quite the dark-horse. He somehow found time between designing for Gobelin and painting for the King of Portugal to invent the solar-powered electric chair and the straight banana, write Limericks (including the classic "There was a young man called Eenis..."), and fashion a remarkable likeness of his ex-wife out of shaving foam and a dagger. Despite losing all his limbs in a bizarre gardening accident at the age of eight, he once impressed Marie Antoinette by playing 'Flight of the Bumblebee' on the nose flute while stopping a rapidly spinning drill bit with his lips.

Thirsty for more? Check out this gallery of fifty-six of his fanciful Chinoiserie designs that I posted on my Flickr page. And if Chinoiserie is your monkey, this gorgeous panel by Pillement entitled 'Chinoiserie, un couple dans une barque' is worth a closer look.

Nicolas Lancret created panels and folding screens somewhat earlier than Pillement, and it's interesting to compare their styles. Lancret being flatter and dryer than Pillement, whose work shows much of the frivolity we've come to associate with Rococo.

Chinoiserie Panel

Nicolas Lancret

Lancret will always play second fiddle to his peer, Watteau. In fact, he only really became popular after Watteau died, being the last man standing for this kind of work.

Anyway, I like him better than Watteau because he was kicked out of the Academie Royale in 1708 for bad behaviour. Imagining all those powdered prigs behaving badly is hilarious, until you realize they'd run you through with a sword for using the wrong fork.

Though he painted more than seven hundred works, these gorgeous paintings of Chinoiserie-inflected frames (with typical fête galante scenes) are difficult to find. I love them mostly for the frames, and have referred to these several times in my own work. I hope you find them useful too.