Page 171 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

156 Greg M. Thomas
to an English collector during the French Revolution, it turns out Eugénie saw and
admired two of these very pieces—a cabinet and commode veneered in ebony and
Japanese black lacquer panels, with ornate ormolu mounts—when she visited Scotland
in 1860. 28 We will see that this lacquer inspired the main decoration in the Chinese
Museum.
A more immediate inspiration came from Queen Victoria, with whom Eugénie
enjoyed a special relationship. Eugénie and Napoleon got along extremely well with
Victoria and Albert during Napoleon’s visit to Windsor and London in April 1855
and Victoria’s reciprocal visit to Paris in August, during the Universal Exposition.
Victoria advised the pregnant Eugénie on avoiding a third miscarriage, sent an English
lady to be by her bedside when Prince Napoleon was born in 1856, recommended
his nanny, corresponded with her, and comforted her in London in late 1860 after
the death of Eugénie’s sister and just after the Yuanmingyuan was looted. 29 Eugénie
was also very close to Lord Clarendon, rumored to be her biological father, who was
Victoria’s Secretary of State 1853–1858. 30 Since my previous publication on the
museum, I learned that Napoleon and Eugénie were hosted during their 1855 visit
in Buckingham Palace’s Yellow Drawing Room, decorated in a Chinese manner with
extravagant objects made by King George IV for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. 31
Multiple techniques of display and ornamentation evident there are repeated at the
Chinese Museum, suggesting a crucial alternative source for Eugénie’s innovative dis -
play. Considering the Franco-British alliance in China, this direct link to Buckingham
Palace gave the museum strong national as well as personal meanings.
A final layer of re-interpretation was the material practice of the museum’s chief
designer, Victor Ruprich-Robert, an establishment architect and professor of design.
Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, he replaced Viollet-le-Duc in 1859 as the
professor of ornament at the École nationale et spéciale de dessin. Specializing in
renovating medieval buildings, he was named a knight of the Legion of Honor in
1861 and led the renovation of the Fontainebleau block where the Chinese Museum
32
was housed. While he had no other experience with non-Western art or architecture,
two sets of beliefs shaped Ruprich-Robert’s approach to the Yuanmingyuan’s objects.
First, he argued passionately that successful art—art that achieves unity and poetry—
requires an inventive creator who can design across the professions of painting,
sculpture, and architecture and across different media such as plaster, wood, bronze,
and textiles. 33 In an important 1862 article entitled “The first among decorators is
the architect,” he cites examples of “le Grand Art” ranging from Greek vases to
medieval metalwork to Raphael’s loges and asks: “Would we not gladly grant to the
authors of all these wonders the right to create the entire decoration of our palaces,
of our homes?” Yes, he says, because they all have something greater than any single
34
painter or sculptor today. He claims only architects are now capable of such unified
design, due to their multifaceted training. In his mind, achieving a unified decorative
effect in the Chinese Museum was key, and that involved bringing French and Chinese
aesthetics together.
More germane to the installation’s specific design was his belief that ornament
is the key ingredient of this universal art of creative unity. His major 1866 book,
Ornamental Flora, opens with the statement “There is no civilization of which
posterity has discovered vestiges, without stating among its ruins . . . the art of
Ornamentation.” 35 He talks about flowers in particular encapsulating both the
geometry and beauty underlying God’s creation, and emphasizes that his floral