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The Grand Salon from the Hôtel Gaillard de La Bouëxière

Thursday, July 14, 2005—Thursday, November 9, 2006
Third Floor Period Rooms
Free Exhibition

A new period room opened July 14, 2005, Bastille Day, at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Permanently installed within the museum, the Grand Salon from the Hôtel Gaillard de La Bouëxière (c. 1735) is one of the most intact existing interiors from early eighteenth-century Paris. This room retains its sumptuously carved and gilded paneling. The Grand Salon reflects a mixture of the régence and rococo styles. Its aesthetic merit is complemented by its important history, once owned by Jean Gaillard de La Bouëxière, who successfully pursued royal positions during the reign of Louis XV.

The Groves Foundation, with the support of Carolyn and Franklin Groves, purchased the Grand Salon for The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and continue to fund its complete conservation, restoration, and installation. The Foundation has also provided for an adjacent museum gallery that interprets the Grand Salon and exhibits French and European fine and decorative arts of the eighteenth century.

About the Grand Salon

Hôtel Gaillard de La Bouëxière in the early 20th century

The Grand Salon, with its carved and gilded paneling, is a distinguished survival of 18th-century French interior design. This elegant room-now painstakingly conserved and restored-originated as the formal reception space (c. 1735) in a Paris mansion. The owner, Jean Gaillard de La Bouëxière (1676-1759), was a wealthy man from Brittany who pursued influential positions during the reign of Louis XV.

In the early 18th century, many French merchants, financiers, and nobles acquired private residences in fashionable Paris neighborhoods like the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Place Vendôme. In 1731, Jean Gaillard de La Bouëxière bought a residence at the corner of the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs (now the Rue Danielle Casanova) and the Rue d'Antin, near the Place Vendôme. He enlarged and modernized the 1682 building, creating an hôtel (mansion) befitting his elite status as a fermier général (tax collector) for the Crown.

Room plan (late 18th century) of the second floor of the Hôtel Gaillard de La Bouëxière

The principal rooms of the Hôtel Gaillard de La Bouëxière, located on the second floor, included a grand salon richly decorated in the régence and rococo styles popular during the 1730s. In the salons of 18th-century Paris, cultivated people gathered to converse, read literature, enjoy music, and engage in diversions such as card playing. This room's design and decoration created an ambience conducive to those refined pursuits.

Gilded carvings on the two curved wall panels celebrate the arts and hunting. Other panels are adorned with images from classical mythology, including Apollo and the Muses, and with allegorical portraits of the continents. On the cornice that crowns the paneling, putti enjoy life's pleasures while droll monkeys play musical instruments. According to inventories of the time, the grand salon was furnished mainly with gilded armchairs upholstered in Gobelins tapestry picturing scenes from Aesop's fables.

After the death of Jean Gaillard de La Bouëxière in 1759, the hôtel changed hands many times. Ornately paneled rooms were removed from the building, and the interior was subdivided and remodeled. In 1983, through the generosity of The Groves Foundation, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts acquired the mansion's grand salon.

Installation of the Grand Salon is entirely funded through The Groves Foundation and the generosity of Carolyn and Franklin Groves, connoisseurs of French art committed to providing an architectural context for the Institute's impressive collection of French decorative arts.

Symbolism in the Grand Salon

Mythology - Apollo

Mythology
Gilded carvings of various gods and goddesses reflect the 18th-century interest in classical antiquity. Apollo, portrayed as god of music and poetry, holds a lyre. He and his twin sister, Diana, goddess of the hunt (holding a bow), appear on either side of one of the mirrors. Flanking another mirror are Erato, the Muse of love poetry (striking a tambourine), and the flute-playing satyr Marsyas, who challenged Apollo in a music contest judged by the Muses. Mercury, god of trade and profit, identified by his caduceus (wand) and winged hat, is paired with Euterpe, the Muse of music, holding a flute.

Allegory - America

Allegory
Female heads, portrayed in profile, personify four continents. Each is identified by her headdress: Africa wears the head of an elephant; America, a crown of feathers; Europe, the helmet of Minerva (Roman goddess of wisdom); and Asia, a camel's head.

