Double-Leaf Doors
Pierre Rousseau·1790s
Historical Context
Pierre Rousseau was a French decorative painter who worked on the interior of the Hôtel de Salm in Paris in the early 1790s, the very period depicted here. The Hôtel de Salm, now the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur, was one of the most elegant Neoclassical private mansions in Paris, and its interior decoration employed leading painters and craftsmen working in the refined Louis XVI Neoclassical style just as that world was being swept away by the Revolution. These Double-Leaf Doors painted in the 1790s are part of the original decorative ensemble — trompe l'oeil architectural elements, arabesque ornament, and allegorical figures in the manner of the antique. They represent the highest expression of French decorative painting immediately before and during the Revolutionary period.
Technical Analysis
Rousseau's decorative painting employs trompe l'oeil illusionism — the painted doors must appear architecturally consistent with the surrounding real stonework. Careful perspective construction, smooth graduated modelling of fictive mouldings, and the restraint of a palette limited to greys, whites, and warm stone colours achieve this illusion.
Provenance
Said by Wildenstein & Co. (letter of January 19,1942) to have come from 193 Boulevard St. Germain, Paris (known at the time as 21 and 23 rue St. Dominique), a private house, supposedly built after plans by Ange-Jacques Gabriel (1698—1782). Comte Hippolyte Terray, owner of the house from about 1830; Marquise de Belleuf (daughter of Comte Terray); Comte de Waresquiel; Arthur Veil-Picard; [Wildenstein & Co., Paris]; Grace Rainey Rogers, purchased in 1913. Gift of Grace Rainey Rogers in memory of her father, William J. Rainey, 1942 and 1944.
