“Whenever I pass through a city, I never fail to visit whatever illustrious furnished hous

“Whenever I pass through a city, I never fail to visit whatever illustrious furnished houses are open to outsiders. […] It’s not only that I find myself more in touch with the past: the very arrangement of the furnishings act on me as a spell. The odor of the furniture, of the wax on the floos, of the ancient rooms is as pleasing to me - or even more pleasing - than the scent of meadows in spring […]. I have a weakness for watercolors of interiors, too, especially the kind that were painted in the first half of the 19th century, the patient work of minor artists or amateurs, which reproduce every piece of furniture, every object, every detail of the carpets and the curtains, the sense of the light and shadows in the room. […] Those great halls, those rooms, depicted just as they were when they were inhabited by the people whose taste they reflect, seem to me vibrant with expectation, still animated by human warmth, like a bed only recently abandoned by the man who slept in it. The flights of rooms and corridors, glimpsed through the doors, and the walls thick with paintings, the knick-knacks, the busts, the statuettes and porcelains, the flowers under the glass bells, breathe an intimacy that you never find in the rooms which serve as backgrounds for the official portraits.[…]Old Europe, beautiful were the richly-decorated salons of your palaces, the calm rooms of your old bourgeois houses, the rustic kitchens of your simple dwellings in the mountains; beautiful also was your furniture with its time-stained patina, your objects lovingly worked by generations of cabinet-makers, potters and glodsmiths! We, who have known all these things in their splendor, who have - if only for a day - made ours the life of so many cities that are no more, how can we forget? As long as there are four walls that still keep the aroma of that vanished Europe, it is among those walls that we wish to die.”Mario Praz, in his little masterpiece with the understated title "An illustrated history of interior decoration”. Watercolour: The west libraries, Capesthorne Hall, Siddington, Cheshire, England (c. 1837). By James Johnson (birth and death dates unknown), in the collection of the Bromley-Davenport family. Source: + -- source link

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