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| - The gilded moldings and carved decoration on this chair and a matching settee (acc. no. 1992.173.1) frame reverse-painted glass panels, which imitate in different colors the hardstones agate, marble, and lapis lazuli. Close inspection reveals the high quality and intriguingly delicate structure of the paint and the fragility of the panels, which is not evident at first glance. That the chair and settee have survived in such good condition is testimony to the technical skills of the maker, who provided a sound base for the heavy glass strips, preventing them from peeling away over time. Nevertheless, these are display pieces that were clearly not intended for regular use. The smallest body movement of a user or any attempt to shift or lift the heavy objects puts divergent forces and pressure on their ostentatious "skin."The Museum's chair and settee are part of a large suite that originally consisted of at least four settees and twenty side chairs.[1] Early in the twentieth century the set was in the collection of the earl of Derby, at Derby House, London, from where it was sold in 1940 to Mrs. Violet van der Elst, also of London. The pieces were dispersed in 1948.[2] At that time, all items of the suite were covered with the bold red and gold baroque-cut velvet that still decorates the Museum's pieces. For many years it was assumed that the initials "PPL" displayed in a medallion on the backs referred to the Villa Palagonia in Bagheria, near Palermo, and, more specifically, to a member of the illustrious Gravina family as a patron;[3] however, as James David Draper pointed out, although "the peculiarly Sicilian penchant for fashioning an overall look out of glass was most memorably given free rein at the Villa Palagonia, . . . the initials 'PPL' . . . do not correspond with those of any prince of Palagonia and in truth the pieces have a much more pronounced neo-classical severity than the Villa Palagonia ballroom."[4]John Richardson, the donor of the Museum's pieces, which he had acquired on the London art market, kept them at one point in the Château de Castille in Provence, the home of the Cubist scholar Douglas Cooper,[5] who himself owned at least three chairs from the set.[6] For the moment, the original location of the suite remains a mystery, although the preciousness and labor-intensive nature of the work narrows the source of the commission to one of the great, prosperous, aristocratic families of Sicily.The back of the settee is tripartite; the medallion with initials appears at the top of the center section, but in the same place on the side sections there is a military trophy in the form of a helmet superimposed on a saber. There is a gilded openwork frieze of overlapping ellipses along the top of the back of both the chair and the settee; this appears also along the bottom of the back of the settee but not on the Museum's chair. These ellipses, rather freely adapted from ancient vase paintings, reflect the so-called Etruscan fashion of the last third of the eighteenth century.[7] A very similar pair of chairs, each, however, with an octagonal verre églomisé panel set into the back in place of upholstery, is part of the collection of Juan March Ordinas at Palau March in Palma de Mallorca.[8] That those panels show a mythological chariot in the manner of an ancient vase painting is also very much in the "Etruscan" style. The incorporation of glass panels in the center of the backs makes the March chairs even more fragile than the Derby House suite.[9]Other pieces from this suite are preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago (two chairs),[10] the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida (two settees and two chairs),[11] and the Museum für Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt am Main (one chair),[12] as well as in various private collections. Some of them have been recovered in shell pink or blue gray fabric with the intention of intensifying the effect of the same shades painted on the glass.[Wolfram Koeppe 2006]Footnotes:[1] Catalogue of a sale at Christie, Manson, and Woods, London, 26 July 1940, lot 41 (sold to Mrs. Violet van der Elst).[2] Catalogue of the Violet van der Elst collection sale, Christie, Manson, and Woods, London, 8 April 1948, lot 114 (ill.).[3] Allen Wardwell. "Continental Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago." Magazine Antiques 92 (October 1967), p. 520.[4] James David Draper. "A Life at the Met: James Parker and the Collecting of Italian Furniture." Apollo 139 (January 1994), p. 23. On the Villa Palagonia and its glass decorations and furniture, see Alvar González-Palacios. "The Prince of Palagonia, Goethe and Glass Furniture." Burlington Magazine 113 (August 1971), pp. 456–60. González-Palacios quotes (p. 456) an English visitor to the villa in 1770, Patrick Brydone, who called it an "enchanted castle," in which some of the ceilings "instead of plaster or stucco, are composed entirely of large mirrors, nicely joined together. The effect that these produce (as each of them make a small angle with the other), is exactly that of a multiplying glass, so that when three or four people are walking below, there is always the appearance of three or four hundred walking above." Goethe, who visited the villa in 1787, described it as "the Palagonian madhouse." See also Alvar González-Palacios. Il tempio del gusto— Roma e il regno delle Due Sicilie: Le arti decorative in Italia fra classicismi e barocco. 2 vols. Marmi 136. Milan, 1984, vol. 1, p. 385, vol. 2, p. 275, fig. 629; and Mario Giarrizzo and Aldo Rotolo. Mobile e mobilieri nella Sicilia del Settecento. Palermo, 1992, p. 124, pl. 78.[5] Mentioned to me by Walter E. Stait, in 1993.[6] John Richardson. "Cubists among the Columns." Vanity Fair, July 1984, pp. 56-57.[7] John Morley. The History of Furniture: Twenty-five Centuries of Style and Design in the Western Tradition. Boston, 1999, pp. 202-8, pl. 386.[8] Juan José Junquera y Mato. Spanish Splendor: Great Palaces, Castles, and Country Houses. New York, 1992, p. 269.[9] Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to examine the chairs in question and have no idea what their state of preservation is. The Derby House set was copied in the early twentieth century; see catalogue of a sale at Christie's, London, 27 May 1993, lot 181.[10] Allen Wardwell. "Continental Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago." Magazine Antiques 92 (October 1967), p. 520.[11] Cynthia Duval. Five Hundred Years of Decorative Arts from the Ringling Collections, 1350–1850. Exh. cat., John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Sarasota, Fla., 1981, p. 157, no. 153.[12] Margrit Bauer, Peter Märker, and Annaliese Ohm. Europäische Möbel von der Gotik bis zum Jugendstil. Museum für Kunsthandwerk. Frankfurt am Main, 1976, pp. 112, 145-46, no. 201; see also catalogue of a sale at Sotheby's, New York, 28 April 1990, lots 175-77 (three pairs of side chairs). (en)
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