Chateau de Malmaison

The lovely Chateau de Malmaison started out as a country house near Paris built between 1610-1620. The Revolution led the owners to sell to Josephine on 21 April, 1799, in accordance with the wishes of Napoleon who was away on campaign in Egypt to acquire some land near Paris. On his return from Egypt Napoleon completed the purchase and became the owner of the property. The First Consul appointed architects Percier and Fontaine to restore the chateau. In 1800 they began to lay out the rooms by decorating them in a neo-classical style inspired by the recent excavations of the ancient Roman sites at Rome and Pompei.

In 1801 Percier and Fontaine added a porch shaped as a campaign tent at the front to house the servants.

Inside the architects transformed  the hall by using four stucco columns to create a room that resembled the atrium of a Roman villa. Originally there were sliding mirrors in the central arcades which gave entry to the Billiard Room and the Dining Room on either side. The chairs in the hall are by the Jacob Brothers and came from Murat's library at the Elysee Palace.

The Hall

The Billiard Room was designed by Percier and Fontaine in 1800. The fifteen X-shaped stools covered with red Moroccan leather, together with two semicircular gilded tables were supplied in 1808 by Jacob-Desmalter for the gallery which was destroyed by fire in 1832.

The Gilded Room, Salon Dore is still furnished with six original mahogany armchairs adorned with Egyptian heads attributed to the Jacob Brothers and covered with blue velvet. The chairs covered with gros de Tours came from Josephine's Room at Saint-Cloud Palace.

The Gilded Room

The Music Room was designed over three small rooms to form a gallery to display paintings by contemporary artists in the troubadour style favoured by Josephine.

The Music Room

The four armchairs and two of its original four settees had been returned to the Music Room together with the harp that belonged to the Empress Josephine.

The Dining Room

Between 1800-1802 France was governed from Malmaison and the Tuileries. One hundred and sixty nine councils were held at Malmaison in the Council Room, which discussed among other things the creation of the Order of the Legion of Honour and ratification of the Treaty of San Ildelfonso which returned Louisiana to France. Portraits of Josephine and Madame Mere hang on  walls lined with striped twill to give the appearance of a campaign tent.

The Council Room

The Library at the opposite end of the chateau to the Music room was similarly formed by removing the partitions of three smaller rooms to create one large space. The wall are lined with mahogany made by the Jacob Brothers in 1800. Concealed behind a mirror is a hidden staircase by which Napoleon could make his way discreetly to his apartment on the first floor. The magnificent bureau was used by Napoleon in his Cabinet at the Tuileries, throughout his reign.

The Library

When they first moved to Malmaison Napoleon and Jospehine shared what is now known as the Empress' Bedchamber but in 1803 Napoleon decided to move his quarters to two small rooms in the south wing above the library and Council Room. The room is now used to display portraits of the imperial family including a portrait of Empress Josephine by Reisner, son of Marie-Antoinette's cabinet maker.

The Emperor's Drawing Room

The octagonal pedestal table purchased by Napoleon III is part of the chateau's original furniture.

Sphinx  firedog.

The bed by Jacob-Desmalter in the Emperor's Bedchamber had been delivered in 1806 for Prince Eugene's bedchamber at the Tuileries Palace and while the chairs came from Saint Cloud they have been covered with a reproduction of the original fabric.

The Emperor's Bedchamber

The Emperor's Bedchamber

The Arms Room and the Marengo Room have been transformed into museum rooms displaying mementoes belonging to Napoleon Bonaparte, General and First Consul and works dating from the Consular period.

Stool shaped as crossed swords (a pair) c 1813-1814 attributed to Martin-Guillame Biennais (1746-1843)

Prince Eugene, Viceroy of  Italy

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825),

Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul,

Crossing the Alps at Great-Saint-Bernard Pass, (detail)

oil on canvas 1801

The Austerlitz Table displays around Napoleon crowned as emperor, the portraits of his joint chiefs of staff on the day of the battle of Austerlitz (2nd December, 1805).

Austerlitz Table (detail)

Manufacture de Sevres 1806

Painted by Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767-1855)

The three rooms formerly part of Queen Hortense and  Prince Eugene's apartment have been used to display mementoes belonging to Empress Josephine. As part of her divorce settlement Napoleon gave  Malmaison to Josephine together with the 14th century chateau Navarre in Normandy. She kept the Elysee Palace maintained her rank of empress, and all her honours and prerogatives. And if that was not enough, all her debts were paid off and she was awarded an income of 3 million francs per annum for life.

