 Hi there. I'm Emily Orr, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary American Design here at Cooper Hewitt. And tonight we are celebrating the installation of our Magnificence or Two de Tabla in the exhibition Tablescapes Designs for Dining. I hope everyone enjoyed Tablescapes earlier this evening, where this masterpiece of Cooper Hewitt's collection is once again glowing in the galleries after a near 30-year absence from public view. I am delighted to welcome Sarah Coffin, who recently retired as Curator and Head of the Product Design and Decorative Arts Department here, to deliver the lecture, Diplomacy and Dining, a look at the table architecture and cuisine in Empire France. She remains involved with the museum, having curated the gallery of Tablescapes with the Sir Two. And while at Cooper Hewitt, Sarah built a reputation as the resident dining expert, as seen in her Magnificent 2006 exhibition and accompanying catalog, Feeding Desire, Design and the Tools of the Table 1500-2005, that explored the evolution of European and American Dining through the design and function of eating implements. I can attest to the fact that for many years following, she received regular requests for interviews on the history of the fork and the spoon, a topic of enduring interest. Tonight, she is taking us back in time to discuss the culinary history of banquet dining, featuring elaborately designed centerpieces, which began in the 16th century and was extended during the Napoleonic era to also include notable chefs and new culinary masterpieces. So thank you all for coming tonight, and now please welcome Sarah Coffin. Thank you, Emily, and it's great to be back here, not that I haven't been in the meantime, as you can see from the exhibition, but also wonderful to have my great colleagues, Emily and Cindy Trope, here tonight. This, as Emily said, is a topic that seems to be not only of enduring interest to me, but a great number of other people as well. And I do think that by door being generally open in the office that Emily and Cindy probably had a good course in all sorts of things that would come my way about when did this start and when did that. But this is a little bit of a case of really having worked on the topic for a while, finding that the intersection of architecture and the table is very significant and one that is perceived to be in the field of architecture. And the point being that as with both the implements which were often given, people traveled with them, symbols of status. Also, these masterworks on the table were very much about politics, diplomacy, and so forth. While I intend to speak primarily of the diplomatic connections of diplomacy, cuisine, and architecture of the table in Napoleonic France, the subject of table architecture must start quite a bit earlier. The connections between dining in the era of Louis Catois in the late 17th century and that of Eugène de Boarnet and his famous father-in-law, Napoleon I, are very strong. Sugar played a key role and its use has been considered decadent since a Byzantine princess married a Venetian doge in the 11th century, introducing the fork as an instrument for eating suckets, small candied fruit, thereby convincing much of Europe that these objects were as decadent as the foods they were for. While sugar as a luxury item has been part of culinary history since medieval times, it was oddly that it was in post guillotine Paris that the cake reached its artistic heights, despite the fact that Marie Antoinette may have lost her head for her remark real or apocryphal, let them eat cake. While the pâtissier most notably architecturally inclined Marie Antoinette, to whom we will come back, made his fame en pièce montée, which are essentially sculptures usually in sugar but arranged in an architectural form, early actual architects were doing the same thing with sugar sculptures for the table. Here we see a group of images from a book published by John Michael Wright called the Rivoglio della Salemma camparsa fatta in Roma, which is essentially was for Roger Palmer, the Earl of Castlemane, whose banquet for the Pope of 1687, it was January 1687, and this is relevant because this was created by a Roman architect. It involves all of these figures here, including what you can't see until you see the whole thing. It's huge. It was miles long. The arms of Great Britain here and the arms, I mean, which was of James II. And this was the point. This was a banquet. Now, banquets in the 17th century and actually somewhat before meant dessert banquets. You were invited. Why? Because what was the most expensive thing? Sugar. So you entertain on a lavish scale and the banquets would have all these sculptures. And in fact, here they showed their high level because they also had the napkin sculpted like waves and boats and things. The ceiling in the room that was used for this banquet was designed by Pietro da Cortona, an eminent painter. And Bernini, among others, did contribute such sculptures. He didn't do this one, but somebody who had worked in his office, shall we say. Did. And the point was that this was the ambassador from the court of James II. James II, they were celebrating the nominal return of Catholicism to England in 1685 when James II came to power. Roger Palmer got the position in 1686, and it took him almost a year to organize this fabulous extravaganza for his entree, his arrival in Rome. And here you see, I'm sorry, I forgot to put it, here you see the piazza Navona, and what with Bernini's sculpt and others sculptures that form this decor de théâtre in the middle very much is what they were recreating on the table. They were trying to do the similar sort of display for the table that was on the, in the piazza. The, here is a magnificent buffet, master buffet table, which is what you will see soon again, but of 1691 from Bologna, and the both, oopsie, you can see that strange thing, elaborate plates and dishes served all around for a buffet, shows the level that any diplomatic mission, this particular one was from an emissary from a German court coming down to pay a visit to Bologna, but it goes across the board in Italy and with Louis XIV. Here again is this very odd arrangement of figures in icicles all sculpted in sugar with various objects like wine glasses and so forth, and this is really the wine table you can see the glasses here. So in this case it's not about food, but you are about tasting and testing different wines, which were apparently perhaps being kept cool or something, some of the wine glasses or the urns that held them. And then we're starting to move forward in 1739, one