Rooms Worth Keeping

Living Rooms explores the past, present and future of domestic life.

Tags:

What explains the attraction of the recreations of historic rooms found in so many museums?

Photo Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Grand Salon from the Château de Draveil, French, c. 1735, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently, a group of elementary school students was learning about life in an 18th-century French chateau. They were surrounded by the reconstructed shell of a drawing room from that period. Their teacher was doing a great job of making the material accessible to them, and they listened with absolutely rapt attention. I couldn’t help wondering exactly what that interior was saying to the students.

Rooms on display in museums are said to be representative of an era and/or of the individual for whom they were created. But this is hardly as simple as it sounds, for period rooms have many stories to tell, both stylistic and personal.

Take the room where the students in Philadelphia were having their class, from the Château de Draveil, built in 1735 for Marin de La Haye, a fabulously wealthy tax farmer eager to shore up his very recent and very fragile nobility. He chose the wall paneling and the ceiling that visitors see today, featuring a design and colors straight from the pages of a contemporary decorating manual. This was an interior created to prove that its inhabitant knew how to live elegantly.

After Marin de La Haye’s death in 1753, the chateau passed into other hands — among them, in 1803, Daniel Parker, an American who had amassed a fortune as an arms dealer during the Revolutionary War. Parker maintained the drawing room’s 1730s décor: what was by then its Old Régime charm gave a new owner a veneer of respectability.

However, several things in the reconstructed drawing room had not been part of the setting in which those nouveaux riches displayed their wealth: the chandelier and the parquet floor are French, but they are not from the 1730s and were designed for other residences. Museum period rooms are often just such amalgams of elements of varying origins.

Michael Bodycomb The Frick Collection’s Fragonard Room.

Perhaps no period room has a past as multi-layered as that of the Frick Collection’s Fragonard Room. Four of the seven paintings that line its walls were commissioned about 1770 from Jean Honoré Fragonard by the Comtesse du Barry, mistress to King Louis XV, for her chateau at Louveciennes. Du Barry, however, rejected the canvases, and they then began a second life in the south of France where Fragonard spent his final years; there, he completed other panels for the series, called “The Progress of Love.”

In the late 19th century, one of Fragonard’s heirs sold the paintings to an English dealer, who sold them to J. Pierpont Morgan. Morgan had a room designed in his London residence to showcase the panels. After Morgan’s death in 1913, his collection was put on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than two years. It was there that the Fragonard canvases first became part of a period room: they were displayed in an exact reconstruction of the room in Morgan’s home, complete with all the original architectural elements.

The Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library Archives The drawing room of the Henry Clay Frick residence, c. 1931.

In February 1915, Henry Clay Frick viewed the exhibit, and by May 1916, the Fragonards were featured in the drawing room in Frick’s new mansion on Fifth Avenue. Frick created his own context for them, surrounding them with a heady mix of his favorite acquisitions: seating formerly in the country home of the Duke of Devonshire; a table (actually c. 1830) previously owned by the Earl of Lonsdale; Chinese porcelain also from the Morgan collection; paneling, curtains and even door locks crafted in Europe for the room.

Michael Bodycomb The Fragonard Room today.

Seventy-five years ago, the Frick residence became the Frick Collection. It took very little effort to make the interior that Frick had created around the Fragonard panels into a public display space, called the Fragonard Room — a rope was placed around the center table, the chairs were moved against the wall. A family’s private living room was now a period room.

As those students were leaving the room from the Château de Draveil, I asked them what they would remember about it. Several immediately said: “That chandelier is cool.” Later one girl said quietly: “I like walking where other people have walked and thinking about the people who walked there before me.”

Both had a good point, of course. We can view a period room as just another museum gallery created to display amazing objects. But if we care about the stories those reconstructed walls can tell, period rooms are much more than that. They come alive with the presence of owners past and conjure up, say, Henry Clay Frick sitting in the Duke of Devonshire’s armchair and thinking of all those — from Du Barry to Morgan — who had previously lived with his Fragonards.