How ironic when the reason Napoleon divorced Josephine was to get an heir for his empire when it turned out that it was her grandson, rather than any children of napoleon who would be the next emperor of France (Napoleon III). Today her direct descendants occupy the thrones of Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Luxembourg while  Napoleon's sit on none.

Empress Josephine,

Gobelins manafacture

The most spectacular part of the collection is of almost fifty pieces of the two ceremonial services commissioned by the Empress and her son Prince Eugene to the Dihl et Guerhard porcelain factory after her divorce. After the collapse of the Empire they were taken to Munich and were used used by Russian descendants of the prince before being confiscated during the Russian Revolution. the pieces now at Malmaison were sold by the Soviets between the two World wars.

Manufacture de Dihl et Guerhard, Paris

Dessert plates commissioned by Empress Josephine after the divorce

hard-past porcelain c 1811-1813

The Frieze Room occupies the bedchamber of Mlle Avrillon, the Empress' chambermaid, along with  Josephine's bathroom.

The Empress' Bedchamber was redecorated by the architect Berhault after the divorce while the Empress went to Milan in the summer of 1812. He created a magnificent room shaped as a tent. The gilded wood bed by Jacob-Desmalter (1812) was where Josephine died on May 29 1814.

The Empress' Bedchamber

During the Consulate when the couple shared the same bedchamber the Ordinary bedchamber was used whenever one of them was ill. After becoming Empress Josephine turned the room into her Ordinary Bedchamber as opposed to the ceremonial one next door. She used the room to read and write letters and was where she kept her jewels.

The Ordinary Bedchamber

Pompeian motifs on the walls of the Dressing Room

The Boudoir was used as a sitting room and as a small dining room for small intimate gatherings. On occasion she would invite a female orang-utan dressed in a white chemise to eat turnips among her guests at a table.

The Boudoir

The estate at Malmaison grew to be three hundred acres of gardens, woods and pasture and a magnificent collection of statuary. Josephine kept a menagerie of exotic animals including kangaroo, emu, flying squirrel, gazelle, ostriches, lamas and a cockatoo that only knew one word (Napoleon) which it repeated endlessly.

The last resident of Malmaison was Napoleon.  After Waterloo he spent a fortnight there, before his embarkation for St Helena.

Horace Walpole's Wooden Cravat

One of Horace Walpole's most prized possessions was the cravat c.1690 carved from limewood in imitation of Venetian needlepoint lace by Grinling Gibbons. It was made to show the sculptor's skill. Walpole was a great admirer of Gibbon's work and his family home, Houghton Hall in Norfolk had a room decorated with his carving.

The wooden cravat was displayed in the Tribune or Cabinet at Strawberry Hill alongside Walpole's other most precious small objects. In 1769 he wore the wooden cravat and a pair of lace gloves that had belonged to James VI and I to receive some distinguished French, Portuguese and Spanish visitors. The wooden cravat is now a prize exhibit at the V&A.

Strawberry Hill

Strawberry Hill was the most famous house of its age. Both house and Horace Walpole have been described many times before. In 1747 he acquired the small nondescript villa on the banks of the Thames, in fashionable Twickenham that he was to transform into a "a gingerbread castle", "a Gothic mousetrap" and a "paper house". From now until the end of his life, nearly fifty years later, Strawberry Hill was to be the centre of Horace Walpole's life. He never married.

"Visions you know have always been my pasture.....Old castles, old pictures, old histories and a babble of old people make one live back into centuries that cannot disappoint one."

Walpole's interest in the Gothic dated from when he first saw the King's College Chapel ceiling while an undergraduate at Cambridge. But he had no interest in trying to recreate the past, what he wanted to was to put on a show, deploying theatrical effect to conjure up an atmosphere of "gloomth". In doing so he created the style known as Strawberry Hill Gothick, at a time when the Classical idiom was thought ideal for the design of country houses.

"It (Strawberry Hill) was built to please my own taste, and to some degree please my own visions". 

And of course it helped that he was immensely rich. Son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole he received lucrative  government sinecures worth thousands a year, but it can't be said that he did not spend it well.

Strawberry Hill is a fabulous confection conceived to house a museum that contained Walpole's expanding collection of art and relics from "Queen Bertha'a comb" to a locket containing "hair from Mary Queen of Scots" and a "spur worn by King William at the Battle of the Boyne."