of Louis, actually a granddaughter of Louis Quatorze married a French, I mean a Spanish infant and they produced, and other weddings produced similar things. This is a rather simplified one, but you can see the arms of the fleur-de-lis of France there, and this was again a dressed buffet. You will, as I mentioned, carrem, the great, the really original sort of celebrity chef who was in the Napoleonic era very much took his cues from this despite the fact that, or perhaps more likely from this, because this and the court of Louis Quatorze was the model he was basing it on with, and we will see why, because the Louis the 15th and 16th eras were associated in Napoleon's mind with decadence and obviously the retreat of being out in public. After Louis Quatorze died in 1715, the court moved back into Paris, people preferred hôtel particuliers, the original townhouses, and they ate more, they ate in what, a purpose-made dining room really for the first time. So you get purpose-made dining rooms. Here you have a group of men, and this is actually quite unusual in France. Usually, both sexes ate together, but they seem to be having an oyster orgy, and perhaps as might be suggested by the nude female sculptor, we're going to join the women soon. In any case, very much what the Revolution was purporting to be about, and I just spoke to someone about their interest in wine coolers, and there is one sitting there cooling the white wine to go with the oysters. But this kind of frivolity which was associated with the mid-18th century was what was against. I mentioned the mid-18th century also as the antithesis of this grand architectural structure in terms of objects, sugar sculptures primarily, that were around with this. One is a table at Marley from the palace of Marley showing the first and second courses. Now, generally speaking, the point was there were sometimes two courses or three courses, but there were not an infinite number of courses as became really true in the 19th century, and there was no need for much architecture because the terrines holding all the food that went out at once for the course were all placed on the table, and the food and their holders became the design. A simpler dinner was simply a matter of four different dishes, and the idea was that you were supposed to have either the valet or often just your neighbor pass it to you, because one of the things about these smaller dining rooms was that the food was out there, which meant that the servants didn't have to stay in the room, and you could actually gossip and talk about things you didn't want to do so in front of the servants. So this was also part of this sort of more flirtatious society. This fan, while it's rather difficult to see, combines both worlds. It's got these circular tables as would be true in a mid or oval or whatever, but it's a special occasion, so it does have some sort of silver sur-tube, but it also has all sorts of dishes arranged around the edge, combining this idea of ornamentation. On a much higher level, I would say than that last image, you have the great centerpiece by my son Yeh, who was a silver goldsmith from Turin, who became goldsmith to the king when Louis XV, Louis Kanz, was crowned as a young man, and when he got married, I should say, and for his wedding he produced gold snuff boxes, sword handles and so forth in the brand new Rococo style. This brought Rococo design into the French thinking already by the 1720s, but essentially most of the commissions start in the 1730s, and here he designs a whole sur-tube for the Duke of Kingston, and there's virtually no surviving great French monumental silver complete of the 18th century. There are some exceptions, but really there's nothing compared to what there had been, because if it wasn't getting melted down for a war, the French Revolution took pretty much care of everything else. However, the Duke of Kingston wasn't French. However, there was always a shortage of silver in France. They always seemed to need it for coinage or wars or something, and so he was obliged to bring some old silver over from England and have it reworked here. There are a pair of these. We don't think this main sur-tube element was ever made. It was designed, but what do exist are both of the pair of terrines, and they were originally, I mean, they were in a collection and were sold some time ago with both of them together, and Baron Tissen and a private collector bought one, and then Tissen's went back on the market, and then Cleveland got it to share with another museum, and so Cleveland has one and the private collection has the other, but so there, at least, everybody knows where both of them are, but they are incredible works where he actually models the crustacea, the lobsters for the... The patae is a sort of stew, and one of them was obviously supposed to be a seafood one, and the other one has things like parsnips and game on the top of it, and that was obviously for game stew, but this clearly is really where you see somebody doing that, and you'll see he's put in the room, style of the room, his own design for the room that it was maybe going to be seen in, and he, by this point, was styling himself in his engravings as an architect. So here is a... And there are more examples of silversmiths who can perceive of themselves as architects and become somewhat, and in fact, for Louis Kahn's father-in-law, Prince Stanislas, who, when he lost the throne in Poland, he, Louis Kahn's, gave him the Alsace, and he had, and was seated at Nancy also. So, but he did end up sending an entire library over to him in Warsaw before he moved, and so this kind of commission would have been more common, I think, had they had the silver. Ironically, this whole set, the pair, went to Russia when the Duke of Kingston became the ambassador of Britain to Moscow, I mean St. Petersburg, and then came back to his wife, he and his wife divorced, she kept the silver, and eventually it found its way back to Paris, so we think happily it was out of Russia when the Russian Revolution came, it took place, but now you can see a bit better the crustacea and the game here from this set. As I mentioned, the setting was very much more of this sort of private nature. You will see this group gathered around the candlelit table dogs in the room, looking rather like I was asking for something at the table. Anyway, but they still maintained this idea of the head table, but the honored guest and presumably the Prince Louis François de Conti up there at the head table, they only sit on one side of the table, which gives you lots of opportunities to have display, but these