Tag: Chinoiserie

Chinoiserie is a decorative style that has been a consistent design element for centuries. I enjoy referencing it when I find it among the products I feature here on the blog.

A survey of my posts finds Chinoiserie among the projects of top interior designers and the objects owned by tremendous tastemakers on par with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. When Sotheby’s auctioned off her estate nearly 45 years later in April 1996, the two-inch-thick catalog, titled The Estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, notes she owned Tiffany silver and Ormolu accessories, Italian cast bronze sculpture, gilded and ebonized furniture. And Chinoiserie proliferated in her art and accessories.

Antiques were plentiful, as well, including Rococo, Biedermeier and Neoclassical treasures. Her art collection included French School watercolor portraiture; Neapolitan School scenic watercolors; Dutch oil paintings; French School gouaches of architecture studies, which hung in the foyer of her Fifth Avenue apartment; and marble sculptures, many of them depicting mythological figures, dating from the 4th-century BC to the 3rd-century AD.