II. The Central Park Obelisk

At 71 feet tall and weighing 244 tons, the Central Park obelisk, commonly known as Cleopatra's Needle, was one of a pair carved from pink Aswan granite and originally erected before the temple of the sun in the sacred city of Heliopsis (the city of the sun, known as On to ancient Egyptians), for Pharaoh Thutmosis III in 1443 B.C. Some two centuries later Ramesses II ordered its flanks carved with hieroglyphs commemorating his military victories. With the collapse of dynastic Egypt and the abandonment of Heliopsis, the obelisks, long toppled, were re-erected by the Romans at Alexandria before the Caesarium during the reign of the Emperor Augustus in 12 B.C. Already worn by time, the obelisk's base was stabilized by bronze rods, dissimulated by sculptures of crabs at each corner and engraved with the date of the obelisk's erection and the name of the Roman engineer who supervised the work.

With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, a group of influential New Yorkers led by William H. Hurlbert, editor of the New York World, and backed by the rail magnate William H. Vanderbilt, openly began to militate that the United States be offered the "gift" of an Egyptian obelisk. Their case of European obelisk-envy only intensified in 1877, when the English engineer John Dixon undertook the removal of the fallen Alexandrian obelisk—a gift to England dating from 1819 to commemorate Lord Nelson's victory in the Battle of the Nile. (After a near-disastrous sea voyage, the fallen obelisk was erected at Victoria Embankment, London in 1878.) Dixon, sensing profit to be made from the New York clique, informed Hurlbert that he could demount and ship the remaining obelisk from Alexandria to New York for the sum of £15,000.

Vanderbilt quickly agreed to the sum but the deal soon hit a fatal snag when the Khedive Ismail Pasha indicated that the obelisk in question was not Dixon's to sell and that any negotiations were to be undertaken by the government of the United States and not private parties. Nonplussed, Hurlbert contacted William Evarts, the US Secretary of State, and Henry G. Stebbins, former Congressman, President of the New York Stock Exchange and the then Parks Commissioner for the City of New York, and arranged with them to begin negotiations with the Khedive through the offices of the State Department. The negotiations, headed by Judge Elbert Farman, US Counsel General to Egypt, dragged on through the winter but the Khedive eventually relented to the removal of the Alexandrian obelisk in May 1878.

After a year's planning, the obelisk's arduous year-long transport was supervised by Lieutenant Commander Henry Gorringe, a U.S. Navy engineer. Gorringe began the delicate task of lowering the obelisk in early August of 1879 but suspended the operation for two months due to local protests and legal challenges—no doubt in large part incited by the large American flag that had been raised atop the crated monolith—which required Consular intervention to quell. Once lowered by fulcrum—with an uncontrolled drop that thankfully did no damage—the obelisk was slid into the hold of the drydocked steamer Dessoug through an opening in its hull. The ship set sail June 12, 1880, arriving in New York July 20th. Another seven months were required to transport the obelisk across Manhattan to Graywacke Knoll behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art where, with great pomp, ceremony and speechifying, it was re-erected upon its original base on January 22, 1881 in the presence of Secretary of State Evarts and a crowd of 10,000 extremely chilled spectators.

The obelisk's saga created a press frenzy in New York, and as noted in an earlier post, over 9,000 freemasons paraded up Fifth Avenue in a celebration simply to mark the laying of the cornerstone of the obelisk's foundation by the Grand Master of Masons of the State of New York. However, before any heated editorializing about the relative merits of Madison, Union or Herald Squares, Columbus Circle or elsewhere could be mounted, the self-appointed site selection committee—Hurlbert, Gorringe and the artist Frederick Church, who was enlisted in an effort to paper over the fait accompli rubberstamping Vanderbilt's wishes—announced its decision to little joy but that expressed by the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to which the Vanderbilt family were major donors. Vanderbilt, owner of the New York Central Railroad (with its notoriously murderous Manhattan tunnel) and the world's richest man, would gain lasting infamy for saying, "The public be damned!" the following year.

