I learned today that if you are looking at fine furniture or art, and you are impressed with the craftsmanship but you don’t actually like it,
you use the euphemism “beau travail,” literally “beautiful work.” Perhaps the object is not really your taste, perhaps the colours repel you, or perhaps you think the whole thing is downright ugly. If, on the other hand, you actually liked the object, you would simply sigh with a covetous gleam in your eye and say it was "beau," beautiful.
The
Camondo Museum is full of furniture and other art objects that are "beau travail" to me, although to someone who loves 18th century Louis XV and Louis XVI style, they will be marvelously "beau." The museum was the former home of the Camondo banking family. The Camondos were Sephardic Jews, chased from Spain during the Inquisition. They established a bank in Constantinople at the beginning of the 19th century, then moved to Paris in the 1870s. Monsieur Moïse Camondo built himself a mansion modeled on the Petit Trianon in Versailles, then filled it with 18th century decorative art treasures. Money, apparently, couldn't buy happiness, as his wife ran off with the manager of the family's stables, who also happened to be a dashing Italian count.
The house is certainly impressive, and is near the lovely Parc Monceau.
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| Musee Camondo |
The objets d'art inside are also impressive, although they will mostly appeal to people who go wild over gobs of gilt.
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| Why ruin a perfectly fine crackled celadon vase with all those gold curlicues? |
There are also many outstanding examples of fine marquetry furniture, where the inlaid wood veneer forms exquisite patterns. A huge amount of work goes into not only the marquetry design, but also the choice of wood for the veneer, the orientation of the wood grain, and the treatment of the wood to slightly char it, producing a 3D effect of shadowing. Here is a good example, a cabinet by the Maître Ebéniste (Master Cabinetmaker) Jean-Henri Riesener (1734-1806).
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| Riesener sliding door cabinet with floral marquetry |
You can see the slats that make up the sliding doors. There are two small gold knobs in the middle of the bouquet. When you push the knobs apart, the doors slide into the body of the cabinet, hidden from view. This kind of slat-based sliding door design later came back with a vengeance, in 1970s TV consoles.
Woodworking was not Riesener’s only skill, as the story of how he became a Maître Ebéniste shows. Riesener was an apprentice, then a journeyman with the great furniture maker Jean-François Oeben (1721-1763). Oeben actually had two journeymen, Riesener and Jean-François Leleu, who was more senior. If a Master died, it was assumed that the senior journeyman would take over the workshop. Therefore, when Oeben died, Leleu assumed that he was the rightful heir and that his future would be bright and rosy. Riesener, however, had other ideas. Riesener and Leleu fought over the right to inherit Oeben’s mantle, and pounded each other in physical brawls that were noted in police reports of the time. Riesener eventually won by seducing Oeben’s widow and persuading her to marry him. He thus inherited Oeben’s workshop, became a Maître Ebéniste, and later became Marie Antoinette’s favourite cabinetmaker.
One of the rooms I liked best at the Camondo museum was the kitchen, a large, light-filled space with a stunning collection of copper pots:
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| Kitchen of Musee Camondo |
I also liked this austere but beautiful still life from the kitchen:
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| Meat grinder and friends |
Just for the record, although my personal taste leans more towards Shaker style, I thoroughly enjoyed Coppola’s movie about Marie Antoinette. I guess it’s hard to make a fantasmagoric and luscious film about the Shakers.
The Camondo family had a tragic end. Moïse Camondo’s only son Nissim was killed as a pilot in World War I. Devastated by his son’s death, Moïse willed his entire house and its contents to the state. His daughter Béatrice and her husband and children all perished at Auschwitz.
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