were smaller tables and they didn't have that much room. What is important is you will note that in a dinner of some significance, the people are sitting in candlelight, candles were very expensive, and more so the crystal, the cut glass crystal like chandeliers and the candlesticks, but you will also notice this golden color, and generally speaking when they refer to the white service, it is indeed for having the principal meal in the early afternoon or in daylight and the tendency to have things gilded, usually silver gild in the evening to create part of this golden light in the evening was what luxury would do. I show these two paintings, show our two examples. One's workshop of Martin Van Mytens, the other's by Martin Van Mytens. This is the different example of the Feasts of Joseph II of Austria, but here you see it's bright daylight out and he's got a white service, silver on the table, but you don't see much of any sort, and then there are a lot of sort of individuals and then of course high up is the royal table. There is at his wedding supper to Isabella of Parma over here and you can see it's all lit up with candles and everybody's sitting around in candlelight so that would have been more important because obviously it was using more candles in the evening and now you start to see the sort of coming in a formal arrangement in a period of the 1760s and there it is with a mirror plateau underneath and these scrolls of what is probably sugar but the introduction of porcelain figurines, white porcelain figurines which we will see these are the kinds of things that would have been on the figurines standing on this mirrored plateau. So this was as an Augusta dinner but it obviously it had candles and it had figures these are Italian figures up here that have the same scrolls that would be like those on the mirror but that leads us in now we're into the Louis Sez period and we discover we're back in Rome and Italy still having remembered that it hasn't been that long that really Italy was the source of the great cuisine and France was learning I mean they were certainly getting its source from Catherine de Medici and Henry II who went to Italy and so forth but regardless it being the province of the architects for tables there certainly here are two Italian examples of table designs both in Cooper Hewitt's collection use of tempietto's figures dancing sort of around the central figure this particular drawing I am on the fence about it could be a tabletop design for as a surto it's the ruins of Pompeii as some actual buildings as excavated shortly before in Pompeii and I also know that architects to support themselves were selling these models as made in cork generally to support themselves exactly in proportion of Roman famous Roman buildings but also of Pompeii and this could indeed be a display table of Pompeii and ruins for the grand tourist in any case these were almost certainly were made they could have been made in wood and everything else but they're most likely still made in sugar so once again you have architects considering the architecture you could put on the table I next move to Josephine the mother of Eugène de Boarnay the purported and apparent owner of our surto upstairs because very luckily those of you who heard Ulrich Leibn speaking I had a couple weeks ago he brought up the topic of the various design elements in common with Hotel Boarnay which he has been researching and so forth and it happened that right as we were doing the collection handbook of the museum that I mentioned to him that I was very frustrated by the note in the file that it said it was in the present from Napoleon to Eugène de Boarnay and it looked every bit of the quality as if it could have been but I was hoping to document it and he had just with his colleague found the records of Eugène's shipping records from Paris to Munich when he had to leave Munich I mean had to leave Paris to go to his in-laws to take a present and quit Paris after Napoleon left was exiled and in it was one surto by Tomier to be picked up actually parts of which were at Tomier back again for repair and for the additional flowers I have to assume that the flowers were not likely to be gilt metal so he may have been asked to provide some silk ones or perhaps even porcelain ones from SAV in any case the idea of gold was despite the revolution was very dominant and the way they expressed this gold was generally in gilt bronze Tomier like Karam was a product of the Ancien Régime and the monarchy and he had in fact it was somewhat older than Karam he had done work in the Ancien Régime and he had managed to take over a commissaire-priseur I mean a sort of well it was really more of a actually more of a decorating house than auction but where he got a lot of work and including it was attention was drawn to him by Napoleon so here this clock although not by Tomier is by Ravrio and what is also interesting is they wanted the latest so here's Josephine and I have looked there's a piano and a spinnet both in Malmaison right now and the piano does not look like that it has a high upright back but the spinnet doesn't look like this either and this curve this is purportedly Josephine playing the piano and the decor you will see elements that you would see at Malmaison but it's obviously a slight fantasy because he wasn't looking at the piano but it has all the same motifs and so there they are commissioning or at least you see these griffins you will see shortly works in Ormelo and Tomier was the first one to pick up on this this is Josephine as Empress and just to give you an idea of the environments that this would go in this is a watercolor from the Thaul collection in Cooper Hewitt's collection which has the swans that Josephine loved this is a bathroom in Boudoir at Malmaison and then this is a period watercolor of a salon of very similar in period to the sur two that you will see the details are very similar Eugène was the son of Josephine and the aristocratic father who had been guillotined in the revolution but somehow this all he was apparently very well liked by everybody on both sides of the aisle and indeed was able to somehow negotiate with him and because he was very good entertainer in the sense of hosting people Napoleon not only gave him the funding to redo an older hotel particulier from the early Louis Kahn's era in the latest Ampere style but he also a lot of which was I think his mother participating with her love of the period taste but he also gave him made him viceroy of Italy and looking at the we'll get that in a minute but here so here he is in his viceroy of Italy garb and