 And the room is silent. Good evening, everyone. My name is Caroline Bowman and I am the director here at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Welcome to all of you to the Enid and Lester Morse historic design lecture. Thanks to the tremendous support of trustee Deni Morse and her husband Lester, this important program series brings historians, scholars and designers to Cooper Hewitt to grow our understanding of design as a social and cultural force in the world. This is the 15th program to date in the series. And tonight we are celebrating the installation of our magnificent Surtut de Table in the exhibition Tablescapes. I hope everyone enjoyed Tablescapes' Designs for Dining earlier this evening where the opulent centerpiece is once again captivating audiences after a nearly 30-year absence from public view. The focus of a recent technical study and conservation treatment by the museum's stellar conservation department, its 54 cast and worked metal elements are now restored and assembled to a state of splendor. A video in the gallery shows our conservators meticulously wiping away the grime, a painstaking effort that took over 200 hours to complete. And our digital interactives demonstrate how conservators used highly specialized photography to reveal the virtuoso craftsmanship of the designer Pierre-Philippe Tommier. To provide insight into the Surtut significance as an elite table setting for the family of Napoleon Bonaparte, I am delighted to welcome Dr. Ulrich Leibn, one of the foremost authorities on the history of European decorative arts and French interior architecture. Dr. Leibn is a friend of Cooper Hewitt and a longtime faculty member of the Cooper Hewitt Parsons School of Design and Master's program. A valued consultant for numerous collections, he has also curated exhibitions dedicated to European furniture for the Bard Graduate Center, Waterson Manor and the Rothschild Collection. In charge of the conservation of the collection of historic furniture at the Palais-Bournais in Paris, Dr. Leibn is the author of the recently published monograph, Empire Style, The Hotel de Bournais. For his talk, Dr. Leibn will draw from his research on the spectacular Palais once owned by Napoleon Stepson, Eugène de Bournais, to discuss the thematic connections of the Surtut's ornamental grammar to the design of the hotel's interiors. Cooper Hewitt has an exciting non-stop program in store for the month of December and I invite all of you to join us for it. On December 4th, just around the corner, Design Historian and Cooper Hewitt trustee Marilyn Friedman will discuss her latest book, Making America Modern, Interior Design in the 1930s, Not to Be Missed. And on December 11th, Sarah Kauffin, our recently retired head of the Department of Product Design and Decorative Arts, returns to Cooper Hewitt to share her insights into the culinary history of the Surtut de Table, Also Not to Be Missed. And finally on December 14th, we will open the Road Ahead, Reimagining Mobility in the Barbara and Morton Mandel Design Gallery on the third floor. Featuring 40 projects and proposals for more sustainable and equitable urban environments and means of transport, yes, including all sorts of drones and robots, the exhibition will be a catalyst for conversations about how we might move people, goods and services in the future. So please join me in welcoming Ulrich to the stage. Thank you, Ms. Barman, for this very warm introduction. And thank you very much, Dini and Lesra Morse for inviting me and letting me speak at this wonderful possibility with such a wonderful auditorium. And thank you also, Vasili Kjernopoulos and Sarah Kauffin for guiding me and giving me their ideas for what they actually wanted for the evening, which was very helpful. And I hope I'm up to the task to give you a very nice insight with this, which goes with this splendid exhibition, which we saw upstairs. So now let me see if the technique works. Voila. So I'm going to actually, we saw the table decoration, the suit too, yesterday upstairs in the wonderful dining room in a very splendid setup. And I was just saying to one of my colleagues that I could just walk away with it and take it back to the Hotel Buane, because I'm seeing it in its full splendor and very nicely restored. I think it would perfectly fit onto a table in a dining room, which we just restored. And we don't have the table set and I'm about to buy another table to bring it back to the room, which was changed over the two centuries. And so it's very interesting to see it now in this resurrection and this wonderful restored form here in the Coupe Eau Huit. So the Hotel Buane is an old Parisian mansion, which dates from 1723 has been changed over several times, has changed ownership several times, and it's currently used as the residence of the Ambassador of Germany in Paris. And so far it's a historic mention, it's preserved and it's taken care of in a very particular way, not to the very pleasure of the Foreign Office in Berlin, who is very kind of careful that we don't spend too much money on silk and gilding of furniture. But there you are, you have a responsibility and what is very nice in this very long history of the building, it's had also been for political, for the historic reasons taken away from Germany and restituted. But what is actually very interesting is that it is a German embassy under French law of inheritance. So when we do any restoration, we can always refer to the French authorities and say they say we need to do