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A cheery coincidence yesterday, noting that the theme for the special exhibition at the San Francisco Fall Antiques Show is chinoiserie. This followed fairly quickly with an email notice from Enos Reese Interior Design of the launch of their new website. Mark Enos and Carmen Reese are designers we’ve been happy to know for a number of years. Amongst their design portfolio is a mid Wilshire high rise featuring, you guessed it, a piece from Chappell & McCullar, and, right again, it was a bit of chinoiserie, a red japanned George II period coffer.

Interesting, this fanciful piece is actually composed of rather durable vernacular materials, with the quarter sawn oak of the casework making it a practical as well as a decorative piece. Oak seems to have been popular for the European construction of furniture meant to look far eastern. These pieces often were a marriage of a European made stand to support a Chinese lacquer cabinet. This example is entirely European, English in this case, and constitutes a collaborative effort from at least three workshops- a joiner for the cabinet, a carver for the stand, and a painter-stainer for the surface decoration of both pieces. Actually, I left one workshop out- a clock maker for the construction of the brass hinges and lockplates, finely wrought, and perhaps more precisely made than the Chinese metalwork it sought to imitate.

The use of oak makes for an eminently practical choice. Durable, of course, but with the use of quartersawn planks in construction, also less likely to warp and expand and contract, which movement would damage the surface decoration. I have to say, on both pieces, the decoration is in surprisingly good condition. Also, in the case of the cabinet on stand, it is particularly important the piece maintain its structural integrity to allow access to its hidden compartments. Nothing worse, I’d imagine, than when trying to access the treasures hidden within, to find the drawers warped shut. And the treasures we found? Sad to say, nothing beyond some late 17^th century dust.

If you live in California or are transiting through San Francisco, by all means make your way to the de Young for the exhibition ‘The Birth of Impressionism’. While by all means go for the pictures- a once in ten lifetime’s loan while the building works continue at the Musée d’Orsay- the title of the exhibition gives insight into an important methodological slant. So, a body might in fact learn something, too.

That of course impressionism did not rise fully formed in its first exhibition in 1874 is easy to appreciate, but is generally forgotten. As, of course, is the importance of the Salon, the annual exhibition of the French Academy.  And it was the social importance of the rejection of the Salon and academicism in favor of impressionism that has a significance of which artistic production was a byproduct, albeit a lovely one.

With the technical advances of mass communication through photography, newspapers and telegraphy, the painting techniques and approved genres of academicism necessarily became anachronistic. I suppose that most courses in art history date the beginning of modern art with the socially realistic subjects of Courbet in the middle of the nineteenth century, and, of course, with improvements in communications making the plight of the poor manifestly apparent, academic subjects became increasingly just a manner of authoritarian fancy dress. And, more importantly, an aspect of social control. The degree to which the social control exercised by the ruling elite was resented by the population was made abundantly clear with the Paris commune. That the communards were quelled within a few months was beside the point- the speed at which it spread and its bloody savagery were shocking proof of deep, broadly based disquiet, painfully reminiscent to everyone of le Terreur of 1793-4.

Certainly this is an aspect of the exhibition that can be divined from looking at the pictures, but times being the way they are, it is not the primary focus, or, as I think about it, should it be, except for those that want it. The catalog is great, with plenty of lucid text putting the pictures in their proper context. Times being the way they are, most people, and this includes me most hours on most days, want to see something pleasing, and The Birth of Impressionism certainly is.

By the way, our friends on Facebook, tell us what you think about the exhibition- what you liked, or didn’t, and why.

My most recent blog entitled ‘Regency mainstream’ has begged a number of questions that basically boil down to ‘What’s the difference between Regency style and Empire style?’ This may spark controversy, but that they are hard to distinguish might perhaps be because they are often indistinguishable. Mind you, English joinery and French joinery are not the same, but forms, motifs, and surface decoration frequently are. And, Paris continued to be the style center, with one of the upshots of the cessation of the Wars of Napoleon that moneyed English, with demand pent up the result of nearly 20 years of intermittent hostility, flocked to Paris to buy whatever wasn’t nailed down.  And enjoy the sites of what had become an imperial city. Not just the Arc de Triomphe, but the living spaces of the recently deposed Emperor and Empress were prime tourist destinations. Consequently, it is not surprising that English grandees, many of whom were made wealthy in the recent wars, then sought to emulate in their own domestic spaces an ostensibly Napoleonic aesthetic.