The obscure site, an open greensward some yards behind the Museum, was a truly spectacular misplacement of this outstanding ancient monument and ranks as the greatest wasted opportunity for civic embellishment in the city's entire architectural history. With breathtaking hubris and offering appallingly flimsy justifications for the choice, Gorringe wrote, "In order to avoid needless discussion of the subject, it was decided to maintain the strictest secrecy as to the location determined on." He noted that the prime advantage of the Knoll was its "isolation" and that it was the best site to be found inside the park, as it was quite elevated and the foundation could be firmly anchored in bedrock, lest Manhattan suffer "some violent convulsion of nature." Indeed.

I. Objects of Awe

The Egyptian obelisk is Western society's most potent and coveted talisman and literally stands as the physical marker of civilization itself. Of the 21 ancient obelisks standing today, Egypt itself retains only four; Rome is graced by 13, all plundered by its ancient emperors, then re-erected during the Renaissance. The remainder are found in what the Victorians, who coveted them as profoundly as had the Caesars, would have called 'the great metropolises of Western civilization'—Istanbul, Florence, Paris, London and finally New York City. (The fourth Duke of Northumberland and Sir William Bankes each also pillaged an obelisk as the ultimate in Grand Tour souvenirs; today they stand in Durham University by way of Alnwick Castle and at Kingston Lacy in Dorset).

Why this all came to be is quite obvious, for obelisks are quite simply the perfect monument: they are rare in the extreme, they were conceived as sacred monuments by the semi-divine rulers of the world's greatest ancient civilization, and they are the largest, heaviest and most elegant objects ever created by man. All hyperbole aside, everything about them is truly exceptional.

All ancient obelisks are monoliths quarried from the fine pink granite found at Aswan, ancient Selene, located on the banks of the Nile in Lower Egypt. The earliest obelisks were raised at On, the sacred ceremonial city known to us today by its Greek name, Heliopsis, city of the sun, or more exactly, city of the sun god Ra. Obelisks were always erected in pairs and stood at the forecourt flanking the entrance through the pylon, the massive, chamfered wall pierced by a central portal that gave access to the inner courtyard of the temple, as seen in the photograph of Luxor, above.

In form, an obelisk is defined by a square-sectioned, tapering shaft and a pyramid-shaped cap, known logically enough as the pyramidion. Like the classical Greek columnar orders (i.e., Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns), obelisks follow certain consistent proportional rules: the height of the shaft ranges from nine to eleven times the width of the base, and the pyramidion's height equals the width of the base. The largest obelisks are—excepting the extraordinary foundation stones at Baalbek, Lebanon—also the largest monoliths known to man. One unfinished obelisk, still lying in its quarry bed at Aswan but abandoned due to natural fissures, is estimated to weigh over 1,200 tons and would have stood 42 meters high—a staggering mass that even we today would find extremely difficult to maneuver.

Like the Greeks, Egyptian masons employed entasis—an imperceptible convex bulging—to give the long, straight shaft a pleasing visual equilibrium. The pyramidion and shafts were invariably carved with dedicatory hieroglyphs composed in the name of the Pharaoh who had commissioned the obelisk; the faces of the deeply incised glyphs were highly polished while the shaft itself was left in an unpolished state. Pyramidions were, as today seen on the other obelisk from Luxor now standing in Paris at the Place de la Concorde, capped with gold ("the flesh of the gods") and many also had their shafts sheathed with polished copper sheets, and more rarely with iron or entirely in gold.

The Egyptians called obelisks tejen, a word synonymous with "protection" or "defense." Obelisk is derived more prosaically from the Greek word obeliskos, a roasting spit. The orthodox explanation of their meaning offered by nineteenth-century scholars is that obelisks are a representation and invocation of the sun's rays, and thus of the sun god Ra himself. They reach toward the sun to draw its generative power to earth as well as to capture Ra's protection, and thus they dispel storms and evil influences. This interpretation makes perfect sense, since obelisks first appeared at On (Heliopsis), the city of Ra, though later they were erected before the most important temples throughout the Upper and Lower Kingdom.

However, left unspoken by the Victorians is the obelisk's obvious phallic symbolism, which is an overt invocation of Osiris—who, with his sister and wife Isis, was the most important god of the Egyptian pantheon. First-born of the union of the earth (Geb) and the sky (Nut) and first Pharaoh of the mythical "First Time," Osiris ruled wisely and mercifully as the "Lord of love" until he was murdered by his evil brother Set, who coveted his throne and who incarnated the desert. Set hacked Osiris' corpse into 14 pieces and cast them away but Isis retrieved all his members save his penis, which Set had thrown into the Nile. Isis fashioned a replacement phallus of gold and momentarily resurrected her brother/husband to copulate with him, bearing their son Horus, "the Savior" who overthrew Set to regain the throne and so was considered the progenitor of all later Pharaohs. Osiris then became ruler of the Duat, or the realm of the afterlife, and together with Isis incarnated mercy, fecundity, rebirth, immortality and the cycle of the seasons.