here we have a design for a an ink stand by the architect Giuseppe Barberi and the ink stand shows these neoclassical garlands and so forth as well it's also in the exhibition and you will see the other motifs that crop up on his walls and everything else so it is a sort of early example of Gesamtkunstwerk but it's also interesting to me that this clock designed by an architect Barberi who also did a design for a centerpiece that he clearly considered a piece of architecture because he's even laid out the floor plan just as if it was going to be a first set of buildings but it probably is a massive sugar sculpture it could have been done in marvels they were starting as we will see and for those of you who haven't been down to the Valadier exhibition at the Frick you should go because Luigi Valadier was another silversmith who became a self-styled architect and here he is designing in multiple hard stones and incredible almost circus maximus but you know again repeating the piazza as a work of architecture on the table and these are done in multiple hard stones in fact very much the kind of taste that we will later see would have peeled in Russia as well but these parts were all movable and interchangeable this appears to have been designed this way but I think there were other extra pieces and so forth that if you had another length you could always add more buildings and so forth and that is something about these we have five pieces here and that is obviously complete it's huge and as Ulrich said which was very helpful that they are working on restoring the dining room right now and the Hotel Particulier, the Hotel Boarnet which is now the German ambassadors residence in Paris and he said oh it is the perfect size for that dining room rather covetously but in fact I suspect that this was given to Eugène on the occasion of his marriage and his being made a member of the Imperial family, Napoleon officially adopted him in 1804 although he did not get included in the line of succession obviously Napoleon wouldn't have divorced Josephine but at that time he also married his German wife Princess Augusta Amalia Ludovica, Georgia of Bavaria and who was the eldest daughter of King Maximilian which is why Eugène moved to Bavaria and where his father-in-law later made him Duke of Leuchtenberg and Prince of Eistat so as I said he was able to be very sociable and Napoleon gave him the Hotel Boarnet money so that Eugène would entertain for him Napoleon and Josephine neither of them liked to eat in public Josephine had rotting teeth and Napoleon felt very ill at ease and so they didn't like public dining Napoleon made an exception for this when he married Marie-Louise and decided he'd better do it the royal way since he was marrying royalty and did have as we will see a public dining occasion but otherwise it was clearly planning to leave it to Eugène but having made him Viceroy of Italy and heir presumptive to the Italian crown I suspect that this went off to Italy with the idea that Eugène would use it for his diplomatic entertaining there and only later when he came back up to Paris had it with him and then send it off for repair Here is the wedding that was painted in 1812 but the wedding was in 1810 and you can see there it is there's one piece you see they've been separated because they're having to sit at this horseshoe shape but you've got one, two, three places there and then more going around here similar candelabra, these sort of oil lamps at the end and everybody is arrayed in style facing out at the audience of the nobles and politically elite who would have been there details to show you again that these artistic considerations are important but it's also a sort of a Boarnay style that you get with these swans this is a wall covering from the collection swans and then you have these these are actually bacchanal figures this is grapes all around so this is presumably something that would have held a bunch of grapes in the middle but it does suggest the wine I mean I don't think it was used to hold anything related to wine but dancing around with the grapes in their hair and but it is the idea of the three graces which was actually purchased by Eugène de Boarnay and of course his, his sort of in-law I should say, Pauline Bundlepart became the Duchess of Parma here you again have the swans here the swans there this is already out in Tournay which is now in Belgium but to show you the impact of this incredible work my feeling is that Tomier working for the Imperial household was taking his cues directly from Percier in Fontaine who did design Malmaison's interiors for Josephine and he would have been using this famous architects the famous architects designs for the table and then executing you will see the motifs in the Hotel Boarnay here on the furniture on the woodwork and it all matches up again with this is probably a data railing so it would have been there not in the house but just again these motifs that he picks up from Percier in Fontaine and then I just want to flip through a couple more that's actually an Italian drawing with again with the basket and the same griffins dancing figure for furniture mount and a lot of other examples of these from the mounts collection of furniture mounts and what was their point was of course to reflect light and you this is therefore with the idea that again you're thinking about the dining room for evening use which was a lot more expensive but this giant pair with the again by Tomier with both gilding and bronzing again oopsie get to a little fast so this is a chair in the collection and this kind of motif actually had you know the this is of the period there may be a connection to Napoleon but you will see the furniture in the Hotel Boarnay the Hotel Boarnay furniture and can easily visualize having it again being celebrating Napoleon which he would have done to as his diplomat the Sev porcelain was advancing with new techniques hard-paced porcelain and porcelain that would this is actually the factory showing off that they're showing off the scientific nature and new wares and here we get to our man it was Marie Antoine or otherwise known as Antonine Carem who was a real entrepreneur he he his famous saying is the fine arts are five in number namely painting sculpture poetry music and architecture the principal branch of this being pastry so here he is he thinks of architecture as that he can do architecture and pastry and indeed that's what he does these great piece montée here you have a sort of pyramid of cakes and things and these are this is from what his earliest book on pastry the picturesque past pastry