Intérieurs romantiques, Aquarelles 1820-1890 — Musée de la Vie Romantique — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 10, 2012 → January 13, 2013

The Musée de la Vie Romantique is joining with the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York for a presentation of the latter’s remarkable collection of some eighty-four 19th-century European Interiors. The works were donated to the Cooper Hewitt by Eugene V. Thaw, from his own collection.

The remarkable quality and astonishing richness of this group of watercolours and gouaches on paper invites the viewer into the privacy of the most patrician dwellings of the time. Tastes that were changing according to the spirit of different nations were a close reflection of the rise of a new class to positions of power and its need, in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to take up major political, economic and social challenges. Throughout Europe — in France, England, Germany and Austria — and in Russia as well, acceptance was granted to a painting genre too long considered minor, in spite of its attractiveness: that of the “interior”, practised with great skill by many artists. At court and in town it was the thing to welcome guests into many-roomed apartments that strove to outdo each other with the work of the most fashionable architects and interior decorators, and to commission works suggestive of the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. Conversation, letter writing, chamber music and intimist painting enlivened the existence of the privileged and the first of the clubs where a cultivated gentry was shaping a new, modern lifestyle.

With its broad panorama of Western decorative art of the 19th century, this exhibition in the two private studios of the Enclos Chaptal will offer the public all the diversity of those multilingual salons where the worlds of finance and power mingled with those of art and literature.