Museums: Mirror of an Era

For his four daughters and 13 grandchildren, to say nothing of his friends and fellow antique fanciers, the late Forsyth Wickes delighted in opening wide the golden trove that he had gathered in his 16-room home in Newport, R.I.

At Starbord House, dinners were served on an early-1800s English table from porcelain that had belonged to Madame du Barry and the Prince de Condé. The sitting room, library and foyer were crammed with rare 17th and 18th century furniture and objets d’art. When Wickes, a retired lawyer, died in 1964 at the age of 88, his heirs gave the $4,000,000 collection to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Some 800 selections from it go on view next week. They have been exquisitely installed, with the aid of Wickes’ longtime caretaker, English-born Charles Taylor, in six rooms that duplicate on a reduced scale the décor of Starbord House (see color page).

Kingly Extravagance. To Perry Rathbone, director of the museum, the formal yet familial ambiance thus created seems particularly appropriate, because the ages of elegance that Wickes loved were marked by “a spirit of refined and luxurious intimacy.” The arts and crafts were more closely related then than perhaps either before or after. As Rathbone points out, the relationship and atmosphere are difficult to convey when the component parts are spread over several galleries. It is only when they are assembled that a coherent picture of a period emerges.

It was an era dominated by luxury-loving Bourbon France, and its real mirror was its applied arts. Cabinetmakers produced carved and inlaid furniture, which they were entitled to sign, like artists. Porcelain factories turned out incense burners shaped like snails or elephants, tulip stands decorated with genre scenes. Yet, while artisans were elevated to the status of artists, painters often became as subservient as craftsmen. The vast majority of oils, watercolors and drawings made by Fragonard, Boucher, Watteau and Nattier to decorate boudoirs and gaming rooms were skillful but skin-deep pictures of pretty ladies, handsome gallants and idyllic landscapes.

The ancien régime felt a special kinship with the stylized artifice of Chinese design. Chinese porcelain was admired for its curvilinear grace, and mantelpieces and niches were filled with delicious Meissen and Chantilly imitations of Chinese styles. One of the most striking objects in the Wickes collection is the great black Chinese chest that London craftsmen lovingly set on legs of gilded wood. When the stateliness of the baroque era gave way to the studied insouciance of the court of Louis XV, chests took on a kind of portly gentility, as witness the gilt-trimmed rococo commode in Wickes’ salon.

When Louis XVI succeeded Louis XV in 1774, the rococo was superseded by the neoclassical mode, an improbable amalgam of Roman severity and Bourbon frivolity exemplified by the small writing desk that stands between two tapestry-covered Louis XV armchairs. The desk’s spare lines are in conflict with the riot of gilded tassels, leaves, garlands and mythological heads. In politics, the warring desires for republican simplicity and kingly extravagance proved even more difficult to resolve, and after the French Revolution the curios made for kings descended to commoners. A Jacques-Louis David crayon drawing of Napoleon’s mother, done before 1800, is a trenchant comment. Beneath a flashy nouveau riche Empire headdress, the Corsican dowager wears an expression of smug pride.