#Hoentschel

[thedeadleafs]

Georges Hoentschel, Chair, 1900

Oak from Algiers.

[detournementsmineurs]

Oeuvres en grès émaillé ou flammé d'Emile Müller et Cie, Frédéric Deschamps, Jean-Joseph-Marie Carriès, Antonin Mercié et Georges Hoentschel (circa 1889-1902) et "Cheminée" attribuée à Emile Müller et Cie en grès cérame émaillé (circa 1904) dans les Collections Permanentes du Musée d'Arts Décoratifs, janvier 2022.

[met-european-sculpture]

Vase by Georges Hoentschel, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Medium: Stoneware

Purchase, The Charles E. Sampson Memorial Fund and Friends of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Gifts, 2011 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/238560

[beautifulcentury]

1 - Émille Gallé, Aube et Crépuscule, bed, 1900. Palisander, ebony, mother-of-pearl, iridiscent glass.

2 - Georges Hoentschel, Chair, 1900. Oak from Algiers.

3 - Dressing table, mahogany veneer and white marble top, French, c.1825.

[caveartfair]

A Chair Shares Its Journey from a Royal Palace to the Met

Armchair (Fauteuil à la reine) for Louise-Élisabeth of Parma, ca. 1749. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Laurent Pécheux, Maria Luisa of Parma (1715–1819), Later Queen of Spain, 1765. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sometimes I wish we had a support group. We would start by introducing ourselves. “Hi, I’m a fauteuil à la reine made for Louise-Élisabeth, Duchess of Parma.” The other chairs would immediately think I’m an asshole, particularly the older Windsor chairs.

Everyone would know that I still have my original upholstery and that I’ve made cameo appearances in a few minor paintings. There’s some cred in that, but also a lot of resentment.

I remember back in Paris when a master carver sculpted me into coils and tendrils, decoration so florid that even my smoothest surface arched into acrobatic movement: swinging, reaching, bounding, wrapping with wisteria determination.

Gold leaf coated each of these spiraling forms. The sheets of the precious metal, impossibly thin, floated onto my exposed wood like a soft rain, cool and tender. Silk velvet was then stretched across my curves, a fine, bespoke suit, taut and precise, with glistening ornament along its edges.

Armchair (Fauteuil à la reine) for Louise-Élisabeth of Parma, ca. 1749. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I can picture Louise-Élisabeth’s daughter, Isabella, age eight, on the first day I arrived from France at the Ducal Palace of Colorno in Parma. It was 1749, and she stroked my crimson velvet with such care, trying to appear grown up and sophisticated.

But I also remember when she curled herself within my arms and cried fat, messy tears, her knees tucked tightly beneath the panniers of her gown with its flowers and ribbons. I can still feel the heaving of her chest against my back as she shivered gently to the rhythm of her sobs. How I wish I could have swayed along with that pulsing sorrow to comfort her.

Only five years later, Isabella’s siblings, Ferdinand and Maria Luisa, would topple into me during audiences with their parents and pull at my gold trimmings, as clumsy and silly as any children, despite their finery.

One time at the Met, a small boy—not more than three years old—wandered past the barriers in the Wrightsman Galleries and headed straight for me. Almost two hundred and twenty-five years had passed, but he reminded me so much of those toddlers back in Parma.

Louis XIV and His Family, ca. 1710. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Come on little guy! I thought from behind the gallery ropes. You can make it!

The boy’s plump hands extended forward, propelled by his thick, tumbling waddle, his shoes clomping on the gallery floor. I felt like I was hanging from a cliff waiting for him to grip my arm and save me. Then a breeze of moist heat floated past as his mother grabbed him at the very last second—just before he reached me.

That was 1978. I still dream about it. I imagine the boy climbing up onto my seat. His pleasant folds and warm, springy pudge nestled between my arms. A small puddle of drool soaking into my velvet, the life of it racing through to my frame.

I would share those dreams in the meetings.

Of course, I remember the lonely attics and warehouses, too. Rooms of swollen heat and shrinking cold. Dark, hollow, airless. A desolate purgatory, despite the stacked and crowded landscape, a bulging mountain range of the stored and forgotten.

In the brittle stillness, dust showered down upon me with a fragile constancy, like some gray and final mist, ashen drifts accumulating on my every surface. For decades, I ached for the feel of footsteps rattling through the floorboards, quivering up my legs, delivering some—any—faint agitation of life. And oh, to be the chosen one when that door finally swung open, the chooser blackened against the blaze of ripe and glorious light!

Portrait of Louise Élisabeth of France, (1727–59), Duchess of Parma, 1965. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Storage would definitely come up in the meetings, too.

Eventually I landed back in Paris at Maison Leys, the city’s foremost interior decorating firm at the turn of the century. There, in 1906, the legendary connoisseur Georges Hoentschel sold me to the American giant J.P. Morgan, along with two thousand other pieces of furniture. Morgan gave the whole lot of us to the Met, where I will always live in great splendor.

But Parma was my home. I will never forget the light and shadow of those glorious rooms of my youth. Some days I trace every detail in my mind, the way prisoners do to survive captivity. I feel Louise-Élisabeth’s body collapsing onto me, tired and alone: the fearless daughter of a king, frustrated by her timid spouse and hindering lack of beauty. I can still smell the sour odor of her flaccid husband as he picked at my gilding.

