Villa Medici acquires the first known painting of the Turkish Room
Thanks to a generous gift from Philip and Cathia Hall, the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici has acquired the first known painting of the Turkish Room, signed by Alfred de Curzon and dated 1850.
The painting Chambre de l’artiste à la Villa Médicis, dite la chambre turque, painted in 1850 by the French painter and former fellow of Villa Medici Alfred de Curzon (1820-1895), has joined the collections of the French Academy in Rome!
This acquisition was made possible thanks to the generous support of Philip and Cathia Hall, and with the support of Marie-Cécile Zinsou, President of the Board of Directors of the French Academy in Rome. This new entry into the Academy’s collections bears witness to an approach that aims to encourage the enhancement of the holdings and, more broadly, the promotion, study and exchange of its heritage.
This painting will be returned to its original setting, the Turkish Room, located at the top of the North Tower of Villa Medici, for an astonishing setting!
The French Academy in Rome’s latest acquisition dates from 2013 and consists of a portrait of Cardinal Ferdinand de’ Medici painted by Jacopo Zucchi, now on display in the cardinal’s historic rooms.
Story of a Painting
Painted by Alfred de Curzon (1820-1895) in the spring of 1850, this painting depicts the Turkish Room at Villa Medici, where the artist spent the first year of his stay as a guest at the French Academy in Rome. As he wrote to his colleague in the studio, the painter Louis-Georges Brillouin, shortly after his arrival in Rome: “I have been put up in a small Turkish Room that Mr. H. Vernet had arranged for him when he was director. The walls are entirely panelled with blue, white, yellow and green earthenware, and a crystal chandelier hangs from the middle of the vault decorated with an arabesque design. This charming little room, of a perfectly square shape, is placed immediately underneath one of the two open boxes on top of Villa Medici. Being so high up has its disadvantages but also its advantages; I enjoy a delightful view from here.” The artist is not so interested in this panoramic view of the city, but rather in the intimate space of the room and its rich polychrome decoration, whose details he seeks to fix on canvas, as he recounts in another letter to his sister Léotine dated May 1850.
Designed in 1833 by the painter Horace Vernet (1789- 1863) while he was director of the French Academy in Rome (1829-1834), the Turkish Room was created just after the artist’s return from his first trip to Algeria. An Orientalist fantasy nestled in the Pincio hills, it is an early example of an Islamic-inspired interior in the eternal city, reflecting the fascination for an imaginary Orient shared by several European artists of the Romantic period. Its decoration takes the form of a pastiche in which elements of Arab-Andalusian character are combined, such as the horseshoe arch of the doors and windows, Ottoman ornamental decoration and more naturalistic motifs on the vault. Much of the magic of this atmosphere is due to the coloured earthenware lining the walls. Previously thought to be Tunisian, they actually come from the famous Giustiniani ceramic factory in Naples. In the mid-1960s, Balthus made them famous in a painting for which he had his future wife, Setsuko Idata (La Chambre turque, Paris, Centre Pompidou).
Made almost a century earlier, Alfred de Curzon’s painting provides us with a rare and valuable view of the Turkish Room as it looked in the mid-19th century, before it was fitted with its characteristic geometric tiled floor, which was only laid in the late 1870s. The artist painted the room from the north window overlooking the garden of Villa, thereby adopting a low-lying viewpoint that invites the viewer to enter the intimacy of this reserved space. On the left, a neo-Moorish door with a horseshoe arch decorated with two six-pointed stars and topped by an inscription framed by crescent moons leads to the alcove, in which the artist’s bed can be seen in the background, topped by a canopy. On the right, a light pink sofa is the only visible piece of furniture. Above the couch are two wrought-iron gun racks (still present today), while on the corner wall to the right, a painted wooden pipe rack can be seen, now disappeared. Without considering the vault, the painter focuses on the Neapolitan glazed earthenware, whose yellows and blues contrast with the pinkish tones of the sofa and the floor. Further to the right, a final element catches our eye: in the horseshoe arch of the window, with its woodwork decorated with a small balustrade, a stained glass window representing a vase decorated with a bouquet of flowers in Ottoman style echoes the same motif represented on the inner walls of the Moorish door. Designed following Vernet’s instructions at the time the Turkish Room was created, the decorated glass in the windows has unfortunately not survived, having already been replaced in the late 1850s. Alfred de Curzon’s painting is thus an invaluable testimony to the unity of the original decoration of the Turkish Room, as designed by Horace Vernet in 1833.
Born in Moulinet, near Poitiers, in 1820, Alfred de Curzon entered the École des Beaux-arts in Paris in 1840. In the painter Michel-Martin Drolling’s studio, he met Louis-Georges Brillouin, with whom he made his first trip to Italy in 1846, during which time he discovered the picturesque world of the Roman countryside. In Rome, he joined the circle of residents of the Academy, meeting Alexandre Cabanel and the brothers Jean-Achille and François Léon Bénouville, among others. Back in Paris, he decided to try his luck and entered the 1849 Prix de Rome competition. He was awarded the second grand prize in the historical landscape category, but was granted a pension for only two years. As a sign of fate, on the very evening of his arrival at Villa Medici, in mid-January 1850, he met Horace Vernet, who was there to undertake studies on paintings of the capture of Rome by General Oudinot in June 1849. The few months he spent at the French Academy were an opportunity for Curzon to make numerous excursions that would allow him to fill his sketchbooks and nurture his creativity for the rest of his artistic life. Before returning to Paris, he accompanied the architect Charles Garnier and the writer Edmond About to Greece in the spring of 1852, touring the Peloponnese with them and then travelling to Constantinople. Upon his return to France, Curzon preferred to leave the hustle and bustle of Paris to take refuge in the calm of Passy, in order to look after his wife’s fragile health. Every year, he sent his paintings to the Salon and several of his works joined the collections of the Musée du Luxembourg. In 1914, his son, Henri de Curzon, published a book of his memoirs and correspondence which is a valuable source of information on the artist.
• Henri de Curzon, Alfred de Curzon, peintre (1820-1895) : sa vie et son œuvre d’après ses souvenirs, ses lettres, ses contemporains, Paris, Fischbacher bookshop, 1914. • Notice of the work, Didier Aaron gallery, www.didieraaron.com.
The French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici would like to thank the Didier Aaron gallery, Paris.
Cathia and Philip Hall are founding members of the Cercle International Afrique (CI-Afrique) of the Centre Georges Pompidou. CI-Afrique is the only acquisition committee in France dedicated to enriching the modern and contemporary collections of artists from the African continent.
