Baroque Doorway

The anonymous drawing above (from the Metropolitan Museum) offers two different design-options for a potential door-frame in an unknown and possibly imaginary Italian palace. The design on the left-hand side and the quite different one on the right-hand side have been cleverly merged by the early 18th-century draftsman as if together they might be built as seen and achieve a newly extreme elaboration of baroque exuberance in their asymmetric grandeur.

The 18th-century drawings that follow could all be said to share a similar, backward-looking aspiration to a similarly heightened level of pictorial drama, reflecting the lingering force of 17th-century practice.

Charles Antoine Coypel
River God
18th century

Gabriel François Doyen
Allegory of Seasons
1760s

Giovanni Battista Natali III
Design for Mirror
c. 1720-40

Pietro Jacopo Palmieri
Trompe l'Oeil
1766

Pietro Jacopo Palmieri
Trompe l'Oeil
1766

Hubert Robert
St. Peter's, Rome
c. 1758

Antoine Watteau
Studies of Women
c. 1717-18

Filippo Juvarra
Architectural Study
c. 1710

William Blake
Satan Exulting over Eve
1795

Fountains at Juvisy

Fountains at Juvisy
1902

Albumen silver prints by Eugène Atget (1857-1927). The photographs were taken in the first part of the twentieth century, mainly in Paris and in the former royal parks near Paris.

Saint-Cloud
1902

Hôtel de Brinvilliers
1900

Saint-Cloud
1915

Fountainebleau
1903

Saint-Cloud
1904

Versailles
1904

Versailles
1904

Versailles - Petit Trianon
1902

Versailles - Grand Trianon
1901

Images from the Getty Museum.

White Lilies

Lilies
c. 1916-19

Eugène Atget famously created a business supplying stock photography, mainly taken on the streets of Paris. Only after his death did he gain a reputation as an art photographer. That reputation appears to rank higher than ever today, evidenced by the confidence of the J. Paul Getty Museum in acquiring, restoring, preserving, rendering & disseminating the prints.

Panthéon
1924

Pont Neuf
1923

Naturaliste
1926

Vieille Cour, 22 rue Quincampoix
1908

Saint Julien le Pauvre
1898

Montmartre
1921

Versailles - Brothel
1921

Café rue des Blancs Manteaux
1900

Au Petit Bacchus, rue Saint Louis en l'Ile
c. 1901-02

Au Petit Bacchus
1908

Truth

Claude Lorrain
View of the Campagna from Tivoli
1645

The Truth – is stirless –
Other forces – may be presumed to move –
This – then – is best for confidence – 
When oldest Cedars swerve –

And Oaks untwist their fists –
And Mountains - feeble - lean –
How excellent a Body, that
Stands without a Bone –

How vigorous a Force
That holds without a Prop –
Truth stays Herself – and every man
That trusts Her – boldly up –

– Emily Dickinson

Prestige Furniture

The side table above – with heads and faces emerging in profusion from arabesques of carved giltwood – was created about 1720 in Rome. Glory undiminished, it now lives in California at the Getty, sharing space with equally sumptuous but more restrained groupings of mostly French pieces, including the map case immediately below.

French "antiques" still enjoyed a unique prestige in the United States during the middle decades of the 20th century. Not coincidentally, those were the decades when J. Paul Getty was most actively seeking publicity as the world's richest man and personally building the core of  the furniture collection he would bequeath to the museum.

J. Paul Getty enacted on the largest scale and for the last time what the fiction of Henry James had described a couple of generations earlier – the conquest and appropriation of European high culture by American money. Later generations of Americans would wield decreasing amounts of power and would feel far less reverence for the European past.

Black Nevelson

For a recent New York design Robert Couturier placed one of Louise Nevelson's black-painted scrap-wood assemblages against the biggest part of one whole wall of an otherwise traditionally furnished uptown sitting room (above).

Below, three sets of turquoise blinds anchoring the multifarious presences populating the New York salon arranged by Couturier for himself. Following that, glimpses of other equally lush and intricate spaces.