Walpole wanted his house and collections to be admired. He opened his house to the public allowing four visitors a day. The upper class visitors were shown around by Walpole himself  leaving the lower order to be escorted by the housekeeper for a guinea a tour.

 He introduced an advanced booking system: "Every ticket will admit the Company between the hours of 12 and 3 before dinner. The house will never be shown after dinner nor at all but from the first of May to the first of October." And ........."Those who have tickets are desired not to bring children."  In what is a great touch, today's visitors are still given a facsimile of  Walpole's guide as their entry ticket.

The first major work at Strawberry Hilll was the staircase hall, begun in 1753 to the designs of Richard Bentley. It was based on the library staircase at Rouen Cathedral. Bentley was to remain Walpole's chief designer for ten years. Horace Walpole was to describe the hall as 'the most particular and chief beauty of the Castle'. The stone-coloured trompe-l'oeil tracery on the walls was copied from the tomb of Prince Arthur in Worcester Cathedral.

In his little hall Walpole strove to invoke the fashionable melancholy of Alexander Pope's poem 'Eloisa to Abelard'; Pope was a close neighbour. When a gunpowder mill three miles away blew up, the glass on either side of he front door shattered and Walpole wrote that the saints had been 'martyred'.

At night a black japanned lantern with painted glass  gave a shadowy light from a solitary candle, contributing to the air of melancholy. This famously gave rise to Walpole's dream in 1764, of a giant mailed fist appearing from the top of the stairwell above. He woke from a fever to start writing his novel, The Castle of Otranto.

The first major extension would be  the Great Parlour, dominated by Bentley's fantastic Gothick chimney piece. While the fireplaces may have been copied from Medieval tombs there were carpets on the floors.

"In truth I do not mean to make my house so Gothic as to exclude convenience and modern refinements in luxury."

This is the room that contained the famous Bentley-Walpole designed chairs with black Gothic window-tracery backs.

The walls were originally hung with portraits of family and friends, some by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Opposite the fireplace hung  a painting of Walpole's three nieces, The Ladies Waldegrave 1780, by Reynolds. After his death in 1797 he left Strawberry Hill to the unmarried daughter of a cousin, Lady Anne Seymour Damer, a noted sculptor and then to the Waldegraves, the family of his great niece. In 1848 the Waldegrave family sold off the contents, to their shame leaving the house stripped bare.

 Walpole installed Gothick bookcases in the library of painted wood derived from the stone doors in the screen of Old St Paul's, and the chimney piece was inspired by John of Eltham's tomb.

Bentley made his last designs for Walpole with the chimneypiece for the Holbein Chamber (so-called because it contained drawings of the royal Holbein portraits), based on Archbishop Wareham's tomb in Canterbury Cathedral and an intricate screen derived from the choir gates at Rouen. Despite their origins these remain among Bentley's most fantastical creations. By 1761 Walpole could no longer tolerate Bentley and he was sacked. His brilliant and original designs could could not compensate for his shortcomings, his laziness and extravagance, and Walpole a withering snob could not forgive him for bringing his common wife to Strawberry Hill when guests of the highest rank were present. From then on the designs were devised by Chute, until his death in 1776 and the recently co-opted Thomas Pitt, a nephew of the Great Commoner.

Until Bentley's departure the alterations to the original building had not been on a large scale but in 1760 comes the start of Strawberry Hill's most important contribution to 18th architectural history; the addition of the cloister and the gallery above it stretching westwards and terminating in the great round tower so creating the romantic shape of the house. Strawberry Hill was the first house to have been designed to have an irregular outline.

The gallery, over fifty feet in length and thirteen feet wide is the largest room in the house and was intended to resemble a Tudor long gallery. The room is spectacular, over the top and and very chic.

Elaborate canopied niches taken from Archbishop Bourchier's tomb were ranged along the wall opposite the windows. They were decorated with looking-glass covered with gold lattice-work. The settees, chairs and stools were also covered in crimson damask and their frames painted black and gold. A specially woven (Moorfields) carpet ran down the centre of the floor, the remainder of which contained ranks of furniture and tables laden with sculpture and other treasures. Against the crimson damask walls were hung Walpole's best pictures.