Little Maria Luisa eventually became Queen of Spain after she was engaged to her cousin Charles at age eleven. Short and not as pretty as her older sister, her feet swung lazily from my edge as she listened to her mother explain the arrangements of the loveless marriage. As rebellion or consolation, a parade of lovers would later sink into my velvet during Maria Luisa’s reign.

Maria Luisa kept me with her until she died in Rome in 1819. I held her through the fear and tragedy of twenty-four pregnancies over twenty-eight years. Only six babies survived.

I wouldn’t talk about those memories in the meetings.

from Artsy News

[museoillogique]

A photograph from about 1906 of the interior of Hoentschel’s private museum at 58 Boulevard Flandrin, Paris, depicts the installation of his Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century collection.

"Salvaging the Past" is arranged based on the photograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Thomas J. Watson Library, presented by J. Pierpont Morgan.

[jaynedesignblog]

Why Look at Fragments?

Jean-Joseph de Saint-Germain, clock ornament, figure of a child with feather headdress. French, mid-18th century, gilt bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906.

Since ancient times, students of design have studied bits and pieces of antique sculpture and architecture and have considered how these fragments can inform our knowledge of the past and further contemporary design. For example, the Romans valued elements from ancient Greece; collectors during the Renaissance gathered parts of the Roman Empire; and in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, museums that were dedicated to collections of fragments were formed, notably the Sir John Soane Museum in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Cooper-Hewitt, now known as the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Fragments have been especially on my mind with the opening of Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art at The Bard Graduate Center (on view through August 11th).

For myself, as a decorator, they offer clues of what a whole building or sculpture or decorative object might have looked like and how it was crafted. More importantly, by their incremental nature, they are abstract elements of design that can be interpolated into new creations. To borrow a term from today’s music, they can be “sampled” into a larger design.

The exhibition is based on the collection of Georges Hoentschel, Director of Maison Leys, a high-end French decorating firm which operated during the Belle Epoque period and catered to the newly moneyed bourgeois class.

In 1906, J. Pierpoint Morgan visited Hoentschel’s extensive display of fragments of decorative arts and architecture. Recognizing its significance, he purchased the collection outright. As president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he donated the group of more than 3,000 objects, leading to the creation of a wing dedicated to the decorative arts in 1910.

Devoted largely to the eighteenth century, these fragments epitomize the refinement accomplished in a golden age of the decorative arts. The majority were removed from permanent display in the 1950's when the museum reconsidered its encyclopedic displays in favor of period rooms. Bard’s exhibit highlights the creator, Georges Hoentschel, and his collection, including a recreation of parts of his Parisian gallery and examples of furniture and ceramics he designed as well.

Here are few of the treasures from Hoentschel’s collection that are on display at Bard.

Furniture mount, French, 1785-90, gilt bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpoint Morgan, 1906

Interior of 58 Boulevard Flandrin, Paris, 1906. The Thomas J. Watson Library. Presented by J. Pierpoint Morgan.

Panel from the top of a mirror with a mask of Flora, French, ca. 1725, carved oak. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpoint Morgan, 1906

Window bolt (espagnolette), French, 1780–85, gilt bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906

Crest of a mirror. French, 1715–30. Carved and gilded walnut. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906

Eagle head ornament, French 1790-1810, gilt bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906

  Basket of flowers, French, 1765–75, carved and gilded walnut and oak. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906

  Lion’s paw furniture mount, French, late 17th–early 18th century, gilt bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906

A pair of earthenware and gilt-bronze lamps on carved elm pedestals by Georges Hoentschel, c. 1900, (these were sold at Sotheby’s and are not in the show) are interesting because they communicate his ability to use antique bronze mounts to suit contemporary taste of his time.

 A detail of the handle from the above.

[detournementsmineurs]

Aiguière, coupe, pot à crème et bol d'Alexandre Bigot en grès émaillé et argent doré (circa 1895-1900) et pichet de Max Laüger en faïence (circa 1898) dans le "Salon du Bois 1900" de Georges Hoentschel (1900) à l'exposition “Luxes” au Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD), octobre 2020.

[detournementsmineurs]

"Salon du Bois" (détails) de Georges Hœntschel en platane d’Algérie (1900), salle fermée au public, dans le cadre de la visite guidée "Hector Guimard et l'Art Nouveau" par Corinne Dumas-Toulouse, historienne de l’art et créatrice textile, au Musée des Arts Décoratifs, octobre 2017.

[detournementsmineurs]

Flacon "Fougères" de René Lalique (1912) présenté dans le "Salon du Bois" de Georges Hœntschel en platane d’Algérie (1900), salle fermée au public, dans le cadre de la visite guidée "Hector Guimard et l'Art Nouveau" par Corinne Dumas-Toulouse, historienne de l’art et créatrice textile, au Musée des Arts Décoratifs, octobre 2017.

[detournementsmineurs]

"Salon du Bois" de Georges Hœntschel en platane d’Algérie (1900), salle fermée au public, dans le cadre de la visite guidée "Hector Guimard et l'Art Nouveau" par Corinne Dumas-Toulouse, historienne de l’art et créatrice textile, au Musée des Arts Décoratifs, octobre 2017.