The Chinese Drawing Room at Temple Newsam in which Lady Hertford, the Prince Regent's mistress, cut out the birds from Audubon's hand-colored engravings and pasted them to the wall
Jayne Wrightsman's Palm Beach residence decorated by Jansen
Six from the original set of twelve hand-colored basso relievo engravings by Samuel Dixon, circa 1750, available from Graham Arader
"Royal Plumage" hand-embroidered silk by Christopher Edwards available here through my favorite discount fabric website
The Peacock Room, 1877 by James McNeill Whistler, Freer Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
16 comments:
Delightful. I enjoy searching out variations of a motif within an interior, a house as well.
On my last trip to Winterthur I made note of each Queen Anne Style chair (I love the old style names and refuse to be reconstructed re: art history terms)and marveled at the variety within one form. KDM
Totally inspired to start my own wall of decorations!!! :-)
Bisous from Paris!
xoxo
KDM, My favorite "Queen Anne" chairs are the Portuguese versions. And I know these style labels are disdained, but they sure are useful, aren't they? EEE
I love all of these rooms though I never considered myself much of a bird watcher. The Chinese dining room still knocks my socks off.
Hi Emily!
Great post. Next time you are in Paris for a week, you should stay where I stayed last time I was there, at a house owned by Tom Scheerer that has its own Aviary Suite!
http://www.parischezvous.com/pages/aviary.html
(PS: it's me, your neighbor at 60 Clark).
Shut up. And it has a fireplace too???
(And we thought we were so fabulous staying at the Hotel Danube, especially when Plum Sykes checked in...)
Wonderful post, I love the Whistler room and that Chinese Drawing room- wow wee! Only a Prince's mistress- she must have gotten bored one evening waiting for her love and had the servants get out the scissors. la
I think I'm more into the prints than the actual boxed specimens, but great collections none the less!
There is something about close hung pictures, which I am unable to resist, whether hung irregularly or regularly. Birds are a particular favourite.
Tom Britts Grand Salon, particularly appeals to me; I am keen on a dark room flooded with light.
Those Samuel Dixon engravings, I could live with very easily indeed.
They would look just fine in my Drawing Room.
Afraid I can't quite stretch to a Grand Salon.... not quite yet anyway... but we are working on it!
OH how I LOVE your examples of Tom Scheerer and Tom Britt. WOW. I have a somewhat sizable collection of sweet little hand-colored engravings of South American hummingbirds by William Lizars. But not in the right space. *sigh*
Soodie, they sound charming - maybe now is the time to make it the right space? Of course, easier said then done. I've always dreamed of a collection of silhouettes....
The Hunting Room at Clandon Park always seemed to me the quintessence of John Fowler's approach. I've made several visits, each time finding something new to admire about the decoration of that country house. On one unnerving occasion, the chinese porcelain birds AND their rococo brackets had been removed from the Hunting Room~a temporary measure against potential burglary. It seemed a terrible deprivation. The balance of the room was upset (gilt, porcelain, festooned chintz
in the seaweed pattern, brown diamond cloth walls banded in moss green grosgrain tape) and one really felt the loss of Mrs Gubbay's beautiful birds.
The bird pictures in the Tom Sheerer room are Swedish, aren't they? They're wonderful, wherever they're from.
Have a look at 18th century English naturalist and artist Mark Catesby's birds of the Carolinas, Florida and the Bahamas.
http://www.catesbytrust.org/Catalog/cg010001.htm
Emily, I've always loved Tom's room at the top so I appreciate the other grand interiors you brought in. Made me think!
Wasn't expecting the Whistler room. I think Michael Smith recently did something inspired by it. Great choice.
Courtney, Tom Scheerer's room has haunted me from the first moment I saw it. I love love love it.
And I think you're right about Michael Smith - isn't in his latest book that he talks about having a sort of aesthetic movement moment complete with an appreciation for cloisonne? I'll have to look that up again and compare the two rooms....
The Calke Abbey photograph made me smile...and even brought on a little sneeze.
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