All the rooms in the house were packed with this magpie's collections, from works of the highest quality to trinkets, trivial souvenirs and mementoes of his friends. Adjoining the gallery and the great bedchamber is the celebrated Chapel, later called the Tribune and later still the Cabinet. This small room with semi-circular apses in each wall, a ceiling derived from the Chapter House at York pierced by a yellow glass star-shaped skylight, became a repository for some of the most precious objects in Walpole's collection, including such unholy objects as statues of  Antonius and the Apollo Belvedere to a snuff box of lapis lazuli. Every available inch of wall space was hung with portraits, few of religious subjects but all of family, historical or artistic interest. There was a grill over the door to keep the visitors out.

"Vulgar people always see with the ends of their fingers."

The great bedchamber was built to the north of the gallery and, adjoining it the Cabinet.

With the addition of the round tower, containing the kitchen on the ground floor and the round drawing-room  with the great bow window on the first floor, Walpole's house was more or less complete, (with the exception of later offices).

So Strawberry Hill became the most fabulous showplace of its age.

Empress' Chinese Museum, Fontainebleu

The Chinese Museum and the Salon were redesigned in 1863 to display the Empress Eugenie's collection of Oriental treasures. Many of the objects were acquired by Napoleon III and Eugenie from the sack and burning of the Summer Palace of the Manchu emperors near Beijing in 1860 by French and British troops as reprisal for the torture and murder of envoys under a prearranged truce.When it came to sharing the spoils "the army spontaneously expressed a wish  that all the precious objects from the Imperial Palace should be sent as a gift to Her Majesty the Empress who had placed the expedition under her patronage, providing the necessary items for treating the sick and wounded." The Empress is said to have been present when the crates containing somewhere between six and eight hundred jade, porcelain and bronze objects were opened. These items were added to the collection that also includes gifts  from the ambassador of the King of Siam who visited Fontainbleu in 1861, Japanese and Tibetan objects and other Chinese items confiscated from aristocratic families during the Revolution. the Museum maintains the arrangements devised by the Empress herself.

The Salon

Tibetan stupa with its statuette of Buddha from the Summer Palace

Chinese Museum

Pump Room, Bath

Since Roman times Bath's and before hot mineral springs have been attracting  visitors. Under the influence of Ralph Allen, postmaster and mayor; John Wood, architect; and Beau Nash, fashion and social arbiter, Bath became the most fashionable city in England in the Georgian period (1714-1830). Royalty, aristocracy and commoners all bathed in the waters that Queen Anne had made fashionable by her visit.

 The original Pump Room built in 1706 was too small to cope with the increasing number of visitors. The present room 85' long, 46' wide and 34' high was built in 1796 to cope with the demand from the fashionable for a  place to see and be seen. During the excavations  many of the remains of the Roman Temple of Minerva were unearthed.

An orchestra played in the gallery while the throng below drank the obligatory water. (The gallery was reached by a ladder.) at the other end of room, in in the alcove, in a niche above the clock is a sculpture  of Beau Nash, Master of Ceremonies in Bath.So great was his success that it has been said that two things in particular transformed Bath, the hot springs that pumped out a quarter of a million gallons of water every day and Beau Nash. The legendary gambler and socialite used his position to promote his love of gambling to the idle rich who needed to fill their days after taking the waters early every morning.

As Master of Ceremonies Beau Nash organised the balls,dances and other social functions and took responsibility for their smooth running. He awarded himself the title "King of Bath". He dressed for the part and led fashionable society with his elegant style. He advocated greater social integration of the classes. In Bath he established a code of conduct for behavior in public places, which relaxed the social conventions that still prevented integration elsewhere.

Visitors flocked the Pump Room everyday from 8am or 9am until 3pm, parading around the room taking the waters. Queen Charlotte was conveyed to the Pump Room, by sedan chair, everyday that she was in Bath.

But the Pump Room's most famous visitors were fictitious, Catherine Morland who visited the Pump Room with her benefactors, the Allens in Jane Austen's novel 'Northangar Abbey'.

"With more than usual eagerness did Catherine hasten to the Pump-room the next day, secure within herself of seeing Mr Tilney there before the morning were over, and ready to meet him with a smile;- but no smile was demanded- Mr Tilney did not appear. Every creature in Bath, except himself, were to be seen in the room at different periods during the fashionable hours, crowds of people were every moment passing in and out, up the steps and down; people whom nobody cared about, and nobody wanted to see; and only he was absent. "What a delightful place Bath is" said Mrs Allen as they sat down near the great clock, after parading the room till they were tired, "and how pleasant it would be if we had any acquaintance here."