ABSTRACT
“Dealing in Interiors: How Maison Carlhian and Duveen Brothers Shaped an Eighteenth-Century French Salon in 1920s New York”
Anne-Marie Schaaf and Teresa Morales
Two prominent transatlantic firms of antique dealers also played significant roles as interior designers for wealthy Americans from the 1880s through the 1930s. Not merely suppliers of goods, Maison Carlhian and Duveen Brothers furnished entire homes and often literally transferred interiors from Europe to America for clients who hoped that this aristocratic material legacy would confer upon them a similar social prestige.
Maison Carlhian, established in Paris in 1867, developed reproduction and restoration workshops for woodworking, plasterwork, scenic wallpaper, and upholstery. Using period paneling and model books as guides, they planned interiors with diagrams, photographs, and scale models constructed of wood, cardboard, or canvas. Colleagues and sometimes competitors Duveen Brothers, established in London in 1879, began dealing in Dutch ceramics, Chinese porcelain, tapestries, metalwork, and furniture. By the turn of the century, Duveen had focused on Old Master paintings and sculptures and had begun contracting with Carlhian in order to obtain French items, mainly paneling and furniture.
Together and separately, Carlhian and Duveen conceived and executed sumptuous interiors for East Coast industrialists and financiers, primarily in eighteenth-century French styles. As practitioners of a historically secretive business, they wrote no manifestos, but they did leave copious evidence of their intentions and results in both archives and museum period rooms. The extensive archival and material culture sources illuminate both their working methods – from making deals to fabricating chandeliers from a mix of old and new parts – and their influence on high-end American residential interior design.
Drawing upon the archival evidence of both dealers’ practices, this essay traces the path of the salon (drawing room) they created for Mrs. Alexander Hamilton Rice’s New York townhouse. Now preserved in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the room contains gilt paneling, French furniture, Sèvres and Chinese porcelain, sculptures, and tapestries selected and assembled by the two firms. The legacy of this collection of French decorative arts demonstrates the dealers’ and client’s taste, based on the status derived from connections to eighteenth-century aristocracy and prominent later collectors.
