The UNESCO-listed historic centre of the Mexican city of Queretaro, about 2 hours north of Mexico City, is a treasure house of New World baroque architecture, of which the chief secular jewel is the Casa de la Marquesa.
The façade of the Casa de la Marquesa.
Built in the mid-18C as an aristocratic residence, it’s now run as an elegant boutique hotel. I didn’t stay there, but I went for a meal in the excellent restaurant.
One of the handsomest pieces of 18th-century furniture in the New France collection at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is this butternut and pine commode from the Montréal area, dated 1740-1760. As mentioned in the two previous posts, Louis XV styles in New France only took hold around 1740 and persisted for decades after the British conquest in 1759.
A commode from New France/Québec in the ROM.
Although obviously provincial in style when compared to the work of the great ébénistes active in Paris at the same time, it’s a very fine piece. As with provincial furniture in France itself, the furniture in New France was simpler in design and execution and used humber materials than that of the capital and the court. In this case, the fancy floral moulding at the bottom, the sophisticated serpentine front, and the elaborate hardware indicate that it was a high-end piece for its time and place. Very likely it was commissioned by a well-off family.
As a fan of 18C French decorative arts, there’s nothing I love more than a Louis XV-style fauteuil, or armchair. Naturally, the first exhibits in the Royal Ontario Museum’s New France collection that caught my eye were these 2 elegant Louis XV fauteuils.
Two handsome fauteuils from New France in the ROM.
The dates given for both pieces are 1760-1790. To look at them, you would think they were from before 1760 — and you would be right if they were French. In New France, however, Louis XV styles persisted well into the 19C. This was the effect of being cut off from the mother country after the British conquest of 1759.
Let’s look more closely at each chair.
Today we pay another visit to Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (MNAA)* to have a look at Fragonard’s ‘The Two Cousins.’ As I’ve said in a previous post, Portugal is actually a great place to see French fine and decorative art because the Portuguese aristocracy collected it with such enthusiasm.
Fragonard’s ‘The Two Cousins’ as seen in the MNAA.
Today I’m pleased to bring you Versailles Century’s first house tour, except the house is now a hotel. I’ll explain.
The most famous facade of the Palacio do Freixo.
The Palacio do Freixo was built around 1750 on the banks of the Douro river near Porto for one Dom Jeronimo de Tavora e Noronha. Portuguese Wikipedia informs me that he was a wealthy gentleman with estates in the Douro valley. He was also the heir of the Dean of the Porto Cathedral, and was instrumental in bringing Nicolau Nasoni (see the previous post), the Italian artist and architect who designed the Palacio, to Porto in 1725 to work on projects for the archdiocese. Dom Geronimo left the Palacio to his younger brother, a knight in the Order of Malta, whose descendants sold it in the 19th century to a rich merchant, who built a soap factory next door. It passed through several more hands and uses before finally being declared a national monument in 1910. The Porto municipal administration acquired it 1986 and extensive restoration work was undertaken between 2000 and 2003. Since 2009, the Pestana Group has operated it as a pousada, or heritage hotel.
I take these to be Dom Jeronimo de Tavora e Noronha’s arms.
We’ll take a tour of the Palacio as a historic house in this post, and in the next one I’ll review it as a hotel.
Versailles: A Visit to the King’s Private Apartments, Part 2
In the late afternoon of the first day of my visit to Versailles, I went along to the ticket office of the Chateau to buy my ticket for the next day, including a guided tour of the Private Apartments. There were various tours in several languages, but the young woman behind the counter flatteringly recommended that I take the French language tour at 10:30, on the grounds that it was the most thorough one. I duly purchased a ticket and wandered off in the rain — the weather was relentlessly wet throughout my visit — to find my dinner.
Semi-restored room in the ticket wing. My inner interior decorator sees some sleek Italian sofas and striking contemporary art in here.
All but skipping with excitement, I turned up the following morning at the designated entrance for the Private Apartments tour. This entrance is on the north side of the Cour Royale (the Royal Court), the great courtyard that precedes the Cour de Marbre (the Marble Court) at the heart of the palace. A uniformed man checked my ticket and waved me inside. A young woman in a smart black pantsuit and a headset then asked me which tour I was there for, and directed me into an adjoining salon. This turned out to be the holding tank for imminent tours. It retained its 18th century boiserie, but was furnished with sleek contemporary furniture, which I’m tempted to say was by Philippe Starck, but I’m not sure. Another pant-suited young lady appeared and gave me a pair of earphones. I nearly protested that I hadn’t asked for an audio guide, but held my peace. All became clear when the actual guide appeared, a brisk, middle-aged Frenchwoman. She instructed us to put in our earbuds and see if we could hear her on the audio system that was connecting us. A very sensible system, this. Nothing is more annoying on a guided tour than straining, and failing, to hear what the guide is saying. We were a group of about 15 or 20. As far as I could tell, I was the only non-francophone apart from a young woman from Brazil who was studying art history in Paris, which I know because we had a chat after the tour. In fact, it turned out that she was taking a course on museology and asked me if I would oblige her by taking a short survey about my Versailles experience. I obliged, of course.
