Now I Sit Me Down (4 page)

The distinction between function and aesthetics is not simple, however. Boucher was a painter, but as we have seen, he was also a decorator, and he regularly carried out commissions for tapestries, porcelain figurines, and book illustrations, as well as theater costumes and sets. Jean-Honoré Fragonard was not above painting panels and overdoors as part of interior decoration. The women's dresses that Antoine Watteau depicted in his idyllic scenes inspired actual fashions, and gave rise to the so-called Watteau pleat. For these artists—and their patrons—the line between art and everyday objects was not hard and fast.

One of the last works of the great cabinetmaker Jean-François Oeben was a dressing table for Madame de Pompadour (now at the Metropolitan Museum). The table is of a particular type invented by Oeben. At first glance it appears to be a simple writing desk with an elaborately decorated top. But the desk contains surprises. Insert a crank, turn it, and an internal clockwork mechanism causes the top to magically slide back and the central portion to slide forward. Two side compartments hold perfumes, powders, and cosmetics. Push a discreet button and a central leather-covered panel tilts up at an angle. The panel has a ledge and can serve as a bookrest, or it can be pivoted to reveal a looking glass. Push another button and a shallow drawer pops out below. The ornamental marquetry of the various parts, like everything else about this exquisite contraption, is dazzling. Pompadour was a great patroness of the arts, and Oeben's marquetry depicts a vase of flowers surrounded by the emblems of her creative interests: a building plan and architectural instruments, a painter's palette and brushes, a musical score, a garden rake and watering can.

Such marriages of beauty and convenience were commonplace in the eighteenth-century interior. Rooms were all of a piece: the floor parquetry, the stucco ceilings, the paneled walls, the tapestries and painted silk wall coverings, the branched candle sconces and chandeliers, and, of course, the furniture. The individuals responsible—the cabinetmakers, upholsterers, varnishers, lacquerers, silversmiths, goldsmiths, and locksmiths—each had their own guild with its own clearly defined responsibilities and apprenticeship requirements. Architects, painters, and sculptors were also part of this team. Art and decor complemented each other: paintings took their place as panels, overmantels, overdoors, and ceilings. Framed paintings and mirror glass were an integral part of the decorating scheme, and architects' drawings indicated their precise locations: flanking a canopy bed, or centered over a console table. None of this is to belittle art, but rather to emphasize that practicality and beauty were not considered mutually exclusive. The marquetry of a dressing table was expected to provide the same visual delight as a painted canvas—and vice versa.

The eighteenth-century novelist and playwright Françoise de Graffigny has left us a firsthand description of a rococo interior. She was visiting a recently decorated country house in Champagne in the winter of 1738, and in a letter to a friend she recorded her impressions of her hostess's
appartement
.

Her bedroom is paneled and painted light yellow, with pale blue moldings; an alcove of the same, framed with delightful Indian [meaning Chinese] paper. The bed is in blue moiré and everything matches so that even the dog basket is yellow and blue, like the chair frames, writing desk, corner cupboards and secretaire. The looking-glasses with silver frames, everything is wonderfully polished. A large door, glazed with looking-glass, leads to the library, which is not yet finished. Its carving is as precious as a snuffbox. There will be looking-glasses, paintings by Veronese, etc. One side of the alcove is a small boudoir; you fall on your knees when you go in. The paneling is blue, and the ceiling has been painted and lacquered by a pupil of Martin, who has been here for the last three years. All the small panels have paintings by Watteau; these are the Five Senses; then two fables by Lafontaine,
Le baiser pris et rendu
, of which I had the engravings, and
Les oies de Frère Philippe
. Ah! what paintings! The frames are gilt and pierced to show the paneling. There are the Three Graces, a chimney-piece diagonally in the corner, and corner cupboards by Martin, with beautiful objects on them, including an amber desk-set which the Prince of Prussia sent him with some poems: I'll tell you about that later. The only furniture is a large armchair covered with white taffeta, and two matching stools; for, by God's grace, I haven't seen a
bergère
in the entire house.

Note that the writer gives equal weight to everyday objects as to art, to the picture frames as to the pictures, to the lacquerwork of the renowned Martin brothers as to the works of Watteau and “Veronese, etc.” The reference to the lack of bergères, which were fully upholstered armchairs fashionable at the time, was meant to draw attention to the unconventional simplicity of the decor.

The owner of the
appartement
was the Marquise du Châtelet, whom Graffigny archly referred to as
la belle dame
. In fact, Émilie du Châtelet was no great beauty, but she possessed something rarer, a formidable intellect—she was an accomplished mathematician and physicist, whose translation and commentary on Isaac Newton's
Principia Mathematica
remains the standard French text to this day. She was also a talented singer and musician, a collector of books, diamonds, and snuffboxes, and an inveterate (though not very successful) gambler. In addition, this remarkable woman, as Nancy Mitford indelicately put it, “always had something of the whore.”

Louis XV bergère

The marquise's most famous romantic liaison was with the great writer Voltaire. “She understands Newton; she despises superstition and in short she makes me happy,” he explained. The two were together, more or less, for fifteen years—until her death. The decoration of her country house at Cirey was one of their joint projects. Voltaire, whose business investments had made him a wealthy man, financed the work, but he didn't have the final say. “Madame du Châtelet has become architect and gardener. She is putting windows where I've put doors, she's changing staircases into chimneys, and chimneys into staircases. She's going to plant lime trees where I proposed to place elms; and if I had planted a vegetable garden, she would turn it into a flower bed,” he complained. But he admired her talents. “What's more she has waved a magic wand in the house. She is able to turn rags into tapestries; she has found the secret of furnishing Cirey out of nothing.”