maker and he's actually done sort of sheen wasery and rustic and all the rest of it loaded in in 1816 but there in 18 to a Parisian lawyer turned restaurant critic and there's another new thing that's going on in Napoleonic France is the creation of the restaurant because of course not every you know there were there were far fewer of the aristocracy hiring cooks at home and more people actually eating somewhere in a more public place but in 18 to the Parisian lawyer turned a restaurant critic Grimo de la Veniere profess that cuisine is linked to nearly all branches of human knowledge chemistry painting sculpture architecture geometry physics pyrotechnics all are more or less closely allied with the great art of fine dining while I can't speak to the matter of fireworks Grimo argued that the artist who in addition to profound knowledge of culinary art possesses a fair smattering of all these sciences should reap the great benefits indeed and one should remember that it particularly in if the for those of you who've seen the film about a Vattel the great chef of Louis Catoise's era who was to the Prince de Condé in Chantilly had a dinner when Louis Catoise decided to invite himself to dinner which meant invite himself in a hundred of his nearest associates and Vattel was supposed to produce the whole event and this included the food but it also included fireworks and you will see many many prints of fireworks of the illustrious Duke of Brunswick Holstein arriving in Bologna and boom boom boom there are prints of the fireworks well likewise it was up to Vattel to produce the fireworks as well as all the accommodations and the feed for both the staff of and the VIPs who came and in fact he ordered fresh fish to be delivered right on the morning and it did get there but it got there late and by this point poor Vattel so over wrought had committed suicide because he thought it wasn't coming so it's it's it makes a great movie but it sounds more like a movie but it was real life so Karim came from very humble origins but rose in the Revolutionary in the first decade of the 19th century to produce these fantastic meals and he also had a very he but he was a traditionalist he he whoopsie he went he created while he created new looking this is real now food to be eaten as the sugar sculptures were generally made with some gum Arabic in them so they were there to be maintained you didn't you didn't necessarily get to use the multiple times but you might have been able to of course a porcelain figurine is much more useful it may be expensive to get in the first place but you can keep rearranging them and doing different things so here is Karim who had in addition to creating magnificent sculptures and in sugar was also actually creating them with new foods with lighter pastes and like macaroons and things and here you see as a comparison though he's making his displays of cakes essentially resemble the traditional 17th and 18th and now 19th century displays as opposed to you know more modern display but he is he is innovative in his cooking and he does that you know to with great fanfare to the point where it was so good he was a modernizer and he he classified French sauces into the four groups that remain known today and a scoffier would build on but his architecture was traditional he also wrote many books which is one reason we know so much about him but he he prided himself on being the architect of food he his great cooking came into play when these two with these two gentlemen here after the fall of Napoleon in and his exile in 1814 Tsar Alexander marched into do we have that slide now I think for it's the next one here he is marching into Paris victorious in March 1814 and this is Tallerin's townhouse well the Elise palace had had something wrong I think there'd been a protest or something in it and so Tallerin invited Tsar Alexander to come stay with him in his townhouse he had already employed pretty much extensively at Valenci his house in the Loire Valley Carem to cook for him not exclusively but anytime there was any diplomatic dinner and in fact Napoleon paid for Tallerin once Eugène de Boarnet had gone off to Italy he paid for Valenci so that Tallerin who was again a aristocrat himself who managed to find favor with Napoleon partly for trying to play but he played both sides of the aisle so he had this great chef well Tsar Alexander gets there and he's got the royal forces on one floor with pleading to have Louis the 18th Louis de Suite installed and the Napoleonic requesters asking for the reinstatement of Napoleon on another floor but I have to eat first so let's have dinner and he obviously everybody's worrying about what's going to happen well in fact he had everybody at the table and then he realized he was going to have to make a toast so what did he do he raised his glass to Carem avoiding having to make the choice then but the next morning Napoleon was out and Louis de Suite was in and it all took place probably around the table with much like Arthur to the top but in this is the kind of room which you can see has the same motifs which was Tallerin's house in fact Tallerin had a terrible time getting rid of Alexander the first until finally he when the Lise Palace was ready for me finally said alright you can have Carem while you're in Paris and then he moved and then in fact he invited Carem to come to Russia and Carem went to Russia but Alexander the first was off on a campaign and by the time he got back Carem felt he had been ill treated by his staff and left but he went many places here in fact is another interesting detail was that Alexander the first was much smitten with Josephine and met her at Malmaison but he and she with him and they had and he wrote that he could have real conversations much as with a man but it was so such a significant interest that she actually gave him this extraordinary I get cameo which was known as the Gonzaga cameo was owned by the Gonzaga's and the Renaissance but it was a Roman cameo of a sort of husband and wife, brother, sister who were very both intellectually and much in love with each other so there was a lot of significant and it remained in Alexander's collection and is now in the Hermitage but here are our two figures sadly he was walking with Josephine in her ever diaphanous and rather low-cut clothing outside in the cold in the spring and in fact she got pneumonia and died shortly after that so he was actually very stricken by that but he would have returned again I suspect this is the kind of centerpiece in fact I thought this might have even been a Russian design because of the nature of the pink