This watercolor depicts one of Charles Le Brun’s original designs for the fescoed, trompe-l’oeil facades of the courtiers’ pavilions at Marly–the series drawn several years before Louis XIV actually selected the site for this mythical royal compound and authorized its construction. The watercolor is part of our extensive series depicting Marly which we painted in the 1990s; it has been published in our books Palaces of the Sun King and Versailles and has been recently reacquired.

French mat and antiqued, hand-gilt frame.
Frame dimensions: 36 x 44 cm; 14″ x 17½”

This watercolor depicts the original Pavillon Monceau, built for the duc de Chartres, later the duc d’Orléans, on his estate of Monceau, today the Parc Monceau in Paris’ 17th arrondissement.

French mat and antiqued, hand-gilt frame.
Frame dimensions: 55 x 63 cm; 21½” x 25″

The extensive landscape gardens at Bad Mergentheim (Baden-Württemberg, Germany) feature this Chinoiserie pavilion (“das Schellenhäusle”), erected in 1802 and recently restored.

French mat and antiqued, hand-gilt frame.
Frame dimensions: 41 x 46 cm; 16″ x 18″

The Pagoda a Chantilly, built circa 1762, launched that era’s Chinoiserie mania. Brightly colored and naively embellished with picturesque ornaments and fanciful Chinese glyphs (that would be pure gibberish to anyone literate in Chinese), it became the touchstone for many of the Chinoiserie pagodas built in French Anglo-Chinois landscape gardens early in the reign of Louis XVI.

French mat and antiqued, hand-gilt frame.
Frame dimensions: 40 x 50 cm; 16″ x 20″

The Château de Ménars was purchased by madame de Pompadour and gifted to her brother, the marquis de Marigny, who rose (thanks again to his sister) to become Superintendent of the King’s Buildings and thus was also (with the king) the most influential figure in French architecture during the reign of Louis XV. Marigny employed the era’s most famous architects to embellish the estate, among them Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who designed this unrealized project for a perfectly harmonious Temple of Love.

French mat and antiqued, hand-gilt frame.
Frame dimensions: 30 x 36 cm; 12″ x 14″

This small residence, set in a formal pocket garden, was built in the early 1700s by Monsieur Colin, a minor noble, in the town of Versailles. Its elegant proportions and understated ornament are characteristic of the maison de plaisance form, which was quite popular among the nobility of the period. They enjoyed building these small, intimate and luxuriously furnished pavilions on their estates, though the Pavillon Colin is in actuality an urban residence.  

French mat and ebonized wood frame.
Frame dimensions: 48 x 38 cm; 19″ x 15″

The design for this luminous watercolor is an architectural fantasy crafted in sun-struck limestone.

French mat and antiqued, hand-gilt frame.
Frame dimensions: 32 x 47 cm; 14½” x 21 “

This life-size bronze of a rearing brown bear was sculpted by the Brooklyn native and animalier, Frederick Roth, for the 1937 renovation of the Central Park Zoo. The sculpture is actually a fountain and the base is ringed by frogs spouting water jets.

French mat and ebonized, laquered wood frame.
Frame dimensions: 30 x 34 cm; 12″ x 13½”

The watercolor depicts a fan palm in a Versailles planter, as found at the château’s Orangerie.

French mat and ebonized wood frame.
Frame dimensions: 23 x 32 cm; 9″ x 13″

A nineteenth-century English terracotta vase with elegant foliate fluting.

French mat and standard gilt frame.
Frame dimensions: 35 x 36 cm; 15½” x 15¾”