it like this, which is actually a wonderful in-between and helped us already a lot of times out of a difficult situation. Now what I see, I show you here is a picture of the residence in about 1820, when it had just been acquired by the Prussian King Frederick William III as a Piedotère during his days in Paris. Piedotères of that size were actually normal at that time. The Tsar had one and the British King had one too, which is the British Embassy today. So King Frederick William from Prussia just did the kind of same thing and he had this house furnished with things which he bought from Eugène de Boarnet and there were other things which he had to acquire. So I have to say that the King of Prussia would have not seen the table set which is upstairs because Eugène de Boarnet was very careful in shipping lots of art objects and of nice furnishing elements of that house to his new home in Munich where he lived as an emigre, no longer being able to come back to France after the hundred days of reconquering France of Napoleon. So he realized that he would never come back. That was the reason why he sold his house and that was the reason also why artwork was shipped from Paris out to other places. Now the history of the Surtut which is upstairs will be detailed in more in the historic details by Sarah Coffin in the next lecture on December 11th. I just come to one picture to talk about table set. What is very interesting in the European history is that table decorations could be as drastic as the kind of real swan which was really also eaten as swan was eaten. This is a table decoration made out of Serviette pliée folded linen napkins and we had a display in Waterston Manor for table set with linen folded napkins. There is a gentleman from Spain who has specialized in re-creating these kind of shapes and it just gives you an idea what different kind of things of table sets we could have. The table set you see on the lower screen is another one by Tommier. We know about officially in the literature about 20 of those big bronze table sets they are dispersed today between San Francisco the Museum of the Legend of Honor and also as far as Russia and Naples and they were often given as a wedding present or also as a present as a diplomatic gift to an in-law or like from one sovereign to another so the one in Waterston Manor we know was given by King Louis the 18th to an Italian count. Now table decorations can change over time as we see with the wonderful table set sorry it's the technique it's with the table set upstairs and then also I compare this with a modern table set a table arrangement with a very nice amusing chandelier which was done by the Campana brothers and that is an installation in Waterston Manor and you see right where what our lordship Jacob Rothschild loves is to clash the 18th century with the kind of very modern recycled art from the Campana brothers. It's kind of challenging but it works apparently very well and the the public loves it and so here we go and we bury the 18th century and give the Campana brothers the full credit for their wonderful creations. Now the Hotel Boine has a much older history than what we see today it started off in 1723 by the famous architect Bofran for whom it was a real real estate operation. He built three of these big mansions in a row. The Hotel Boine is the only one which survived to this day 1723 and was rather little changed the front got an Egyptian Porsche but the back has the incredible view on the River Seine as it was intended by Bofran in the 18th century. The addition by Eugène de Boine in about 1803 was the Egyptian Porsche which seems to really been taken out of the vivants and non engravings which were coming up at that time published at that time and which brings us already to the clash of the ornamental language which was used here and we know that Yvonne de Nord was one of the earliest the first Europeans who went in the campaign of Egypt with Napoleon to Egypt and they really documented archaeologically what they saw and so we see elements from temples which are well documented today in this wonderful porch with those capitals the Horus and the colonies of the Temple of Dendra. Now the Hotel Boine is situated in this very famous situation overlooking the River Seine and also looking over to the Tuileries where of course Eugène knew that it was the residence of Josephine his mother and his stepfather Napoleon so this dashing young gentleman in a picture which is in the Royal Collections in Sweden today shows him as vice king of Italy which he was named to be in 1805 and shows him right in a very dazzling surrounding from the uniform up to the furniture around here it's all very very smashing and very very voluptuous and showing the kind of taste of this young prince for opulence and luxury which also goes with the fact that he bought his surdue table from the best furnitures of the Empire who were available in Paris. The surdue upstairs is about I would say like four meters long which is precisely the size which would work for the dining room in the Hotel Boine. It's constituted of fantastic elements which I will present you in different details and this is the room where it should be standing and no you don't laugh because I got really many ideas this afternoon seeing it in situ. So this room was restored to its 1810 appearance last year and this year we hope to have the means to buy an appropriate historic table which I'm already chasing to put back here and then the king of Prussia because he had no