which is rhodonite perhaps and the green which could have been malachite for Russia and there was a note in the file that said that it had a Russian inscription well we looked and it doesn't and I suspect therefore it is an Italian Roman design it could it was the kind that again 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 you've got similar figures this tempietto with figures on it mixed or Malou very much again an architectural statement another view of the two different Valadier but here's a man who was a silversmith who again really became an architect and then created these works of architectural space and then just to end on I wanted to show you this design drawing from again the 1785 to 1885 which you can see these groupings much like the ones with the stones and these swags and so many of the motifs but again very like the Valadier arrangements as well as the one we saw on the hard stones so the idea that Eugène was down there seeing these Roman versions they had this great architect Percier and Percier in Fontaine who were producing designs for Tomier and Tomier commanding the attention of Napoleon this wonderful object that appears to have really been the present for the wedding, his adoption and everything else that all and being made vice-royal of Italy all of which happened at the same time undoubtedly was the source of this commission and based on it and the dates of the other known Tomier, they're most of them all later 1810 to 14 and so this really is another reason to think that this is much crisper this one in its detailing to think that this one upstairs is an early one and does show the connection of Napoleon wanting to make the connection to Rome politically of obviously putting most of his family in charge of Italy and using it for all the political power that Imperial Rome meant to him so there's a great statement of that and at the same time of having a chef who is creating the extraordinary arrangements of food that are supposed to accompany this most of the Italian ones you notice don't show them actually holding food but the French ones do appear to be made for holding decorative food or sweets going back to the concept of architecture so Karem took Roman architecture and that of Palladio and who he referenced he actually went and studied in the bibliotech nest you now he studied architecture before making these arrangements of food so this was not coincidental and the food was displayed as architecture but the ingredients were innovative and to that we have this confluence of Talonron, Alexander I, Napoleon and many others in power including in Vienna and George IV who had Karem come to cook for him and their table arrangements show the impact of this extraordinary moment when everybody came together in Paris and created a style so thank you very much I hope if any of you have questions that I've left a little time for questions and feel free to ask yes so what we have upstairs would that have been filled with desserts or would that have been would there be food around it did people sit around that table they would have sat around it or possibly on one side if it was a sort of display dinner but principally that would have been likely since it's equal on both sides that it would have been one where you'd sit around it and the food would have been outside they would have had as I think predominantly things like colorful petit four and so on or candies on the glass dishes that stand up and then there might have been grapes and other fruits in the baskets they probably had glass liners those baskets to hold the grapes and so on and while the glasses remarkably still with the stands the cake stands they're not in the baskets and then of course light and it's unfortunate that the lights can't stay apparently are not working well enough for us to keep the candle light on and the candles but the idea was all those candles and those big candelabra and you notice how tall they are in comparison that was so that you could AC through to your the person you wouldn't been talking to them you'd probably talk to person on one side of the other of you but you would see them but more importantly the heat from the candles wouldn't melt the women's makeup and so they that was the primary reason but it would also enable the candles then not to be blocked by the people to flicker off the mirrors that would have inevitably been between the windows and again you would have depended on the windows if you were having a daytime dinner but I think the fact that these are signal are built bronze is very significant because it means that it was intended for evening dining and that was shifting over in that period but you know it's not to you really get gas lighting and so forth in the streets of Paris and elsewhere where you can expect to be able to see what your way around that unless you if you're living in a great Chateau it means you have invited everybody for the night because they're not going to be going out in the pitch black with no light so so those are all important considerations the color meaning something the motifs have meaning there are figures of the seasons arranged around the one holding a wheat sheaf another hole is identifying so those would have all had significance but the important references were that they clearly fed off ancient and you know antiquity and imperial forms yes I and please just wait for the microphone folks we are recording so we just want to make sure that gets captured and documented when did Paris get gaslight I did look this up once in the past I think it wasn't till the teens or 20 teens or 20 late teens or 20s but I should I should know that and I did know that but in any case after the Napoleonic era I mean there were wicked lights with some oil that were in transportation vehicles and so forth but the gas isn't later into later the oil lamps in fact in the in the design from tourney backwards here they are in fact well even that wedding picture where there's a you do get oil at this period it's just not heavily used and they didn't wouldn't have had it much in the dining room but here that's a brool that's something that could have been with oil but that's actually an and iron but the point is where is it here these these boat shape these ancient boat shaped things are all could have been for oil so a little startling at the table but and why they'd have preferred but and the other thing is of course what the candles were made of and of course these would have been made with something like beeswax that wouldn't have imparted a terrible smell while eating because it was a very you know it was it was