Visiting grand houses: The importance of symmetry

Two tourists in Asterdam

Hello my friends. On my last visit to Amsterdam I took a friend of mine to see two museumhouses in our capital city. It is not only fun to engorge oneselve in the beautifully restored interiors. They are also great for gaining inspiration for colourschemes and details in decor for my own project.

Both houses are canalhouses in Amsterdam. Now Huis ter Swinnendael will be a large country house but these two museumhouses are nevertheless very interesting for my project. In this post I will show you some of the rooms of the Van Loon house. My next post wil be about the Willet-Holthuysen house.

the red drawing room

 This house with its sandstone clad front facade is a magnificent private residence built in 1672 by the architect Adriaen Dortsman. Its first occupant was the painter Ferdinand Bol. Then it came in the hands of the Van Loon family who own it to this day.

The blue drawing room

As the photographs show, Most rooms are decorated in a rococo influenced decor. Little of the late 17th century decor remains. This is quite common in these kind of houses. Interiors were often more subjected to fashion than the exteriors. The same will aply for Huis ter Swinnendael. Some rooms will have primarily a 17th centrury baroque decor or a 18th century rococo or clascicist decor. In the Netherlands more ore often called succesively Louis 14th (Baroque), Louis 15th (Rococo), or Louis 16th (Clascicism). 

The Diningroom

In the main receptionrooms on the ground floor you can see a great use of the colour combinations that they used. Although I do not know if these combinations are the same as the original colours 2 centuries ago, or are choices of a later date, they suit the rooms well.  The greyish green with red fabric of the red drawingroom is a favorite combination that can be seen in several drawings and paintings from that time. In the posts about the different rooms in my cardboard model for Huis ter Swinnendael I do no use orange, but the combination of muted orange and clay in the diningroom I find very atractive. So who knows...

The master bedroom

This bedroom is the grandest of the bedrooms. Its layout resembles the blue bedroom in the cardboard maquette that I have made. The red fabric contrasts nicely to the pale blue. But the next photo is, in my opnion, the best of the bunch.

... And the importance of symmetry!

This is in my eyes the best feature of the house. The closed door you see is not a door. The open door is the actual entrance to the room. If you stand in the corridor the door on that side is bang in the middle of the wall of the corridor. The bedroom wall is shorter because of the built in cabinets left and right of the fourposter bed. But a symmetrical decoration of the wall was very desirable. So when the actual door closes the walltreatment is perfectly symmetrical but that grand door, complete with its overdoor grissaile painting is false and has no doorknob because it is a false door.

I think it is a matter of getting ones priorities right. :-)

I hope you have enjoyed this little summerpost and till next time.

Huibrecht

A miniature gueridon tutorial: 1. "I wanna see your face painted black"....

Hello my friends. 

Perhaps you recognise this line from 'Paint it black' by the Rolling Stones? Don't worry. I am not morrose, lovelost or depressed. But that song keeps popping up in my head when I work on this next little project.

Many of you will know gueridons. A type of sidetable/ pedestal which were quite popular from the 17th century onwards. They were highly decorative and there stem could have the shape of a collumn, a balustre or the carved figure of an animal or a human. The human figures were, depending on the size of the Gueridon, either shaped as putti, Cherubs or full grown people/ mythical figures. Blackamoor was the name given to those where the stem was carved and painted like African natives. Like the pair beneath which I found on the site of Sotheby's. Although some examples with Asian or North American Indian figures do exist. Those are very rare however. 

source: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2013/19th-century-furniture-n08983/lot.246.html

You may know that Mulvany and Rogers also used pairs of beautiful blackamoors made by John Hodgson in some of their dollshouses. Their version(s) of Versailles has them for example. The photo beneath depicts them, though not in a Versailles setting. 

source: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/john-hodgsons-pair-blackamoors-signed-1800396916

For a large countryhouse like Huis ter Swinnendael a pair of this kind of gueridons or torchères may still be a bit too grand but I believe that Carel Polyander Zonneschut could have brought them back from his ambassadorship in Paris. So with that in mind I started sketching...

Remember the two 'clock angels' I bought at a fleamarket last year and used to adorn a wall mounted clock? I did not quite know what to do with them. Their faces did not have the right proportions for classical angels. And their bodies were quite elongated. A few weeks ago I got the idea of trying to turn them in a pair of gueridons/ blackamoors. But how should I proceed from here?

First I had to rid them of there wings. They are made in the second half of the 20th century and made from a cheap alloy called spelter. So if my attempt should fail, the loss of them would not be that great. I took a pair of plyers to hand and ripped the wings of their back.

It is not as cruel as it sounds. Luckily they did not feel a thing. ;-) Next I proceeded to repair their backs. I shaped the 'wounds' of the remaining wingattachment with needlefiles, and used filler paste to fill the holes. Lastly I used coarse and fine grade sandpaper to smooth them up. Now they were ready to be painted.

Then I aplied black enamel paint to blacken their bodies. I tried one with black and one with gold coloured hair. I sticked with the gold. The tone difference between the black and gold is always quite apealing. Blackened and gilded bronzes are to be found in almost every antique shop or grand house.  My gueridons will not be real blackamoors in the sence that they are gold haired putti.

But where to go from here? The bases and the crowns and how I will make them will be shown in part 2. Be well and enjoy the summer!

Huibrecht