The Chinese Room in the Royal Palace, Berlin
Eduard Gaertner1850
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
New York, United States
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.
- 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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