Most broadly then, the obelisk embodied the Egyptian belief of "as above, so below" and linked the male to the female, the human to the divine, the earth to the cosmos, the living to the dead, and the reigning Pharaoh to Osiris, god of the afterlife and of immortality. The male form standing before the interior recesses of the temple, the tejen drew Ra's essence down from the rays of the sun and Osiris' seed up from the underworld.

The obelisk before St. Peter's basilica at the Vatican evokes this regenerative symbolism quite explicitly, standing as it does at the center of the female forms of Bernini's oval colonnade and before Michelangelo's dome; likewise, the Washington Monument faces the Capitol's dome in symbolic re-enactment of the Isis-Osiris myth.

Wholly apart from these vast, monumental urban ensembles, the original schema of the obelisk has also been preserved and retransmitted, almost ad infinitum, by its transmutation into classical architecture in the form of paired columns flanking an entry portal. Ultimately, the pair of posts bracketing the lowliest front door derives from Egyptian temples, and the most famous example of this schema is of course the pair of finely worked bronze columns that stood before Solomon's Temple and which are minutely described in the Bible. These freestanding columns were so important that Hiram, the bronzeworker who King Solomon "fetched out of Tyre" to furnish the Temple, had given them names: the right pillar, Jachin and the left pillar, Boaz. Immediately thereafter, the Bible recounts that Hiram "made a molten sea, ten cubits from one brim to the other"—that is, he cast a massive bronze basin that stood in the Temple's courtyard and held "two thousand baths" of water. Biblical scholars have long speculated what function this basin served, and posit either a symbolic linkage to the "primordial waters" of the book of Genesis or its use in ritual ablutions—even though the Bible states that Hiram also fashioned ten smaller basins explicitly for this purpose. Whatever its true purpose, the circular basin doubtless also symbolized attributes of Isis: the feminine, fertility, the womb.

Of course here we have also just encountered several foundational traditions of freemasonry. The bronzeworker Hiram of Tyre is known to every mason as Hiram Abiff (linked through his own murder to Osiris); and, according to the Masonic Old Ritual, hidden inside Hiram's hollow columns were ancient records and the most valuable secrets of the Jewish people (and those they inherited from their captors, the Egyptians)—the veritable ancient secrets of the occult mystery schools. And such is the influence of freemasonry that, if you were to dig beneath almost any significant public structure erected since the nation's founding, you would likely as not discover Masonic tokens beneath its cornerstone and Masonic symbolism incorporated into its site: Over 9000 freemasons paraded up Fifth Avenue to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone for the New York obelisk on October 2nd, 1880, in a ceremony presided by the Grand Master of Masons of the State of New York.

Though in steady decline since the Depression era, freemasonry has recently received renewed attention, and with it vilification and demonization, exemplified by the enormous success of the conspiratorial fiction of Dan Brown. Masonic societies are believed to harbor a powerful Luciferian brotherhood, an elite network that is one of the pillars of the "unseen hand" guiding world events. Its occult symbols are woven into the fabric of our society and our built world. Doubtless the contemporary reality of Masonic influence is far more prosaic than this, though nonetheless the preceding sentence is entirely true: Masonic symbolism is indeed woven into the fabric of our built world—because freemasonry's symbols are derived from our common legacy as a civilization. Occult is an ancient word meaning "hidden" and has no prima facie connotation of sinister, as so many today believe. The point here is not to defend freemasonry but rather to attempt to disentangle its oft-contentious reputation from the realm of architecture and its meaning.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently sinister in obelisks, paired columns, sphinxes, pyramids, or any other ancient architectural elements adopted by the masons, nor have they become corrupted in how they have been employed or reinterpreted. To give but one example already cited: the great obelisk on the Mall in Washington, DC, was designed by masons and stands in a city whose plan was designed by a mason and is dedicated to the first president of the United States, a 33rd degree Scottish Rite freemason. Few structures on earth besides their own lodges are more Masonic than the Washington Monument, and yet it is a magnificent monument to a truly great man whose symbolism echoes through the ages, well over 4,000 years, to its roots in ancient Egypt. However, it does not follow that its meaning is the same as that the Egyptians gave to their obelisks, nor does it follow that it is some dark perversion of it; rather its meaning is the summation of all that has come before commingled with the aspirations of its builders, and with the greatest part reserved for its intended purpose, to honor the nation's founder with a form synonymous with immortality.

