Page 157 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

142 Vincent Droguet
salon-gallery. The latter room, decorated in crimson cloth and hung with green
cotton curtains like the grand salon, was furnished with window seats and small
billiards tables for the entertainment of guests. A stunning sculpture of an Algerian
Woman by Charles Cordier, in onyx and gilt bronze, stood here from 1863, seeming
to welcome and guide the visitor. For the imperial couple, this statue must have
constituted another example of the exoticism under whose sign these rooms had been
placed. One should also not forget that it was on the western wall of this salon-
gallery that the empress had hung Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s famous painting
depicting her among her ladies in waiting. This emblem of the Second Empire
belonged to Eugénie herself and was returned to her after 1870. Today the canvas
is kept in the Château of Compiègne.
The grand salon, which opens through four bays on the side of the pond and two
others on the side of the Fountain Court, was truly new because two rooms had to
be combined to create the space. However, it was intended to recall clearly the style
of the building in which it is situated through an imposing cornice in eighteenth-
century taste and a superb fireplace in violet breccia marble dating probably to the
end of the reign of Louis XIV. Along similar lines, the portrait of Louis XV after
Rigaud and that of Queen Marie Leszczinska after Toqué were hung here to evoke
the age of enlightenment dear to the empress. With its comfortable seats, broad-
patterned carpet, wall tapestries, and imposing fireplace, the empress’s new salon
fitted perfectly into the “standards” of luxury of royal palaces in the mid-nineteenth
century (see Figure 9.2). The comparison with Buckingham Palace’s Yellow Drawing

Figure 9.2 General view of the grand salon with the portraits of Louis XV and Marie
Leszczynska. © Fontainebleau, Château.