Page 179 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

164 Greg M. Thomas
Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Farnham, UK and Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2011),
7–75.
19 Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête
Impériale, 1849–1870 (Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 1997).
20 Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 76–77, 139; and “Musée chinois de S. M. l’Impératrice,”
Le Monde illustré, no. 325, July 4, 1863, 5–6 (reproduced on MIT Visualizing Cultures
website, op. cit.).
21 Duff, Eugenie and Napoleon III, 8, 17, 85–86. His mother showed him his baptism site
in 1831.
22 Duff, Eugenie and Napoleon III, 144–150, 158–159.
23 Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 67–72.
24 Marie-Laure de Rochebrune, ed., La Chine à Versailles: Art et diplomatie au XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Somogy, 2014), 120–139.
25 Therese Dolan, “The Empress’s New Clothes: Fashion and Politics in Second Empire
France,” Woman’s Art Journal. Vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1994): 24–28; David
Baguley, Napoleon III and his Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2000), 50; Olivier Gabet, “Marie-Antoinette, d’Eugénie aux Vanderbilt,”
Marie-Antoinette (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2008), 378–379.
26 Dolan, “The Empress’s New Clothes,” 26.
27 On the Petit Trianon, see La Chine à Versailles, 258–269. On Versailles, see Daniëlle
O. Kisluk-Grosheide, “French Royal Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum,” The
Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. New Series, Vol. 63, no. 3 (Winter, 2006): 4–48:
22–28; and La Chine à Versailles, 191–197, 204–213.
28 Both are in the Metropolitan Museum (nos. 20.155.11–12). Compare Kisluk-Grosheide,
“French Royal Furniture,” 27 and Gabet, “Marie-Antoinette,” 379.
29 Duff, Eugenie and Napoleon III, Chapters 11–15, 17. Napoleon and Eugénie also visited
Victoria at Osborne in 1857. On Victoria’s visit, see also Napoléon III et la reine Victoria
(Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2008).
30 Duff, Eugenie and Napoleon III, e.g. Chapters 6, 9.
31 An 1855 watercolour by James Roberts shows the room as prepared for the couple; Royal
Collection no. RCIN 919924. On these objects, see my “Chinoiserie and Intercultural
Dialogue at Brighton Pavilion,” in Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China
and the West, ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 2015), 228–243.
32 Union syndicale des architectes français, Exposition des oeuvres de Laisné, Millet et
Ruprich-Robert (Paris: Gastinger, 1891), 13–16; see also “Victor Ruprich-Robert,”
Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art . . ., ed. Philippe Sénéchal and Claire Barbillon:
www.inha.fr/fr/ressources/publications/dictionnaire-critique-des-historiens-de-l-art.html;
accessed July 2015. I thank Vincent Droguet for directing me to this source.
33 M.V. Ruprich-Robert, Notes lues dans la séance du 3 mars 1868 à MM. les professeurs
de l’école (Paris: J. Claye, 1874), 5–14; and “Le premier des décorateurs, c’est l’architecte,”
Revue de l’architecture et des travaux publics, vol. 20, 1862, columns 263–271.
34 Ruprich-Robert, “Le premier des décorateurs,” column 265: “Ne serions-nous pas
disposés volontiers à accorder aux auteurs de toutes ces merveilles le droit de créer
l’ensemble des décorations de nos palais, de nos maisons?”
35 Victor Ruprich-Robert, Ornamental Flora (London: John Weale and Paris: Dunod,
1866), 1.
36 Ruprich-Robert, Ornamental Flora, 2–8; and Notes, 5–8.
37 The notice in Le Monde illustré—the only review I know of—just calls the museum a
pretty room with nicely sculpted vitrines and then raves about the finely crafted but
grotesque art of a regressive Chinese civilization (6). Three or four photographs were
made by Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg, probably in 1863, commissioned for Eugénie. See
Thomas, “Looting.”
38 Samoyault-Verlet, Musée chinois, 19.
39 By this accounting, there are 14 units with black backgrounds and 14 with gold.
The entrance into the room has one black unit on either side, with the inner walls as
follows (B = black background, G = gold background):