Hidden in Plain Sight

This small limestone pavilion, of truly exceptional beauty, was built in the mid-18th century at the entrance to the Maison royale de Saint-Louis, known simply as Saint-Cyr, the vast convent school that stood a bare stone's throw from Versailles. Louis XIV established St-Cyr in 1684 as a pension to educate impoverished aristocratic girls at the behest of Madame de Maintenon, his pious morganatic wife, and the imposing complex was the work of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the Sun King's ubiquitous First Architect.

Louis XV, true to form, held not the slightest interest in Saint-Cyr; though he was its patron and paid its bills and galloped past its gates on hunts literally hundreds of times over the decades, he never once bothered to visit the school and refused to enroll any of his daughters there. Nonetheless, he did commission the Pavillon des Archives; and though records have been lost, the pavilion's outstanding quality and distinctive style indicates that it was quite probably designed by his First Architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel—the greatest French architect of the mid-eighteenth century and author of the Petit Trianon and the Place de la Concorde.

In 1808, Napoléon, also true to form, transformed St-Cyr into a military academy. Heavily damaged in World War II, the complex was restored by order of Charles De Gaulle and still today houses a military academy. Fortunately, the Archives Pavilion survived virtually unscathed from these attacks, though its interiors suffered at the hands of ruthless, fluorescent-lit postwar functionalism.

There is profound truth in the real-estate agent's mantra of "Location, location, location." Though it is a perfect jewel—the apex of the pavillon de plaisance form and the distillation of French neoclassicism—nevertheless the pavilion remains virtually unknown and has rarely been published in the architectural literature, and even then as a footnote. Had it been erected within Versailles' walls rather than in St-Cyr's shadow, the pavilion would today be mentioned in the same breath as Gabriel's masterwork, the Petit Trianon; instead it stands overlooked and anonymous, mere yards from the main road linking the towns of St-Cyr and Versailles.

The Old Bandstand, Central Park

Though most of our subjects are French, this is not exclusively so. In October of 2003 we opened the exhibition Central Park at Didier Aaron, Inc. in Manhattan. For that show, we painted what must be one of the most exotic structures ever to be built in the park—or in all of Manhattan for that matter: the Musician's Pagoda on the Mall, known fondly to generations of New Yorkers as “the Old Bandstand.”

Frederick Law Olmsted, the park’s designer and first Superintendent—and someone not usually given to such flights of fancy—originally envisioned a floating pagoda-cum-music pavilion moored in the Lake off Bethesda Terrace. Detailed plans for the floating pagoda were drawn up in 1862 by his assistant Jacob Wrey Mould but Olmsted then settled upon a prominent site on the Mall promenade at the northern end of the famed elm alley, the park's great open-air "cathedral."

Mould, an English-born architect in the Ruskinian vein who was Olmsted's chief designer, had enormous influence over the esthetics of the Park's structures. A quintessential Victorian esthete, Mould loved exoticism, polychromy and foliate ornament, and his masterwork, Bethedsa Terrace, offers all three in abundance.

His initial design for the floating pagoda was hardly altered in execution on land and is incontestably his most outlandish design for the park. The hexagonally planned, cast-iron pavilion featured wildly eclectic details—classical Greek anthemia on its base and a lyre at its crown, along with a Schinkel-inspired grid of stars covering its golden dome—and was clothed in what Mould vaunted was “a hell of color”—a folly in the truest sense and an unexpected splash of Orientalist opulence in nineteenth-century Manhattan.

The pagoda became one of the park’s most familiar landmarks and its weekend, summertime concerts were a focal point of the city's civic life from the post-Civil War era until the promise of the Naumburg Bandshell precipitated its destruction in 1922.

