Tag: fine antiques

I’m a fan of fine antiques. I make it a point to not only seek them out at antique shows, I visit museums to see how curators have arranged vignettes and entire rooms that have been broken down and reassembled as they originally were.

One example of a sighting of such a magnificent example of fine antiques was the Widener Room at the National Gallery of Art. The Rococo interior was clad in an aged boiserie originally installed in La Château de la Norville about 20 miles south of Paris. The room seemed oddly intimate and I couldn’t put my finger on why until it occurred to me that seeing the raw boiserie was like seeing a woman without her make-up.

There were hints of her adorned self in the lushness of Christophe Huet’s paintings inset into the transoms, the gilt-framed compositions still gleaming as they would have when lavish fêtes were underway, but there was an air of vulnerability about the room that would not have occurred to me if the high-gloss had been intact.

I also had the thrill of seeing a table à écrire belonging to Marie Antoinette in person. Was this really the writing table upon which letters like these would have been penned? I wondered, in awe of the petite desk I found tucked within a cluster of galleries on the main floor of the museum. I have a number of posts under this tag so if you’ve enjoyed this snippet, I hope you’ll stop by and read about other fine antiques I’ve spotted on my travels.