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This Chinese Room reflects the royal taste and patronage in the 1820s and 1830s Berlin. Large panels of highly decorative hand-painted Chinese paper, with borders of gold Chinese characters on a blue background, line the walls. Black lacquered furniture upholstered in bright yellow silk, a curving banquette by Birkenholtz covered in blue damask and two Renaissance Revival chairs covered in rose velvet provide seating. A japanned cabinet is in partial view in the right foreground; large Chinese porcelains are on display; and a grand chandelier hangs from a whimsically painted ceiling evoking the heavens. The bare floor is of blond parquet.

Details

  • Title: The Chinese Room in the Royal Palace, Berlin
  • Creator: Eduard Gaertner
  • Creator Lifespan: 1801/1877
  • Date Created: 1850
  • Type: Drawing
  • Rights: Thaw Collection
  • Medium: Brush and watercolor and gouache, graphite on white wove paper
  • Signed: Lower right: E. Gaertner 1850
  • Provenance: Eugene V. Thaw Collection; Feilchenfeldt, Zurich
  • Paper Support: White wove paper
  • Exhibitions: New York, NY, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. House Proud: Nineteenth-Century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection, August 12, 2008-January 25, 2009.New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, From Romanticism to Realism: German Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1998.New York - Frick Collection, An Album of Nineteenth-Century Interiors: Watercolors from Two Private Collections, May 21 – August 23, 1992.
  • Dimensions: Frame H x W x D: 42.2 x 60.3 x 2.5 cm (16 5/8 x 23 3/4 x 1 in.)Sheet: 27.2 x 36.3 cm (10 11/16 x 14 5/16 in.)
  • Bibliography: Gail S. Davidson et al., House Proud, Nineteenth-Century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2008), 115, pl. 48.Charlotte Gere, Nineteenth-Century Interiors: An Album of Watercolors (New York: The Frick Collection, 1992) 68-69, (illus.).Irmgard Wirth, Edward Gartner, Der Berliner Architekturmaler (1978), fig. 159(illus.).

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