March 30, 2019 Presentation by Charissa Bremer-David The presence and role of European tapestries in American domestic interiors, 1900-1950 Some pictures click on the thumbnail for the full picture. At the turn of the twentieth century, art dealers and private collectors imported antique European tapestries across the Atlantic, hanging them in new venues vastly different and distant, intellectually and physically, from the traditional locations for which they were originally conceived and historically displayed - those former locations comprising royal palaces, princely residences, aristocratic châteaux and townhouses, churches and religious buildings. This talk will explore the meaning and relevance these tapestries had for their new owners stateside. Drawing upon the photographic archives of the New York-based art firm named French & Company, we will see how these weavings functioned as major components in elite American domestic interiors. Charissa Bremer-David is curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She has written extensively on the Museum’s decorative arts collection, including the catalogues French Tapestries and Textiles in the J. Paul Getty Museum (1997) and, together with colleagues, French Furniture and Gilt Bronzes, Baroque and Régence, Catalogue of the J. Paul Getty Museum Collection (2008). Her research into the archives of the New York art dealer, French & Company, and the resulting publication in Studies in the Decorative Arts (Fall-Winter 2003-2004) earned the Robert C. Smith Award presented by the Decorative Arts Society, Inc. She has contributed essays and entries on French tapestries to several exhibition and collection catalogues, including Tapestry in the Baroque, Threads of Splendor (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2007); French Art of the Eighteenth Century at The Huntington (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, Arts Collections, and Botanical Gardens in association with Yale University Press, 2008); and European Tapestries in The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago in association with Yale University Press, 2008). She has curated several important exhibitions, notably: Oudry’s Painted Menagerie, in 2007, which focused on an eighteenth-century Indian rhinoceros who made a seventeen-year-long tour across Europe as an animal celebrity; Paris: Life & Luxury, in 2011, which re-imaged the rich material context of a mid-eighteenth century elite Parisian lifestyle by bringing together a wide and diverse range of works of art; and Woven Gold: Tapestries of Louis XIV, 2015-16, which examined the Sun King’s role – as heir, collector, and patron – in preserving and building the French crown’s vast holdings of prestigious tapestries (with significant loans from the Mobilier National). Currently, she pursues two avenues of research (1) (together with Pascal-François Bertrand) the eighteenth-century production of the Beauvais tapestry manufactory, as revealed in the registers of payments to the weavers and (2) design and ornament in eighteenth-century Parisian silver with the goal of cataloguing the collection of French silver in the J. Paul Getty Museum. gn Relations. return to home page