Well Said: Van Day Truex

"As to table settings — colour in the daytime, inside — off-white faïence in the evening. I like off-white better with candlelight than colour. And out-of-doors — off-white or brown faïence. No porcelain here in the country. I prefer off-white and brown out-of-doors not to compete with Mother Nature! Napkins are brown — and natural linen — or often out-of-doors, overlarge paper. No blooms on table or centerpiece except the long table in the big room is always banked at the far (and nondining) end with potted plants and flowers."

So wrote Van Day Truex (1904-1979) about the way he lived in Menerbes, France, as recounted by his friend Marguerite Littman. An aesthete extraordinaire, he was a one-time design director of Tiffany & Co., former president of Parsons School of Design, and mighty influence on designers ranging from Billy Baldwin to Albert Hadley to Jeffrey Bilhuber as well as tastemakers such as Rory Cameron.

P.S. Do stop by The Aesthete Cooks and check out what's on the menu.

Get Inspired: Marthe Bibesco

Princess George Bibesco in her Paris apartment, wearing a Christian Dior satin caftan and banked by white and red carnations, November 1965. Image by Cecil Beaton from Christine Sutherland's "Enchantress: Marthe Bibesco and Her World" (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996).

If you can't arrange flowers in grand sprays or haven't the money to buy anything more exotic than carnations, you can always make an impact through extravagant simplicity.

Case in point? Consider the supremely stylish example of Marthe Bibesco, Roumanian-born author of the novel Catherine-Paris. In her apartment at 45 Quai Bourbon on the Île-Saint-Louis in Paris—an 18th-century hôtel particulier she shared with a variety of relatives and beau-monde tenants, including American fashion designer Pauline Potter, later Baroness Philippe de Rothschild, who sublet Bibesco's flat every summer—the writer (1886-1973) set glittering clear-glass flacons on every available flat surface, each containing a single blossom. The distinguished princess called these arrangements her "parterres," a word evoking formal French gardens and which was more than accurate, especially when the flacons were gathered together to fill a tabletop.

As photographer Cecil Beaton recalled after a visit chez Bibesco in 1965, the woman who had bewitched Proust with her youthful beauty was now a "tiresome and pretentious" septuagenarian dressed in "a horror of white satin, crumpled and a bit stained, with a black hood over her head to camouflage her dewlaps." Still the environment she inhabited made an impression worth recording in his diary that evening. "She has little money left, yet the apartment has such style that I was fascinated," Beaton admiringly observed. "At the windows are rows of glass bottles with each a sprig of camel, dromedary, or mandarin fern ... [and on a table stood] 12 eighteenth-century perfume bottles, each with a white-wire carnation facing in the direction of Notre-Dame."

P. S. Do see what's happening in the kitchen at The Aesthete Cooks.

Cut and Paste

A photocollage executed circa 1870 by Constance Sackville-West or Amy Baillie. The work combines a watercolour background of a park with albumen silver prints depicting family and friends. Image from the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Kudos to John Derian, the decoupage artist extraordinaire. Surely without this soft-spoken native of Massachusetts’s celebrated career, it is arguable that the Metropolitan Museum of Art would never have considered staging an exhibition about decoupage, the ancient art of cutting and pasting. Others may and will disagree with this opinion, of course, but Derian certainly has an an enormous impact bringing decoupage back into the public eye.

The show, which opened at the New York City museum on 2 February and closes in May, is actually devoted to an often comical subset of Derian's medium—photocollage. Victorian ladies high and low took cut-out images, watercolours, and photographs and inventively combined them into folding screens, decorative pictures, and charmingly surreal albums infused with Monty Python-style absurdity. The 48 works on display in "Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage" are not great works of art by any stretch of the imagination, even if, as the catalogue labours to note, their very existence anticipates similar collages done by avant-garde talents of the early 20th century. They are, however, delicious relics where folk art meets technology, sentimentality is pollinated with humour, and idle hands find busy work to keep Satan's temptations at bay. Whether executed by Alexandra, the Princess of Wales, or the young Countess of Yarborough, these zany photocollages all share a potent combination of schoolroom innocence and surreal whimsy. And even at their advanced age, the bloom of freshness.

"Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage" was organized and originally on view at The Art Institute of Chicago.

P. S. Do see what's happening in the kitchen at The Aesthete Cooks.

Siamese Chic

My family and I were watching Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr in The King and I a few weeks ago and one aspect of the sets caught our mutual attention—the high-gloss floors.

Jet black, pale blue, jade green, and shocking pink, King Rama IV's residence in Bangkok, the Grand Palace, at least as far the movie's designers were concerned, was all about super reflective, boldly coloured floors and masses of airy chinoiserie. For one mad moment we discussed painting our wood floors similarly, then remember what hell was wrought when we coated them with shining white epoxy paint, and the feeling passed.

But if I had a house in a warm-weather area, I might reconsider these slick, sleek, Siamese expanses, which surely could be rendered just as stylishly in linoleum or something similar.

P.S. Do see what's on the menu at The Aesthete Cooks.

Well Said: Jacques-Émile Blanche

A portrait of Jacques-Émile Blanche by John Singer Sargent.

"Genuine collectors are poor; they are seekers and men of knowledge guided by their taste."

So said Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942), French artist and author of an amusing memoir, Portraits of a Lifetime (Coward-McCann, 1938).

Home Improvement

When the Fahrenheit drops and yet another blanket of snow is falling, one’s mind wanders to sunnier possibilities. I find this wandering to especially pronounced when one’s bank account is low—poverty, at least in my case, seems to inspire grand ideas that have little chance of being fulfilled. At least that seemed to be the case until I began studying more thoroughly Margaret Olthof Goldsmith’s Designs for Outdoor Living (George W. Stewart, 1941). Suddenly our signal lack of funds seems to be not such a bad thing, given the low-cost opportunities.

The book arrived in my post-office box several weeks ago, at just the moment when I needed more photographs and information about artist Bernard Boutet de Monvel’s folly of a house in Palm Beach, Florida. The majority of images in Goldsmith's book focus on areas of houses not often considered at great length in shelter publications, even today, such as patios, loggias, pool houses, terraces, children's play areas, adult recreation areas, and such. Several of her entries have caught my eye, especially since for several years my spouse and I have been discussing what to do with the large patch of lawn at the end of the raised beds at the back of our house. It would be nice to have a pool there someday, something long, lean, and trough-like, natural looking rather than Caribbean. Until then, however, we’d like to erect at the rear of that green swatch, a cabana of sorts, a simple outbuilding that would welcome lazy afternoons and warm-weather dinners and which would come in handy whenever that pool ever does come into our lives.

Here are some of the outbuildings that are inspiring me:

Harold W. Grieve's spectator's gallery for the home of Arlene Judge, a Hollywood actress better known for her seven short-lived marriages than for her screen career.

For the home of actress Helen Hayes and her husband, Charles MacArthur, in Nyack, New York, architect Mary Deputy Lamson designed a board-and-batten Gothic Revival-style bathhouse inspired by a 19th-century school.

Architect Aymar Embury 2d designed two bathhouses with a connecting pergola for the Purchase, New York, farm of New York Port Authority chairman Howard S. Cullman and his writer wife, Marguerite. This project is our favorite, and we think could be recreated for a reasonable cost.