Trophy - Hunting

Trophy
The term trophy refers to a painted or carved group of related objects. Two of the room's panels are decorated with trophies, one representing the arts and the other the hunt. The arts trophy, adorned with a garland of roses, celebrates music and the theater. Flutes, oboes, bagpipes, and castanets, along with other instruments and a book of music, appear with a jester's staff and a theatrical mask. The hunting trophy, decorated with oak leaves, includes a hunting horn; a net of dead game containing a rabbit and fowl; a flintlock gun, swords, and bundled rods crossed with an ax and javelins; and a falcon's hood and lure.

Chinoiserie - Fireback

Chinoiserie
During the 18th century, Europeans were fascinated by products imported from the Far East and by accounts of travel to exotic places such as China, Japan, and India. People surrounded themselves with chinoiserie: prints, porcelain, furniture, textiles, and architectural elements influenced by Eastern designs. The central plaque of the fireback in the Grand Salon pictures a man sitting cross-legged, wearing an exaggerated Asian costume complete with a lotus-leaf hat, and attended by a monkey. He holds a table with a teapot and bowl, a reference to the Eastern ritual of tea drinking that inspired a similar custom in Europe.

Singerie - Monkeys and music

Singerie
Monkeys (singes, in French) were often drolly portrayed in human roles during the 18th century. In the Grand Salon's cornice, monkeys mimic the adjacent putti by playing musical instruments.

Evolution of a Period Room

Detail of the cabinet (study) from the Hôtel Gaillard de La Bouëxière as installed at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1944 (The Saint Louis Art Museum, Purchase 7:1929)

The Hôtel Gaillard de La Bouëxière remained in the family of Jean Gaillard de La Bouëxière until 1766. The bank BNP Paribas owns the renovated building today.

In the late 1920s, the dealers Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co. of Paris sold several rooms from the mansion. The Saint Louis Art Museum purchased a cabinet (study), which remains on view as a period room. In 1929, one week before the stock market crash, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired paneling from the grand salon along with the fireback, fireplace marble, and cornice on view today.

Watercolor model of the Grand Salon
(Maquette of the Grand Salon of the Hôtel Gaillard de La Bouëxière, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 88.58)

In the 1940s, the Metropolitan commissioned the interior decorating firm Carlhian of Paris to make a watercolor model of the grand salon. The room's two long walls are reversed in the model, and the interior shutters and faux marble baseboard are missing. Carlhian had to create the model's curtains and four overdoor paintings, since the originals had been removed before the room was sold to the Metropolitan and shipped to New York. The model was given to The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1988 by Leon and David Dalva.

The Metropolitan never installed the grand salon, and eventually the New York antiques dealers Dalva Brothers acquired it. In 1983, Carolyn and Franklin Groves and The Groves Foundation purchased the grand salon from Dalva Brothers and donated it to The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, with funds to complete its conservation, restoration, and installation.

Conservation and Restoration

More than a dozen workshops, conservation firms, and restoration companies in America and France, in addition to members of the museum's staff, contributed their skills to installing the Grand Salon in The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Throughout the process, the museum's curators consulted colleagues at institutions that had undertaken similar projects with their 18th-century French period rooms: the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the American Embassy in Paris.

Artisans from Les Ateliers Gohard (Paris) gilding plaster reliefs in the cornice

From 2002 to 2005, Les Ateliers de la Chapelle in Le Longeron, France, and Les Ateliers Gohard in Paris conserved and, where necessary, restored the carved and gilded panels. Most of their work was carried out in France, following practices of traditional craftsmanship. Meanwhile, the Upper Midwest Conservation Association, housed in the Institute, performed the challenging task of resculpting plaster reliefs on the cornice and the ceiling medallion and repairing breaks in the marble fireplace mantel and hearth.

Artisans from Les Ateliers de la Chapelle (Le Longeron, France) assembling the paneling

The cast-iron fireback is based on an 18th-century example. The 18th-century fireplace bricks came from the Château de Noizé in Maine-et-Loire, France. Plaster designs based on 18th-century motifs adorn the cornice. The six sconces derive from similar sconces (c. 1735) in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the model for the chandelier originally hung in the Château d'Ingelmunster in Belgium, near Lille, France.

The restored windows, interior shutters, and parquet floor are based on photographs taken when their historical counterparts were still intact in the Hôtel Gaillard de La Bouëxière. The window soffits and ceiling medallion were made from plaster casts taken from the originals. The two-part leaded mirrors and the crimson silk curtains with their gilt-threaded passementerie (trim and braid) were reproduced from descriptions in the 1759 inventory of the room.