While direct commercial exchange may have been uncertain, intellectual exchange seems to have been more frequent. The designs of Thomas Hope published in 1807 heavily influenced those of Percier and Fontaine in their Recueil des décorations intérieures published in 1812. Ironically, this volume was then introduced into England with a popularity that at least temporarily eclipsed the influence of Hope, George Smith, and others. Well, we all know, then as now, if it is from Paris, it has to be better.

Fortune follows fashion, of course. The London merchant E H Baldock, amongst a number of others, did an extensive business in furniture that was in the French style, and Baldock most prominently had pieces made in France for the English market. The pair of boulle cabinets shown is an example. Interestingly, the Regency period found renewed interest in what became Anglicized as ‘buhl work’, and this sadly resulted in a number of earlier French pieces scavenged for their boulle and marquetry elements.

I suppose the name most associated with Regency style is Thomas Hope, whose time, taste, and money allowed him to decorate his Marylebone house, his country seat of the Deepdene, and publish the results in the widely distributed Household Furniture and Interior Decoration published in 1807. A flagrant self-promoter, upon completion of his decorative scheme for Duchess Street, Hope sent tickets of admission to members of the Royal Academy, many of whom not surprisingly found this an act of hubris. Many, though, took advantage, including Sir John Soane- and were impressed with the result. Besides influence and an exercise in ego, I’m not aware that Hope’s efforts did him any material good. But, then, Hope made his money the old fashioned way- he inherited it.  A bit of an irony- with Hope’s designs considered the quintessence of English Regency period fashion, Hope himself was an auslander, the scion of a Dutch banking family who fled Holland fearful of the predations of Napoleon. Although Hope was sometimes thought a parvenu and nouveau riche, but as has often been said, it is the riche that counts, and Hope’s efforts were generally well considered in his day.

And to this very day, too- with the designs of Thomas Hope arguably forming the basis of what most people consider as Regency style. Certainly Hope’s own extended Grand Tour through not just Italy but the sites of Greek antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean contributed a tremendous degree of archaeological accuracy. Not only were the forms of antiquity copied, but the popular Regency paint schemes executed in black and red and yellow ocher took their lead from the Attic pottery Hope studied.

Hope knew his work would inevitably spawn imitators, and it is thought Household Furniture…was in fact published to ensure that those who cribbed from Hope actually got it right.  And imitation quickly followed, with George Smith’s Collection of Designs for Household Furniture published in 1808, only a year after Hope.

While Smith’s designs clearly owe a significant debt to Hope, what had already become standard neo-classical motifs- bellflower swags and fruit and flower garlands- were given a Regency twist when executed in a Regency period palette. The London furniture maker John Gee prominently used an ‘antique’ palette to contribute a Hope-inspired classicism to essentially English forms, like the chairback settee.

Things do go in and out of fashion and I suppose the fact that, for much of the last century, Brighton was a bargain day out for Londoners occludes its glory days. It’s still pleasantly seedy, as are most seaside resorts, but no where else is the Brighton Pavilion.

As I think about it, the entire history of Brighton, with its prominence the result of its being favored by the Prince of Wales from the 1780’s, might well have been determined by ‘Prinnie’s’ notoriously louche behavior. Close enough to London, but yet far enough from George III’s stultifying court, the prince could comfortably indulge in fantasies that certainly found their outward expression in the confection that became his Royal Pavilion. With an increase in funds with accession to the Regency, the now Prince Regent let imagination run wild.  The forest of onion domes and minarets executed by John Nash, while lavish in their number were a bit less extreme in cost, built as they were of stucco over a wooden and iron frame. The vaguely Mughal exterior gives way to a riot of Chinoiserie, with the long gallery with walls and trim painted an astonishing pink, with a bamboo motif overlay in a blue-green. The bamboo motif carries on with chairs and tables made of split bamboo. Even the staircase that leads to the upper floor carries on the bamboo motif, but in cast iron, faux painted to match the yellow color and ribbing of the furniture.

The banqueting room that leads off one end of the long gallery is again a riot of chinoiserie, or dragon’s at any rate, with gilt dragons holding aloft the wall and ceiling lighting, and in the pelmets, all the drapery.

The effect of all of this is less of anything oriental than of exotic excess. Moreover, the design of the pavilion was even in its day not in the most fashionable taste, which tended more toward studied antiquarianism in the manner of Thomas Hope, who’s Household Furniture and Interior Decoration was published in 1807. It’s interesting to note that the interiors at the Royal Pavilion were realized by Crace and Company, whose more sober commissions included the interiors of Sir John Soane’s London residence. And, of course, with the accession of Victoria, sobriety became the order of the day. The Brighton Pavilion was sold by her to help pay for her decidedly more practical and domestic seaside home, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.