Taste and time

We have been doing what we do long enough now to observe an evolution in the public's architectural taste and thought it would be interesting to highlight a few of the watercolors that have come to the forefront over the years and examine why. Of course this has nothing to do with contemporary architecture but only applies to the range of historical subjects we treat, but with our exhibitions and through the sale of our note cards we've seen strong and definite trends develop and it's certainly worthwhile looking more closely into what lurks behind them.

From the outset, we have drawn the full range of traditional architectural styles: neoclassicism, baroque, rococo, Chinoiserie, neo-gothic, rustic, and exotic—a variety of building types: chateaux and pavilions; garden follies in the form of grottos, pagodas, trelliswork pavilions and tents—and the gamut of garden ornament: vases, ironwork, sculpture, fountains and other details.

The surprise favorite to appear from our first exhibitions at Didier Aaron—at least to me—was an unrealized project for an octagonally planned trelliswork pavilion designed in the early 1680s for Louis XIV's gardens at Trianon. Between us opinions were divided as to its architectural merits (I must admit I found it naive and awkward and bizarrely conceived—what a dark, dank, wretched spot the central fountain would have been, set under that huge expanse of roof). It took some time and persuasion for Bernd to convince me to include it in the show, and I grudgingly dubbed it "the Cheese Bell" because of its massive, baroquely curved, wood-shingled roof.

Bref, the Cheese Bell was a huge hit. It and another large watercolor were purchased immediately by a well-known Manhattan-based fashion designer and his wife and it could have departed with several other gallery visitors. (Oh, how we envy photographers, for whom an original constitutes an edition of eight prints!) A few years later, in the late House & Garden, we spotted the watercolors hanging prominently in the living room of their country house. We launched our note cards soon after the show and the image was far and away the bestseller of an already rather large collection and remained so throughout the late 90s.

Having been proven so thoroughly wrong, I wanted to fathom the mystery of the Cheese Bell's success. Well, it certainly evoked gardens quite powerfully with its forest-green trelliswork, and this led us to create several other treillage pavilions which surprisingly left the public indifferent. In fact one of them, a personal favorite for us both in design and execution, lingers inexplicably orphaned to this day, so obviously trelliswork was not the key to its popularity.

We had drawn several domed structures for the first show, the Cheese Bell among them, and this, along with the alchemy of the pavilion's other attributes, was the key to its appeal. People love domes. They give three-dimensionality effortlessly to the flat elevations we draw, which one gallery visitor summed up by remarking, "I love the rich perspective you've created with the dome." Of course an elevation is not a perspective, but the comment was perfectly true. I've also come to believe that domes subconsciously evoke the maternal breast—they are round, generous and comforting; not sharp-edged and rectilinear.

In general though, in the late 90s taste was evenly divided between pared-down neoclassicism and the most sober of Chinoiserie, represented by the Belvedere at Trianon (with its soft, low dome) and the Pagoda at Chanteloup, a picturesquely tiered stone building with a classically columned base.

With 911 all that changed dramatically. (As an aside, its aftermath was also devastating to the art world at all levels and it took long, difficult years for the public to regain its interest in art.) When the public did return, it delighted in the rustic and anything having to do with nature—intimations of a rural, arcadian past and evocations of earth and gardens. The most popular watercolors from that time were simple, small-scaled, approachable; a moss-covered, Medicis-form urn from the Château de Raray sums up the mood.

In the last few years before the Crash of '08 (just as it had on the eve of the French Revolution, it must be noted), interest in the exotic and in "imaginative" Chinoiserie simply exploded. Despite the implications of history repeating, this remarkable wave of enthusiasm has been gratifying as Chinoiserie has been an abiding interest of ours, and nothing captures this yearning for fantasy and escapism better than an unrealized project for a garden niche at Trianon designed for Marie-Antoinette. A bold, light-hearted, theatrical pastiche, this small, flamboyant structure has had a simply magical appeal.

In the past year, this watercolor, which has become iconic for us, has been replaced by another that has again surprised us much as the Cheese Bell did—a small neoclassical pavilion from the late 18th century that once stood in the gardens of the French estate of Romainville. Sun-struck, unassuming, flanked by orange trees in Versailles planters, it has gained steadily in popularity practically by stealth.