longer the table set you have upstairs he bought another one which is not too bad and which we're going to try to put on the table there these surdue would be very appropriate also to use as a table decoration a permanent table decoration when the table was not constantly in use and these elements were baskets with flowers which could have fresh flowers or artificial flowers and those wonderful candlesticks which you which you see examples here. This is the mise-en-scene of the table set by Tommier which is in Waterston Manor which was bought by the present Lord Rothstein in order to find another layout for the dining room table at Waterston and it's very atmospheric and it gives you an idea how beautiful this would be arranged with of course flowers fruit and the candles glittering and you get an idea of this with the wonderful paneling in the dining room upstairs and the splendor of that effect of the gold which was glimmering with this wonderful candlelight something we often forget today with this harsh electric light which is surrounding us and of course the the rooms in the Hotel Boine they were made for all these wonderful artworks this are rooms which we have already restored and in a way we work a lot with engravings as I will show you later but we try to reiterate the color spirit and the splendor of the Empire period. This is the Salon vert which is the first room to be restored 10 years ago with curtains in silk with a very wide braid which is woven on a hand loom in Lyon after a pattern from about 1802 this is the library which was restored back to a color scheme which had been hidden under white washed wall paint for about a hundred years we were able to recreate and find the colors by doing sondage and taking samples from the different coats on the wall and the library cabinets which are standing here are original and they have been kept in situ since the early 1800s. This is another view of the library and I show this to you in order to compare it here with a wonderful watercolor by Percier which a friend who was here tonight alerted me because this drawing went through a sale in New York and we were very happy because it was just showing exactly the same scheme for a library in a palace which we found in the Hotel Boine in a more private setting and all these elements with the arches and the big cabinets as they were used in the Hotel Boine. Something which I found preparing this lecture and which was not intended because we didn't know this when we did the carpet this is a carpet which was woven for the room after a model which is kept in the French National Archives for textiles in the Mobile Nationale and I come back to this later and we had it re-woven and here you see the same kind of pattern on the ceiling so it's very interesting when you work with historic resources and that's now I'm working myself into the way of making the link with the Smithsonian Institution and the collection here in this house we need those collections and those fragments and those engravings in order to be able to assess the heritage it's not the decorator who has a fancy idea or the interior designer who has a fancy idea we need history we need documents if we go with historic material we need to be kind of thorough to look at evidence and that becomes very clear when we look at the room schemes which are documented in engravings as they're kept upstairs here in the library or in the wonderful print and in drawings collection these are all examples which are here in New York in the Coupe-Eauette collection by Percier and by other artists and they just illustrate in a very very minute and very clear way in how far a contemporary designer artist or you know researcher can rely on them and when you look close on them there is a one drawing upstairs which is this one which I was able to retrieve from the internet there is so much detail and if you go close to them you can travel with your eyes for a long period on these incredible documents and you don't need to go to Paris or to Berlin to see them you have an incredible collection in this very building here and Gail Davidson made this incredible show of the Thor collection interior views and there were amazing treasures to be rediscovered or to be discovered and then again to show you what you can do you look at one of those three drawings and then you see what we did in the Hotel Boine with the with the pink room the cherry red room and you understand in how far these rooms which are there the room shell is just there what you need to do is to recreate the draping to choose the right colors to have the right materials not to take plastic textiles but to have the real silk and to use cotton for the for the curtains on the windows and to clean the gilding and have water gilding and not taking oil gilding or brush gilding and then the whole thing just revives and comes back to something very nice what is also very interesting is that we do very much take the detail for descriptions of the inventories the inventories describe curtains on the window redo the vitrage they are hated by the ambassadors because it obfuscates the view into the garden and they want the view into the garden it's a good German Bauhaus style you know you want to look into the garden so we bring them in but we skirt them rather high so we we are loyal to the document but people have the view into the garden so you have to to play tricks with them to in order to convince also what we reintroduced was for example and this is just one sentence on