Napoleon's wedding so then which you can't go much higher but there was another image I think from tourney I can't remember I want to go backwards all the way but where they showed another lamp in any case so the the the oil lamps were around from the late 18th century but they weren't really very functional in terms of of being able to travel any distance and it didn't help you it was on your carriage it wasn't on the street there was no need for that yes in the back oh you got the okay sorry good we'll do it did you explain the dinner service a la ruse versus yes I would actually had meant to do that but we I had thought for a long time that Kerem and he did clearly get exposed to the surface a la ruse when he went to Russia to St. Petersburg to be the chef for Alexander the first in I think it was 1815 or 16 that he went but it does appear to have been coming in earlier the probably with the Russian conquest I mean the Russian victory that it was sort of around that time in any case service a la ruse what I mean service a la France says was what I showed you the diagrams of with the dishes forming the ornament of everything on the table at once now this didn't mean there was only one course and everything from soup to nuts got on the table but it did mean there was a set soup and start sort of first course and then there was another course with meats and so forth and then the dessert table would be completely changed I mean you would still have the you couldn't just come along and take that off and put on something else but you would have the dessert foods served obviously separately and sometimes and as I said in the early days you were probably coming for dessert and certainly in a large function but or a buffet I mean it was very much a lot of oil functions were I mean where it was a wedding where they had to invite a lot of people and then those people would be served in buffet and maybe the marrying couple and their immediate relatives would sit at the high table service a la ruse was the idea of sequential serving of courses and as I mentioned they were along with the term best row which comes from the Russian soldiers in Paris at this time with Alexander the first who were going that they wanted to eat quickly and they were coming in and saying in Russian which means fast fast and it turned into best row that the idea of types of restaurants and of course it wasn't expected that the sort of gentry were going to be predominantly eating there it was going to be travelers and the soldiers and so on so this is the association with best row with being separate from cuisine but the there for a long time you know talent I mean Karen was a great proponent he I think he represented to Napoleon again it's the political power of the statement and he represented what was now really firmly with his talents fixed that French cuisine was the ruler in cuisine and traditional French display was going to win that and his cooking was going to be win the day in other words France had a really exportable commodity in its cooking and also a position of power and so Karen was still doing things like the Ancien regime despite the fact he was hired by old and new and quickly flipped over to being able to cook for Louis the 18th general entourage but he was not clearly politically he was more liberal than and was more socially minded about even though the clearly the type of cooking he liked to do was for the higher up so so the as I said there are changes of course with the with the service of the Francis but the the difference is that you don't it is easier to have the soup the food be hot because you don't have to get something from the other end of the table but be on the other hand leaving them there where I mean leaving them on the table you can get rid of the servants and have everybody pass them around if you want to talk whereas there's a greater deal of transparency because Napoleon identifying more with the power of Louis the 14th wanted to have you know when there were these entertainings have these big banquets it was out in halls again there were long tables which is why you can have a search to the top because it's now something for a long table and that was that was also part of the service a la France enabled as that came in the service a la France at Ruth's coming in because you didn't have so much else on the table with all the food it could be served up one at a time and served two people but again again that brought whatever staff was there was actually you will see into back into the room which was no longer supposed to be important actually you can see that very well in the marriage here whoops yes you see here here is here are the the servants serving I mean these are the these are the men actually in this case serving well there's men here and these are the apparently the valets to the people sitting there so in other words each person had either one or one the two had a servant taking care of serving serving them in this particular instance because it was a royal royal wedding but normally you would have had this would be the kind of thing I mean the arrangement you would have had in the Napoleonic era of of people serving you one at a time which is a la roost really there was somebody in the back yes I I have a question about the team that chefs like I am had back then because you see a tremendously elaborate display and the food had to be tremendously elaborate as well that he had someone that also styled the food with him like you see rolls today he was he was the stylist because there's actually quite a bit of writing about this where he was encouraged to go to drawing school and when because he needed to know better how to present the drawings of his I mean he would create it all on paper do effectively design drawings of his presentation and then he would design the dessert on paper obviously had chefs working for him making the things to his recipes but they were and and I'm sure constructing them but he he was the stylist so and he published his own work in these cookbooks to show people what was he was intending to achieve and so that's another thing he was really in that sense he's really very definitely the ancestor of the celebrity chef of today because he was promoting his designs and his way of doing things along with the recipes hi I'm really curious about that wine cooler that was in the oyster luncheon did that actually hold ice or was it just metal they usually did have ice but they also were lined with lead or sometimes another copper but a metal that would immediately hold the cold as well as keep the water from leaking through the