Paneled Room (salon de compagnie) (Doors B-2)

The design of this room was invented by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, one of the most celebrated French architects of his generation, who called on skilled painters and sculptors to implement his decorative scheme for the painted and gilded doors and panels, and the gilt plaster relief sculptures in the overdoors. The grotesque ornamentation, which combines graceful arabesques and winged centaurs with palmettes and sphinxes, shows some of the finest decorative work of the late 1700s. Much inspired by the art of ancient Rome, such designs are characteristic of the style called neo-classicism that was fashionable in Europe during this period.

The paneling decorated the main reception room of a house built for Jean-Baptiste Hosten. Hosten derived his fortune from a large sugar plantation in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Republic of Haiti), where two hundred slaves worked. He invested his colonial wealth in Parisian property and entrusted Ledoux with the construction of his private house surrounded by a planned group of fourteen other houses to rent. As his home was being built in Paris during the early 1790s, Saint-Domingue was riven by a slave uprising – the beginning of a revolution that would result in the abolition of slavery in that colony in 1793 and the winning of independence from France in 1804. Hosten had returned there by 1802, possibly to oversee the anticipated re-imposition of slavery, and was executed in February of that year by a mulatto militia. Only six of the houses of his planned Parisian development were completed and the paneling from his own reception room was removed just before the group of buildings was demolished in the early 1890s.