Friday, December 1, 2017

More European Rooms from the Pulverized Past

Matthaus Kern
Study at St Polten
1837
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Eduard Gaertner
Study of Prince Karl of Prussia
1848
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

James Roberts
Study of King Louis-Philippe at Neuilly
1845
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

A WINDOW

Among a hundred windows shining
     dully in the vast side
of greater-than-palace number such-and-such
     one burns
these several years, each night
     as if the room within were aflame.
Some fault in the glass
     combines with the precise distance and
my faulty eyes to produce
     this illusion; I know it 
yet still I'm ready to believe perhaps
     some lives
tremble and flare up there, four blocks away
     across the sooty roofs and
the dusk,
     with more intensity than what's lived
behind the other windows,
     and the glowing of those brands of life
shows as seraphic or demonic flames
     visible only to weak and distant eyes.

 Denise Levertov, from The Jacob's Ladder (Jonathan Cape, 1965)

Josef Sotira
Study of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna
1835
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Ernst Christian Anton von Lautzow
Study of Grand Duchess Cecilia von Oldenberg
1839
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous English artist
Library
ca. 1830-50
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous English artists
Library
1850s
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Arthur Frederick Payne
Pynson Wilmot Bennitt's Room at Trinity College, Oxford
1857
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Julius Eduard Wilhelm Helfft
Music Room of Fanny Hensel née Mendelssohn
1849
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

S. Tolstoi
Man's Living Room
ca. 1853
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

C.M. Fredro
Room in Reuss Palace, Dresden
ca. 1835-37
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Emanuel Stöckler
Drawing Room of a Sportsman
1856
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Mary Ellen  Best
Drawing Room
ca. 1837-40
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

C. Rath
Blue Room
1877
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum