I love this French Neoclassical Paneled Room at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. It’s so rich in neoclassical details from the Louis XVI (16th) period. Chairs with thin fluted legs, decorative items with garlands, swags, palmettes, and flowers, and a return to simplicity in shapes, such as the rectangular and circular motifs in the doors. Yes, there’s a lot going on here compared to todays much simpler rooms, but the attention to detail and the subtle gilded ornamentation helps the viewer experience the refined joy of this period.
The end of the Louis Louis’s, as my art history teacher used to say, was the lightest and leanest of the three periods. You can see by these delicate and symmetrical details how pleasant this room must have been to live in during the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. The heavy Baroque and Rococo period gave way to these refined details thanks in part to Louis XV’s (15th) mistress Madame de Pompadour. Additionally, the discovery of Roman ruins at Herculaneum and Pompeii (1738-50) helped to turn the tide on the previously decadent and ostentatious period, with a return to the classicism of Greece and Rome. Note the grecian inspired women on the doorknob mechanism and the stunning wall mounted candelabra.
Visiting this room makes me feel as if I’m back in Paris visiting any number of my favorite places… I love to linger here and soak it up whenever I visit the Getty. It’ll have to hold me over until I can plan my next visit back to the mothership.
This salon, or main reception room, is from a residence in Paris called the Maison Hosten. It was built for Jean-Baptiste Hosten, a plantation owner from Santo Domingo. He Commissioned the architect Claude-Nicolar Ledoux to design his residence as the focus of a larger house complex that was to include fourteen other surrounding town houses. The Maison Hosten and six of the others were completed by 1795, when building stopped after Hosten fled the country during the French Revolution. The whole project was dismantled at the end of the 1800s. The complex is considered to have been among the most significant works of French domestic architecture by one of the leading architects of the 1700s. (per the Getty Center placard)