Displaying items by tag: Period Rooms

Cheekwood is taking important first steps towards the historic restoration of its Mansion, which is slated to debut in 2017. Further building on its reputation as “one of the finest examples of an American Country Place Era estates in the nation,” Cheekwood will refurnish the lower levels of the Mansion to reflect the lifestyle and setting of the 1930s era; originally used by its first residents, Mabel and Leslie Cheek, and designed by legendary landscape and structural architect Bryant Fleming. Several rooms in the 1929 Cheek family home will be restored to furnishings and décor representative of the original period, including rooms that have never before been on view to the general public.

To spearhead this initiative, Cheekwood has hired Leslie B. Jones as its new Curator of Decorative Arts & Historic Interpretation, following her time as the Curator and Director of Historical Resources and Programming for the White House Historical Association in Washington, DC.

Sections of 18th-century gilded walls and paintings of deities are sprawled across the floor of a warehouse on this city’s outskirts. After nine decades in limbo, this architectural salvage is being reorganized into period rooms that will rival Versailles’s for inventiveness and visual impact.

The pieces came from the interior of a townhouse built near the Louvre around 1707 for Philippe II, the duke of Orléans, a nephew of Louis XIV. In the 1920s, before demolishing the building so that its own quarters could expand, the Bank of France labeled and crated the pieces and pledged to recreate the rooms elsewhere. They will re-emerge in a year or so at a government building on Rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais, about a mile from their original home.

The Louvre announced that it will reopen its 18th-century decorative arts galleries on June 6 following an eight-year restoration and reinstallation. The Parisian museum’s sweeping collection of more than 2,000 decorative objects will be dispersed among 35 newly-renovated galleries in the north wing of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée. The galleries, which boast 23,000 square feet of exhibition space, were originally expected to reopen last year. Before this extensive restoration, the galleries had not been significantly updated since they were installed in 1966.

The Louvre’s collection of royal furniture, decorative bronzes, rugs, tapestries, gold and silver ware, porcelain, jewelry, and scientific instruments, will be grouped into three stylistic movements: the reign of Louis XIV and the Regency (1660-1725), Rococo (1725-1755), and the return of classicism and the reign of Louis XVI (1755-1790). The galleries also feature a number of period rooms including a drawing room from the nearby Hôtel de Villemaré, which was acquired by the Louvre in the 1800s but has never before been displayed in its entirety. Before being reconstructed in the museum, the room underwent a lengthy conservation.

Jannic Durand, director of the department of decorative arts at the Louvre, said in a statement, “We wanted to achieve a happy medium between period rooms and exhibition galleries. Each object benefits from being in relationship with other objects. In some cases, this means creating a period room so our visitors can understand how people lived with these objects or so they can appreciate holistically the elegance and refinement of the 18th century. In other instances, it means curating display cases devoted entirely to porcelain, silverware, and even some pieces of furniture to underscore the history of techniques and styles.”

The Louvre worked with the celebrated interior designer Jacques Garcia to create the new spaces for its collection of 18th-century decorative arts. The project was funded entirely by the patrons of the museum, including a $4 million donation from the American Friends of the Louvre.

New York’s Brooklyn Museum has finished renovating two rooms from an historic home in Saratoga Springs, New York. The late 19th-century Parlor and Library of the Colonel Robert J. Milligan House have been conserved and refurbished for the first time since they were installed in the museum in 1953. The Brooklyn Museum acquired the rooms as well as their furnishings in 1940. 

The rooms have been repainted and bold carpeting has been added to the Library’s previously bare wood floors. The museum has also restored and installed the Parlor’s original chandelier by Cornelius and Baker of Philadelphia and decorated the rooms with recently acquired objects and several Victorian furnishings original to the rooms but not previously on view in Brooklyn. Each room illustrates a revival style popular in interior decoration in mid-19th century America -- the Parlor exhibits the Louis XV Revival style while the Library depicts the Gothic Revival style. 

The Milligan House was completed in 1856 and is still standing in Saratoga Springs.

While the newly opened Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, offers a hemispheric view of 3,000 years of North, Central, and South American art, the period rooms tell a distinctly local story. Of the eight period rooms and other architectural elements interspersed within fifty-three new galleries, six of these rooms make their return to public view after a hiatus of nearly eight years, now carefully restored and rethought for a new generation of visitors. Two other rooms are on view for the first time. The American period rooms have been a popular part of the MFA’s displays since they were first installed in the former Decorative Arts Wing of the museum, which opened to the public in 1928. Now, as then, the rooms focus on New England, complementing the MFA’s significant holdings of colonial and nineteenth-century art from New England. The most elaborate and well known of the period rooms are those from Oak Hill, Samuel McIntire’s 1800–1801 architectural masterpiece created in Peabody, Massachusetts, for the Derby-West family and filled with luxurious furnishings and exquisite examples of his carved furniture. The three Oak Hill rooms now sit comfortably alongside a gallery devoted to the furniture of John and Thomas Seymour (who were heavily patronized by the Derby-West family) and the neoclassical silver of Paul Revere. Other rooms now reinstalled include the 1730 Jaffrey parlor and the 1803 Shepard parlor, with its original French scenic wallpaper. Two newly installed rooms from the 1840 Roswell Gleason House in Dorchester inform adjacent galleries of mid-nineteenth-century paintings and decorative arts; the earliest timber-frame structures—the 1692–1693 Manning frame and the 1704 Brown-Pear hall—are placed in spirited dialogue with the museum’s important collection of early Anglo artifacts arranged within and around their walls. Throughout, the period rooms inform our sense of place and scale, while providing a more intimate encounter with art.