EMPIRE DESIGN™

This week has been impossibly busy and it was remiss of me not to have posted earlier and further to the point, I still do not have good photographs of the boiserie panel to post ... I will post some soon.
After a dreadful week, for reasons (and/or persons) best left unmentioned, I took some time out today and lay on a couch in the sunshine to recuperate. Just by chance, I happened to turn on the television and was treated to a screening of 'Riviera Cocktail...

As the spring weather starts to warm, I am about to commence restoration of a boiserie panel. It is important in these matters, when using certain mediums, to have air temperature and moisture levels within the right range.
I have spent much of the morning perched at the top of a step ladder, examining painted bell flowers and swags of roses with the aid of dental tools in an effort to make a judicious decision as to the areas of of the delicate decoration that will need...

"Beautiful in their irregularity, distinct in their properties, unique in appearance, we confess that we admire them above all others, and that their charms for us would depart were they aught else" said the great rosarian William Paul in 1848.
Tea Roses, which were in their hey day between 1880 and 1910, are to a very great degree forgotten roses. With fewer petals than most old roses, they remain unsurpassed for elegance. Lusciously scented with elongated buds and drooping blooms that tend...

Heavy Roses, Voulangis, France, 1914, is said to be the last photograph taken by Edward
Steichen in France before the Great War.
'Heavy Roses' seems to capture forever the closing moments of the fin de siecle that preceded the collapse of Europe into darkness. Evocative of summers long past, I can never think of the image without imagining the colours of the petals, their margins...