The household arrangement at Cirey—a ménage à trois that included the marquise's complaisant husband—was unconventional. Émilie and her lover each had their own study and their own library—science hers, literature his—an astonishing 21,000 books in all.
1
Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet kept different hours—he worked throughout the day, she liked to work at night. While she prepared a study of Leibniz, he wrote poems, plays, and philosophical tracts. They met in the evening. Voltaire would dragoon houseguests and neighbors into performing his plays in a pretty miniature theater that he had installed in the attic. Graffigny describes a midnight meal following such a performance. “After supper, Madame du Châtelet will sing an entire opera … We can't catch our breath here.”

The lovers occupied a newly built wing next to the crumbling old chateau. The heart of their home was a gallery facing the garden. Paneled and painted yellow, it was part living room and part laboratory; in addition to the usual furniture, it housed a collection of telescopes, astronomical models, pendulums, and globes—as well as a pet parrot. The room was heated by a porcelain stove “that makes the air as warm as in the spring,” wrote Graffigny. This was where the marquise played her harpsichord, and where papers and books were pushed aside to make room for morning coffee and evening supper; Graffigny describes sharing the table with an orrery. At the Château de Cirey, intellectual pursuits happily coexisted with material pleasures. One has the sense that the Enlightenment polymaths paid as much attention to decor and furnishings as to science and philosophy—they were all one.

Let's Pretend

The carving around the main entrance of Cirey was designed by Voltaire. The allegorical ornament on each side of the door—art on one side and science on the other—represented its two occupants.
2
The urge to decorate is as old as human history. Ornament was probably first applied to the human body, which, over the centuries, has been smeared, painted, dyed, and tattooed. Nor was this tendency limited to “primitive peoples”; Voltaire regularly wore a powdered peruke, and by all accounts whenever Émilie du Châtelet appeared in public she bedecked herself with jewels.

Ornamented tools and utensils are found in all preindustrial cultures. The decoration of utilitarian objects both humanizes them and makes them more enjoyable to use. I have a letter opener that I bought in a craft shop, made out of tornillo, a tropical hardwood. The object is as smooth as a Brancusi sculpture except for the handle, which is only partly carved; half of it is left in a natural state, the coarse grain plainly visible, a graphic reminder that this was once part of a tree. The rich dark wood—both smooth and rough—is satisfying to handle, even just to look at. Not that it slits paper any more effectively than a kitchen knife, but using this tool adds pleasure—and import—to the simple act of opening an envelope.

It is easy to forget in our functional age that, until recently, most machines and tools were ornamented, lathes as well as typewriters. Expensive shotguns are still decorated, as are some musical instruments such as harps and harpsichords, and old-fashioned implements such as fountain pens, but, on the whole, modern tools are plain. The computer on which I am writing—a Mac—has been lauded for its design, but its smooth shape is about as expressive as a toaster. Using it does not provide the same tactile and visual pleasure as my letter opener.

While few of us occupy rooms “as precious as a snuffbox,” we do dress up our homes—with wallpaper, window treatments, and patterned rugs. Remove these embellishments and a house looks unlived-in. The desire to ornament can emerge in the least likely circumstances. I've seen mud huts in African villages whose front doors were carefully outlined with colored paint. The modest decoration was prompted by the same impulse that makes Americans decorate their front doors for Thanksgiving and Christmas: celebrating entry into the home.

The British architectural historian John Summerson pointed out that there are two distinct types of ornament. One simply modulates surfaces with patterns or decorative designs. Surface modulation provides a focus for the eye, as well as a contrast between surfaces that are ornamented and surfaces that are plain. It can also provide a tactile experience, a sense of scale, a definition of edges, or the articulation of different parts. In a Louis XV armchair, for example, the floral pattern on the upholstery fabric can mimic the carved motifs on the legs and arms.

The second type of ornament Summerson called “subjunctive” (he admitted it was an awkward term). What he meant was the desire to make something appear “as if” it were other than it really was: a rosette carved out of wood, a plant motif embroidered on a chairback, or a guilloche chain carved on a chair rail. Subjunctive ornament can be natural forms rendered in inert materials, or forms transposed from one material to another. A rococo chair may have arms carved like foliage, and feet in the shape of clenched animal claws. Such ornament brings to mind the frisson of wonder at an illusionist's levitation or a conjurer's card trick. The world is not what it appears to be.

Subjunctive ornament could be called “let's pretend,” since play is never far beneath the surface. Because we have learned to treat classical architecture with a respect that often borders on reverence, it is easy to miss how joyful and even prankish classical ornament can be. Although plants carried serious symbolic meanings in the ancient world—the evergreen stood for eternity, the vine for fertility, the oak for wisdom—the rotund fruits, curling leaves, and sinuous stalks also introduce a frolicsome quality that undermines the solidity of architecture. A seventeenth-century British visitor to Venice described a Corinthian capital, which is a riot of acanthus leaves that resembles tumbled hair, as “decked like a wanton courtesan.”

Garlands, fronds, swags, and other floral motifs, whether carved in wood or cast in bronze, turn eighteenth-century armchairs into horticultural samplers. A profusion of encrusted shells and sea urchins gives the impression of something pulled from the briny deep. When tastes shifted to the neoclassical, furniture legs resembled fluted columns and marquetry was more likely to show classical ruins than floral arrangements.

Whatever its iconographic or symbolic content, ornament inevitably blurs the distinction between what we perceive with our senses and what we intellectually know to be true. That is why ornament has always consisted of plant life, chains, ropes, and knots, as well as human and animal figures. Such decoration starts by catching the eye, and ends by engaging the mind. As Voltaire famously quipped about luxury: “The superfluous is such a necessary thing!”