conservation is the glass domes on clocks they were cleaned like you clean the surto here and then we put them under domes if we have the money to afford those because they cost a little fortune and so we hope to protect them for the next generation also before and after this is a bench we found in a secondary room we were able to retract the bench into the gallery so we wanted to restore it and we choose textiles in order to replace this rather tetey and worn wool velvet with something more sparkling which corresponded to the color scheme which was described in the room where this bench had been placed originally so again we use archivals here again from a silk weaver in in Lyon and they have these archives now partially in Paris and they bring them also if you want them to see and to study and that allows you to recreate something of that scheme here even a more flag-fragrant example this is an armchair appalled certain in the 1960s this is the same armchair after the process of our conservation with a silk which is based on a document of which there's a little swap preserved in the Mobile Nationale and this is a visit in the attics of the Château de Fontainebleau where they have the entire piece from the period and when you take the cushion of the Berger off you see this kind of very loud color schemes with the raspberry crush raspberry and the kind of you know poisoning green confronted and nobody is shocked by this in the Empire period this is the color scheme you know so you can prove these colors we go back to the original document and that's the same thing in Paris it's dispersed in different buildings here you have it right concentrated in New York on Fifth Avenue between this institution and the Metropolitan Museum there's quite a lot of wonderful archivals to to thrive from and to to get inspired and to know how it really looked like now the graphic document is something which you are very interested in and which I will focus now in the letter of my presentation we have motives like these griffins and this is just a house in the Marais and they're very narrow streets so you have to be walking a little bit like a dream walker to see these wonderful things but you have them in a porch of a house from the 1790s then you have them on a consult table in the Hotel Boarnet those kind of sphinx with the wings and then you find them also in a model for fire dogs which is in this building in the drawings and prints collection so it's the continuity of motives in France and in French language of ornament which is so nice to follow up from a small domestic object like a fire dog for which of course we don't have really used today but they were very sensible at that and meaningful at that time up to the big to the porch of a house or to the console table in the Hotel Boarnet another element which is very interesting and which allows to justify the importance of a collection such as the one we're in here is a small element when you look this is a desk a forefront desk by Bernard Molitor a cabinet maker whom I made my PhD at 25 years ago and there is this little palmet on the corner and you look at the website of the collection and there is the shift collection of bronze mounds and fragments of mounds and you find exactly that mount here in the collection which is very amazing so when we put our energies together we can find the original mount isolated here but still very meaningful you look at the French piece of furniture it's put into context it's very senseful on the piece of furniture and then when you go further and you study fashion newspapers as they're also kept in New York and especially also in this building you can even find that piece which allows you with a date to give it a date of creation so this is how the art historian who's not only the purely intellectual working from the written word but who's also looking with his eyes and I'll call it there's a German word of the school to learn how to see this is what is very important when you're an art historian today and with the possibility of digitalization these collections which were hidden for hundred years in boxes and hardly anybody knew what was in the Coupier Yule now we can use this new instrument but not to do tweets or feces or whatever but actually to work you know and it's very interesting what this institution is doing and using digital media in a very didactic and a very inventive way so I think we can learn from what is happening here in a very positive and inspiring way which is actually makes you happy when you see what you what you can do with these media apart from doing all the nonsense which is happening to you know and which is kind of troublesome for somebody of my age now having an ornament and I want to show this to you it's very interesting this is at the Coupier Yule and it's actually the same mount like on this console table by Molitor which is in a castle palace probably bought by Jerome Bonaparte and the whole thing comes from a cameo from Rome which is an Italia which was cast and plaster that's how it made its way out of Italy to a European collector then to a bronze maker and then on to a piece of furniture and even on to a door of a hotel particulier okay so this is this incredible transition and you know transformation of an ornament which comes from a medal in Rome and ends on a console table in castle or on the porch of a Paris Paris Street and I can tell you again you you don't necessarily see this when you walk a drive with a taxi through the Paris Street it's just very interesting same thing with this amazing motive which is also coming from the shift collection it's in your digital database I found it it's the same Medusa head which you have on the side of the same Molitor table you have it also on the very strange apron which serves as an extra support of a daybed which is much too long to not have that apron there because it would crash a very nice federal style daybed by Molitor and you have it on two doors and the building which was built during the French Revolution in the Chaucer d'Antin in Paris probably known by the ladies here from the gallery Lafayette which are just around the corner okay so when you do an art historic walk you would find in the same district those amazing revolutionary doors and it's always the same motive you know which kind of travels through different media and is assimilated in different way same thing for those heads this is again the shift collection in this house in this building and the same head in context used on a chest of drawers by Molitor from the Empire period so it's interesting the fragment and how was it used and this is very interesting but we can see the sur-tour de table on a table up there because it gives you some sense of what these things were used for this is the porch of the hotel of the Legion of Honor hotel the Psalms in the Rue de Lille in Paris and here you have the same kind of victory ladies on a chest of drawers on the Freestraw by Molitor so the same ornament used in different ways and of course that is a period which expresses itself and the Empire period was very clear and very definite about that language that becomes very evident in the big salon of the house which is the salon of the Four Seasons which was restored with the apostle Xavier Bonnet whom I just want to pay an homage because we lost him some weeks ago at the very young age of 48 and he was a very fantastic apostle who worked very very careful and very close with us in order to reconstruct those incredible draperies and hangings and he also we also conceived that color scheme which you have to imagine was pinkish and cream colored before we started our restoration work okay so you can see in how far with the documentation and with sondage on the walls we could we were able to recreate that fantastic unity of of room of calf decoration of painted decoration on which I could speak here for hours on this one picture and there's also a student from the program in the room who made her master on this and she writes since about a year about that palace and the iconography and I will just give you a little snap of that for the lecture we were able to retract something like this porch here which you see with these affronted lines to engraving by Persian Fontaine in a book which was published in 1798 and that depicts a porch of a house from the Renaissance in Rome which is actually existing so we see that architects and designers draw from history they take things and this is a Renaissance porch which is itself inspired by antiquity and then gets transformed in Paris into a neo antique palace into the porch of a drawing room so it's the idea is there and then transformed by different generations this is the amazing upholstery and we see that incredible coherence of the woven decor of the silk with the carved and gilded decoration on the walls recreated again by Saville Bonnet when we look at drawings we have very audacious designs by Persian Fontaine with this chair which was documented to be placed in the bathroom in 1817 the inventory which leads our restoration campaign and so we put it back there but we see those things figures which support the armrests very elegantly and we see them in drawings by Persie which are very weak drawings but they are the original drawings and we have them but we see them also in those wonderful watercolor drawings of a series of unique watercolors an album which was split between the Coupe du Huit and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs so half of the drawings is here and the other half is in Paris and they're currently the curators actually working together digitally putting the album back together which is very interesting because this is a means of work we wouldn't have had before and I don't need to insist everybody who's in the field can just see that everything we see here the textile the braid the coloring the woodwork everything is giving us very wonderful information and it allows us to assess these documents as invaluable sources for research and for restoration work the same can be said of fireplaces we have those very luxurious fireplaces in the Hotel Boine such as the one in the Green Salon with the victories we saw already earlier on and then we know that even at the world exhibitions or that the big industrial exhibitions of the time these fireplaces would be commented on and already depicted so some of those give authors for the objects because the objects have numbers and so we can identify makers often with this wonderful documentation we have a special example of a fireplace which was printed in about 1810 to be made by Eugène de Boine and we have the reduced version of that fireplace which is the very one surviving in the Hotel Boine okay so that was about to go to the skip and we were able to salvage its last moment and it has bronzes by Foucher and was set up in the current figuration by the architect Hitoff who was in charge of the building in 1820 and did certain transformations the rooms in the Hotel Boine in a very unique way display