It is a dramatic shift in taste from exoticism to classicism, but the appeal of an intimate, almost miniature scale remains constant. The building is in no way unique and in fact is quite similar to several other small pavilions we have drawn, but this one has captured the imagination as the others have not. As to the why, we believe it is due to its approachability and human scale, to the solidity and reassurance of its simple form and the justness of its detailing, the openness suggested by its large, glassed, arched door and oblique windows, and to its unforeseen power of evocation—who would not want to spend a summer's afternoon in and about such a structure, especially today?

Charles Ryskamp

In January we received the Sotheby's catalogue for the auction of Charles Ryskamp's estate, handsomely illustrated and deeply melancholy and still something of a shock, this thick, elegant publication. Charles died almost a year ago now, on Friday the 26th of March 2010 and quite suddenly, as he had kept the true nature of his fatal illness from his friends, so typical of him, not wishing to cause a morbid fuss in his final days.

To see his drawings for sale wasn't discomfiting; he always said that art should go back into the world to benefit younger generations, but it was a curious feeling to see illustrated—and know that you could purchase—the crystal tumblers that he served gin and tonics in, or the silver plate that held the cheddar crackers that went with them, or the cherrywood cocktail table that it stood upon, or the armchair on which he sat when we visited, or the delicate painted wood sculpture of a pear that he had placed on the side table (he had a great fondness for pears and had several drawings of them as well). All those personal things that were so much a reflection of him, even if simply inanimate objects—one better understands why the Pharoahs were entombed with their possessions.

Needless to say, though it must be said, the news of his death came as a terrible shock and remains a great loss. Charles was also an authority on Elizabethan poetry (particularly Cowper) and a professor of English while I majored in English at Princeton, and we turned to him when we conceived our first large exhibition, of French garden architecture. We visited him at his then-home in Princeton and spread out the first half-dozen watercolors on the living room floor and he studied them and said it would be a wonderful exhibition to be sponsored by The Frick Collection (he was then its director) and he put us in touch with Hervé Aaron and Alan Salz at Didier Aaron and well, that pretty much was that, our careers were decided there and then.

Charles was patron of our first two exhibitions at Didier Aaron, which in part benefited The Frick Art Reference Library, for which he worked tirelessly. He also authored the preface to Pleasure Pavilions and Follies, our first book, and we always sought and relied on his advice when planning our exhibitions. But he was first and foremost a friend of rare fidelity and generosity of spirit.

Charles had a nearly unique ability to make the world a finer, richer, more interesting place simply by being in his presence—a place of abundance and fascination. We've met only two others with this rare gift and it is certainly the reason for his remarkable life and career. But we've also rarely laughed so hard with anyone, and remember wiping away an evening's worth of tears when he impishly took us to a curious cabaret on the outskirts of Vienna dedicated to an old-fashioned and sentimental local folk music known as Schrammermusik, a Surrealist's dream frozen in time that simply had to be experienced to be believed. During that trip there was also stifled laughter echoing down the dim, imposing and surprisingly vacant corridors of the Vienna Academy from a corner room in which hung a massive Hieronymus Bosch, though we weren't laughing at the Bosch but something it somehow provoked that we spun out having to do with the medieval relic trade. (Well, we'd just seen room after room of Habsburg relics that morning at the Imperial Treasury and as the saying goes, you had to be there.)

We've always been interested in garden vases; they were the subject of our earliest exhibition and we later published a book dedicated to them. Once we'd sent him a small sketch of one made into a birthday card and he liked it so much that he commissioned another and, typically of Charles, requested it hold an orange tree (as they did at Versailles) "to give it life." We'd never thought of that and did as he asked and mailed it off to him in New York. The day it arrived he was with a curator from the Morgan Library, selecting drawings for the exhibition of his collection that they were then preparing. He could not wait until the curator had left to open the parcel (a framed cartoon hung in his hall showing a man clutching a book in one hand and pushing someone off a cliff with the other and was captioned "the collector") so they first saw it together and that is how we came to have the rare honor of having a work exhibited at the Morgan, and to discover a theme that we pursued with several watercolors that remain favorites to this day.

That watercolor and several others of ours in his collection appeared in the Sotheby's sale and a friend and collector from the other end of the country wrote soon after to inform us that she had purchased the vase and had also once met Charles when visiting New York and that he had given her and her husband a personal tour of the Frick that she would never forget, and that the watercolor would remind her of him and the day. Certainly all this is nothing of more than personal note; simply a train of small, fortuitous events more than coincidence that Charles, simply by being Charles, enabled; a small circle closed as his drawing, just as he had wished, found its new home.

(The photograph is of Charles in his office at The Frick Collection, the holders of its copyright)

Guard Pavilions

One of the most distinctive elements of the French château are the paired guard pavilions (guérites) that flank the entry to the forecourt and that announce and distill the estate's architectural style. We have become quite fond of these small architectural jewels and have been searching for and painting a number of them in the past few years.

Until well into the 18th century, the rectangular block created by the château and its forecourt, and occasionally the garden parterre also, was often delimited by a wet or dry moat—an esthetic holdover from the middle ages when châteaux were actually châteaux forts, or fortified castles. Even after moats fell out of fashion, the forecourt was still enclosed by high stone walls or ironwork grilles that abutted the guérites for privacy and security.

Even Louis XV's Petit Trianon, safely ensconced in the Great Park of Versailles, held to these traditions, though its architect Gabriel reduced the guard pavilions to dollhouse-like miniatures barely large enough for a sentry to stand in. Others, such as those built at Chanteloup for the king's disgraced First Minister, the duc de Choiseul, are small cubic pavilions set far from the château itself. (Below, top: Petit Trianon, bottom: Chanteloup)

At Blérancourt and Chantilly, both dating from the 17th century and sharing the same distinctive slate roofs, the pavilions border moats, dry and wet respectively. Quite clearly, guérites also lead charmed lives, as many of them—including those at Chanteloup and Blérancourt pictured here—survived the destruction and parceling of their estates after the French Revolution.
(Below, top: Blérancourt, bottom: Chantilly, shown also in the lead photograph)

A personal favorite are the rococco guérites at Champlâtreux, with their overscaled oculus windows set in gracefully sweeping mansard roofs.

The 2011 Arthur Ross Awards

We have been honored by the 30th annual Arthur Ross Award for Fine Art from the Institute of Classical Architecture/Classical America. From the ICA/CA website:

Established in 1982 by Classical America chairman of the board, Arthur Ross, and its president, Henry Hope Reed, the Arthur Ross Awards were created to recognize and celebrate excellence in the classical tradition. From the beginning, the awards have recognized the achievements and contributions of architects, painters, sculptors, artisans, landscape designers, educators, publishers, patrons, and others dedicated to preserving and advancing the classical tradition.

Past honorees for architecture have ranged from well-known practitioners such as Allan Greenberg and Quinlan Terry, to relatively unknown but no less accomplished ones such as A. Hayes Town and Harold H. Fisher.

The awardees are chosen each year by a selection committee made up of members of the ICA&CA Board of Directors, Advisory Council, Fellows, and distinguished members of related professions.

This year's honorees include Franck & Lohsen Architects for Architecture and Ralph Lauren for Patronage. The awards ceremony will be held at the University Club in Manhattan on the evening of Monday, May 2, 2011.

Watercolor Magazine, Winter 2011

Watercolor Magazine's current issue contains a ten-page article on our work written by Naomi Ekperigen, "Attaining Perfection with Watercolor." We certainly strive to live up to that title, and the article is copiously illustrated with a variety of our watercolors, as well as with our porcelain designs.

Bernd was interviewed while on a trip to New York and Andrew by phone in Paris, and the resulting text is extensive and engagingly written, touching upon our formative years as well as the mechanics of our watercolor technique and the design process for the china services.

ANTICOMANIA

Under the category Better Late than Never, we are remiss in not having mentioned Anticomania, the remarkable and recently ended exhibition at Galerie J. Kugel, the Parisian antiquaires located on the quai Anatole France near the French National Assembly.

The sumptuous exhibition, mixing exceptional Greco-Roman antiquities with Renaissance and Grand Tour objects, was staged by Pier Luigi Pizzi, who designed a spectacular coffer-domed Palladian rotunda that stood in the gallery's courtyard and housed Antique marbles. The objects assembled, as is the case with every one of the Kugels' exhibitions, were of exceptional quality, beauty and rarity, and their presentation in the gallery recalled the grand interiors of Roman palaces.



The brothers Alexis and Nicolas Kugel requested a design for the invitaton and cover of the catalogue that would evoke the paintings of Hubert Robert, the Ancien Régime's master of Italian ruins, and the final image is the result of weeks of consultations and refinements.