wood and so you they sometimes would put very cold or icy water in there and actually drain it out and leave the bottles in there to stay cool because they could do that but you know it depends that one appeared to have divisions in it so I and let's and remember we're not talking about the refrigerator and ice cubes we're talking about blocks of ice so you get ice from how would they make ice this was this is quite an amazing thing if you think about it I mean obviously Russia has ice somewhere nearby right at hand but or at least or at least northern Russia but you know in western Europe I think they went to caves and they store you know stored in caves and then they'd haul it in very large blocks and and break it up you know with you know as little as possible I mean break off a chunk of whatever size they needed but there's quite and of course you have to think about they're having to anticipate the loss if they're trying to put it on a cart and carry it so they've got metal line carts and metal line containers and they store it usually underground I mean that's why there's often cave storage or underground storage to keep things cold once you get your ice but they're generally speaking a lot of times it's a matter and that's why the Europeans to this day I would think I think don't like their white wine and they don't like ice in their water and they don't like white wine as cold as we expect to drink it they're expecting it to be cooled by a cold river water that could be put in and cool off that metal and this strongly and then you put the bottles in and you get them cool but you don't get them refrigerator cold yes yeah over there hi I just wanted to know in your research did you find that due to interaction with other cultures that the architects of cuisine and architects of food and generally architects were influenced by other cultures and they reflected in their work well yes I mean certainly the culinary as this you do find that you know there's obviously it speeds up a great deal in the 19th century when people actually get things like avocados and tomatoes from the new world and so on but before then I think it's it's more of an idea or they will you know trade or traders coming back from Asia and or the Caribbean obviously the sugar itself is a long distance it's just not food stuff that will spoil so but all of those things were extremely expensive you couldn't get grapefruits from Florida or whatever all the way back to Europe by the kind of boats that they had so there were other things that people may have tasted if they were explorers but they were never going to see until mechanized transportation came along but I think the biggest thing was the publication of printed books by superb draftsmen there's a wonderful Dutch woman who went to Suriname and elsewhere it was a book is in the Cooper Hewitt library Sibylla Marians in the 17th century and she documents minutely fruit and vegetables and flowering plants that people want to have them but they so they know they're out there so they're sort of looking for things but as I said for the most part it's more the idea of the decoration that comes back on a cabinet from China or Japan that then is interpreted by local craftsmen with what we now call sheen wasery and recognized to be very far away from anything likely except there really are pagodas in China and they made fanciful versions of them in Europe so you might well find a pagoda in sugar on the table it's more a case of reflecting a westernized idea of what was actually out there but not an accurate one except for these few things that could be transported for like sugar for a long time Hi I just wondered thinking about the earlier sugar paste centerpieces of the dessert course would the dessert course have been served in a separate room or would it have been on a separate table in the early I think that they were in also in the desserts were arranged sometimes in a buffet separately on as we saw with that wine one and the master buffet but many times also as sort of available in dishes on the table that were separate from the served to the top which you weren't going to reach out and disturb that was decorative but it may have been the same foods available on the table but also on the buffet table and another thing that is interesting to connect back to our friend the Byzantine princess is that in fact the first forks that really come into use in particularly in northern Europe were the small ones and the point was that you were bringing them for yourself so when somebody had a service made it was for serving at a banquet of desserts so the forks are very little and with the exception of meat I'm not talking about meat serving forks but I'm talking about individual forks that you might put into your mouth and and so they were perceived as being elegant accessories to a dessert before they got actually used for meat and so forth any other questions thank you what do you think caused the decline of the sort to I well things I think I think in some ways believe me having looked just been in the Hofburg store store rooms in Vienna I can tell you there was no decline in the 19th century in Vienna I've never seen so many sure to a various periods ranging from one by Tomer or maybe it's several that had about eight 12 mirror parts and could be arranged in multiple different rooms of different sizes but they went on there were some of guilt bronze certainly from the Napoleon I mean the mid 19th century and even the 1880s so I think what happened is though again you have different sizes and shapes of dining table coming back into fashion a lot of the Antoine era and the France Joseph era was often round tables and so forth then you might have one single element and it's why frankly a lot of these two that were made and obviously let's face it there's a limited number of people who are going to have something like that but there are gradations and there certainly are ceramic ones with and they came as the time of the exhibitions to be made with electroplated bases and other things but you will often find a large center of the table piece without the assorted other parts that go with it and I think that really persists right through the era of the grand entertaining of the scuffier and the late 19th Edwardian era and then you have World War I and a complete shift over to a lot of more modern lifestyle and lack of servants and all sorts of other things that just a great the idea of the ostentatious was less popular after that so I think that was really it probably was World War I that it was the finalized the decline right well thank you very much