the taste of the very precise period between 1803 and 1806 when Eugène de Boine was called to be vice king of Italy on the other hand Napoleon was so offended to or by the money he had spent on restoring his house and establishing it has his Paris residence that it he sequestered it from him and used it as a guest house for when you know foreign guests came to Paris and so Eugène de Boine hardly ever lived in his house when there was starting to be the decline of Napoleon's star of victory we know that he intended to come back to Paris but then after the hundred days and the return of Napoleon in 1815 it was clear that he could never return to Paris and then he had to sell the building to the king of Prussia now motives I want to continue to amuse you with some Pompeii and dances and some in very daring positions and I can tell you that these positions I hope I don't offend any anybody's feelings but this is only possible in France until 1805 afterwards this disappears and it's very interesting to see what you can see at that period we have lots of these dances and of course they have fantastically integrated into the decoration this is the four seasons drawing room in course of restoration in due course of restoration and the wonderful thing is you have these figures in the interior decorations on the doors but also on the furniture this is the side panel of a commode by Jacob Frère set with glass on the sides and the glass is actually protecting silk paintings paintings on silk which are affixed with a sugar glue of a very strange composition under those panels okay we had some repair so we know more about those panels now we did some analysis of the glue but the style is just the same as what I showed you earlier on and this unity of style can be topped with the music room where we have these wonderful dances in monumental and I was very delighted to be able to track that back to an even earlier example in the dining room of the chateau of Saint-Claude which was a kind of cottage for the summer at the doorstep of Paris which Josephine and Napoleon had restored for their own use in 182 and we have documented this engraving with the muse dancing over the fireplace in the dining room and in his own music room Eugène paints all the walls had paint painted all the walls with these wonderful canvases of of ladies dancing motifs of that style do only also exist in different variety on furniture and I would like to just quote we have this incredible bronze upstairs from the shift collection and here it is in situ as you should imagine it on a piece of furniture it's again a fragment and recontextualization this type of figure of a denuded female holding a veil or some other object in her hand was very fancy at the time and would be visible in paintings and and also in bronze and but also in 3d in these incredible figures made by an artist to impress Napoleon now when we come to smaller objects I want to come back to this dancer which we see here on the base of one of the candlestands of the sur-tude table upstairs and I would like make a little exercise with you to exemplify some of those motifs so we have the dancer and we have the swan now the swan was very important in the hotel buane and was very much liked by Josephine Bonaparte here in an allegory which is by Gerard in the Metropolitan Museum and she like birds exotic birds and the swan so the swan who was in no way a female symbol at that time but also a polinian symbol and such a way a male symbol is all over the place in the hotel buane so there's the unity of the calf decoration the painted decoration and the furniture where you have the swan okay and this is a wonderful design in the Metropolitan which shows a swan just in the same way as we see it in the in the hotel buane this are more swan seats hotel buane elizé palace and my maison and in the Persie album of the museum of the Metropolitan Museum the original design by the architect so all this is put together and shows you the importance of those oh sorry this printed documents are drawing in order to assess the original and the objects now we have these figures on the edge of the balustrade of the sur-tude those represent like seasons or months and they're little ladies kind of you know hardly dressed a little bit like the dances as I showed you before and I was very astonished during the work on my PhD to have these cabinets to find these cabinets with a wonderful female figures standing right rigidly at the corner and they remind me of those figures so that I thought that they might intended originally have been intended for a sur-tude a table and then be used in a different way for a piece of furniture we have also the figure of children at the time here is a cupid painted by persie after drawing by persie on a door panel of the hotel buane this is from the shift collection piece of bronze from piece of furniture and you have a little cupid here just of the same configuration on a clock and this is again a big sur-tude either the big sur-tude in in what is the manner and it's full glory where you have the same swans as we have them upstairs and I want to use to show you an element which is difficult to see in this picture but there is a swan which you see two swans around a fumigating vessel and you find them on the table set at what is the manner but you find the same mount as a door as a key escutcheon on a cabinet by Molitor so here it is in big this are two swans and here it is on the cabinet rather difficult to be recognized but what I want to show