Friday, December 1, 2017

European Salons of the Nineteenth Century

Anonymous Italian artist
Salon in a Florentine Palace
1824
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

L. Lely
Salon in Palazzo Satriano, Naples
1829
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Jules-Frédéric Bouchet
Small Salon, Montpensier Wing, Palais-Royal
1831
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

"But the point at which my pain became unendurable was when he said: "To begin where my last telegram left you, after passing a sort of shed, I entered the house and at the end of a long passage was shewn into a drawing-room."  At these words, shed, passage, drawing-room, and before he had even finished uttering them, my heart was shattered more swiftly than by an electric current, for the force which girdles the earth many times in a second, is not electricity, but pain.  How I repeated to myself, renewing the shock as I chose, these words, shed, passage, drawing-room, after Saint-Loup had left me!  In a shed one girl can lie down with another.  And in that drawing-room who could tell what Albertine used to do when her aunt was not there?   What was this?  Had I then imagined the  house in which she was living as incapable of possessing either a shed or a drawing room?  No, I had not imagined it at all, except as a vague place.  I had suffered originally at the geographical identification of the place in which Albertine was.  When I had learned that, instead of being in two or three possible places, she was in Touraine, those words uttered by her porter had marked in my heart as upon a map the place in which I must at length suffer.  But once I had grown accustomed to the idea that she was in Touraine, I had not seen the house.  Never had there occurred to my imagination this appalling idea of a drawing room, a shed, a passage, which seemed to be facing me in the retina of Saint-Loup's eyes, who had seen them, these rooms in which Albertine came and went, was living her life, these rooms in particular and not an infinity of possible rooms which had cancelled one another.  With the words shed, passage, drawing-room, I became aware of my folly in having left Albertine for a week in this cursed place, the existence (instead of the mere possibility) of which had just been revealed to me.  Alas! when Saint-Loup told me also that in this drawing-room he had heard someone singing at the top of her voice in an adjoining room and that it was Albertine who was singing, I realised with despair that, rid of me at last, she was happy!"

 Marcel Proust, from Remembrance of Things Past, volume 6, published posthumously in French as La Fugitive and also as Albertine disparue, translated into English as The Sweet Cheat Gone, also as Albertine Gone and as The Fugitive.  The passage above is from the translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, first published in 1930.

Jules-Frédéric Bouchet
Large Salon, Montpensier Wing, Palais-Royal
1831
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Vladislav Dmochowski
Salon
1840
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Otto Wagner
Salon in the House of the Duke of Leuchtenberg
1850
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Eduard Gaertner
Chinese Salon in the Royal Palace, Berlin
1850
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Dominique Hagen
Salon, Moscow
1851
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Rudolf von Alt
Japanese Salon at Villa Hügel-Hietzing, Vienna
1855
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

S. Redkovsky
Salon
1858
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French artist
Second Empire Salon
ca. 1850-60
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Rudolf von Alt
Salon in the Apartment of Count Lanckoronski, Vienna
ca, 1869
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Franz Alt
Salon in Vienna
1872
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous English artist
Salon Elevation, Buscot Park
1890
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum