Page 159 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

144 Vincent Droguet

Figure 9.4 General view of the Musée chinois. © Fontainebleau, Château

from the temple of “Kao-min-Tsen” (Gaomingcun) and were installed in 1867, the
room is devoted entirely to the display of the empress’s collection of Oriental objects.
The idea of devoting one or more rooms to the role of a “museum” in the heart
of a royal apartment was not completely new. 13 At Versailles, Louis XIV had main -
tained a “cabinet of curiosities and rarities” adjacent to his apartment and Marie-
Antoinette, whom Eugénie virtually worshipped, had installed in several rooms of
her interior apartment the collection of Japanese lacquers inherited from her mother,
Empress Marie-Thérèse. At Fontainebleau, however, the cabinet of curiosities was
rather transformed into a room of monumental proportions where the decoration of
the walls and ceiling played a major role in complementing the collection.
The wall ornament of this grand room consists of lacquer panels on a gold ground,
following a decorative principle dating back to the end of the seventeenth century, 14
panels whose presence often sufficed to identify a room as a “Chinese salon”. These
panels came from two large screens that were in the furniture collection of the crown
well before the Second Empire. Split and juxtaposed, the panels were finished with
other elements purchased from the Parisian merchant Meyer, who had also provided
the decorative borders. The lower section of the walls is covered with paneling
painted black and adorned with red wood moulding, all of which was meant to evoke
an Oriental décor. Above the lacquer panels, the wall is hung with red silk with green
patterns, which was originally an authentic Chinese fabric.
On the ceiling, three large kesi (silk embroideries) from the Yuanmingyuan
cover the surface, within a frame of black lacquered wood and yellow silk. This fixed
decoration is again enriched by carved and painted wooden moulding that adorns
the window jambs and the arcade opening onto the grand salon. These Chinese