Page 161 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

146 Vincent Droguet
only in 1879 in favor of the French State. The rooms were then opened as a museum
of Oriental art in the heart of the château, but stripped of their furnishings: comfort -
able seats, movable chairs, pedestal tables, pianos, and billiards were removed from
the site as embarrassing reminders of a bygone era.
A century later, in the 1980s, the château’s curatorial staff made the decision to
restore the Chinese Museum and the adjoining rooms to their Second Empire con -
dition. This operation was carried out in an exemplary manner under the leadership
of Jean-Pierre Samoyault and Colombe Samoyault-Verlet, relying both on the palace
inventories, which recorded all the objects and furniture items belonging to these
rooms during the reign of Napoleon III, and the several photographs made by
Richebourg in 1863, shortly after the opening. This restoration included the re-
installation of objects in the glass cabinets and of furniture in various spaces but also
the restoration of the Chinese Museum’s lacquer panels as well as the reproduction
of the wall fabrics and carpets. After seven years of work, begun in 1984, the
empress’s rooms and Chinese Museum were able to open to visitors in 1991.
Thus in these meticulously restored spaces one can probably imagine better than
previously the setting of the private life of the last French rulers at Fontainebleau
and gauge to what degree the “Oriental desire” constituted for a worldly and cul ti -
vated fringe of European society an aspiration that resulted in creations as numerous
as they were unique in the realm of the visual and decorative arts. Moreover, this
“Oriental desire” of Empress Eugénie did not end with the Chinese Museum. Several
years later, in 1868–1869, she planned to have a new office installed on the ground
floor of the Louis XV wing, also in the oriental taste, by reapplying the decorative
principles already realized in the Chinese Museum: lacquer panels covering the walls,
silks on the upper section, and installation of the fourth kesi on the ceiling. But in
the case of this office, the oriental effect is all the more striking since the furnishing
was composed in part of authentic Japanese or Chinese pieces. 18
Finally, we should keep in mind, to conclude, that the strong passion for orien -
tal objects that existed in France under the Second Empire reached not only a ruler
like Eugénie or “un homme du monde” like the Duc de Morny, but also more
demanding collectors such as the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the self-
proclaimed archetypes of the high-level treasure hunter. In the Goncourts’ house at
Auteuil, it is clear that objects were exhibited in a manner that largely accorded with
that adopted by Empress Eugénie at the Chinese Museum of Fontainebleau; lacquer
and porcelain plaques were hung on the walls, while porcelains were densely packed
in glass cabinets.
Despite the social, intellectual, and more general cultural distance that separated
them, we might wonder if the dreams—or “oriental phantasms”—belonging to the
old Edmond de Goncourt, lying on the sofa in his “attic” in the middle of his cherished
collections, were not of a somewhat similar order as those of the empress posing
nonchalantly as an odalisque for the photographer. Beyond the border of individual
universes, it was the spirit and conventions of an age and a culture that affected
them.

Translated by Greg Thomas