The Magazine Antiques

The set of Swedish trompe-l'oeil wall paintings in the dining room gives the visitor the feeling of being in a small European château or schloss (Fig. 9). Each is decorated with trophies, medallions, and garlands of flowers around a "framed painting," one of which depicts Stockholm harbor on a stormy day (Fig. 7). The panels are complemented by an elaborate late eighteenth-century English cut-glass chandelier, an English Regency dining table, and an early eighteenth-century set of Italian gilded chairs painted with coats of arms.

The most interesting grouping in this room is the one above the chimneypiece (Fig. 8): Meissen porcelain figures of the Senses—Sight with her telescope and Touch being bitten on the finger by a parrot—are mounted as candelabra in gilt bronze and form a garniture with a gilt-bronze clock signed Gilles l'âiné à Paris that dates from about 1750. The painting above, of a hunting dog with dead game within a trompe-l'oeil frame, is flanked by a pair of extremely unusual gilded wood wall lights. These sconces are composed of rather languid rococo scrollwork brightly carved with sprays of flowers. Finished in matte oil gilding, they are northern European, possibly German or Dutch.

The most spectacular room in the house is the large double-height living room with its cove ceiling (see Figs. 1, 10). The previous owners held dances here for two hundred people, and the current owners discovered that without the parties this room with its dark paneling and solitary gas ceiling fixture, lost its luster, so they set about transforming it. Although it has two tall windows looking onto San Francisco Bay, it is the room rather than the view that remains the main interest. Instead of adding the obligatory rectangular picture windows found in so many houses in Pacific Heights, the owners kept faith with the room's original fenestration.

The dark nature of the room is offset by two massive yet delicate gilded and cut-glass chandeliers that are in perfect proportion with the space and by five large Flemish paintings of arcadian landscapes. The central panel from the series is hung over the large chimneypiece, a feature of the room that is so darkly painted as to be hardly visible (see Fig. 10). But its presence is in keeping with the surrounding objects: two large Chinese Coromandel lacquer armoires surmounted by gilded Italian baroque reliquary busts, which themselves are surmounted, respectively, by a barometer and a hygrometer by the eighteenth-century French makers Cappy et Mossy.

The combination of exotic Asian lacquer and porcelain with European decorative arts is the order of the day here—from Chinese porcelain in French gilt-bronze mounts to the elaborate pair of imperial Chinese jardinieres with jade and coral trees of life, one of which is displayed between a pair of French eighteenth-century chenets of a dog and a cat. The prime example of East meets West is a distinguished piece of eighteenth-century mounted porcelain from the collections of the margraves of Baden: a Chinese blanc de chine elephant saddled with a Japanese lacquer bowl and mounted in gilt bronze bearing the crowned C that indicates that it was assembled between 1745 and 1749 (Fig. 14).

The elaborate jardinieres are spectacular examples of Chinese workmanship of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century (Fig. 12). They have certain affinities with a nécessaire in the manner of James Cox (c. 1723-1800) of London, the gilt-metal case of which is also embossed with scrollwork and mounted with paste gems. Like the nécessaire, the large musical clock by Francis Perigal in Figure 11 was intended for export to China.4 Such English automata fascinated the Chinese imperial court: this example has a figure in a pagoda that lifts a scroll at the quarter hour with an inscription in Chinese characters that loosely translates, "May you have five sons who pass exams to become high officers in the government." Above the dial is a scene of ships that, at the hour, sail to a tinkling tune past a waterfall of revolving glass rods. Although it is rather old fashioned for 1790, the Chinese loved the exuberant rococo scrollwork of English ormolu clocks, and these objects show how the two cultures admired and imitated each other's luxury goods at this date.

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