you with this is that these bronze makers used the ornament versatile in different ways in a different modus it could be used as a as a purely ornament purely decorative ornament on the pedestal of a fruit basket and it would become a key escutcheon for a cabinet now to mere was a very prolific and he did incredibly big things and and different things so sometimes he signed objects such a pedestal with his signature on it and often he didn't so this is a bat which was sold at Christie's in New York which belonged to the Duke of Hamilton at some point and it's probably the most impressive bat from the Empire period you can imagine with these kind of figures male figures in cast bronze of the size of a four-year-old child you know it's pretty amazing and they're really their 3d sculpture he also did for several those amazing tables and that is very valuable because the archives of several tell that to me I was the one who was in charge of mounting these table tops so that is very important something also very interesting is the decoration of theatres and we have drawings for theatre settings and this was found by a French colleague at the who's working at the Louvre the decoration of Psyche a theatre play 1792 and then the bat in the Palais Boirnay is picking up on that theatre decoration with these double columns which are really probably the biggest bat of that period in a private mention to be preserved the textiles here not being preserved yet they're still from the 1950s we can go as far as making relations between drawings and figures on the painted wooden elements in the bedroom and we also see the wonderful cohesion of the carved and gilded decoration and the woven decoration which at the time of Oisin de Boirnay and the first gown the first decoration was actually embroidered on silk when we recreated that we realized that it would be too expensive to re embroider all the silks for 24 seats in a room so we had it woven in two different colors of shades of silk now what is interesting with this ornament and this is just the next course to finish is that very from very soon on that symmetric and very systematic empire design would become inspirative for manufacturers and for industrial production so this is Glenica Palace in on the border of Potsdam in Berlin and what is very interesting what you see here is no longer cast stone nor cast plaster it's embossed zinc and that is very interesting what you do if you don't have the means of the French and of the French craftsmanship and your industrial nation in poor pressure you just print it in metal and it looks very good even after 200 years so this is the inspiration of the ornament of course the systematic ornament of the symmetry of the empire period gave itself very well to do such wonderful experimentations and that continues with bending which you can just find the same in the hotel Boirnay with a building which I randomly photographed on one of my trips through North America you know like Philadelphia or Hartford Connecticut you can find these incredible Victorian buildings where they did those very sober decorations which are purely inspired by Pesie and Fontaine same designers who designed you know your surtout but they casted an iron you know because it's cheaper and it's more durable so I hope I've given you a kind of insight into the relation between documents and the realization of those creations and I will finish just with some views of the Hotel de Boirnay as it is appearing today after 10 years of work intense negotiations with the Foreign Office in order to get the budgets and to be allowed to do the right job in the sense of the heritage and the cultural value of such a building and I could speak a whole seminar on that building in order to exemplify the wonderful ornamentation and the relation between documents and graphic documents which created that wonderful ensemble and I hope I've given you a little insight of our work which we published like two years ago in the book of on the Steyl Ampere which was a big achievement after the research and I hope you will enjoy this very nice exhibition which is upstairs. I didn't really make the twist to the presentation of the things from the modern times and I really enjoy to discover upstairs the work of Margarita Morgan Time which I ignored and I finished my lecture with the Ingo Maurer Chandelier which is another fancy of our lordship who bought that after he saw the great exhibition in Philadelphia some years ago and again a great success with the audience at what is the manner and works pretty well with the blue paneling in the blue dining room. It makes kind of a wonderful clash. So I thank you very much for your attention and we can now we still have some minutes for questions and answers so I stay here and I don't know if you have a mic or you want to go around with it. So we can have some questions. Thank you very much for your attention. Is the Hotel Borne open to the public for visiting or is it only sort of for people going to the embassy website and they have a tour guide and you can book your tour. That's part of the arrangement. There's an exchange as a cultural program and it's pretty open. So yeah. Yes please. When you showed the dancing women maybe I misunderstood I thought you said something about that they they couldn't be that way after 1805. Yeah they kind of nudity is something which was very much possible between 1795 97 and 1805. And then everything becomes a little bit more prodigy again. So that's what what caused was there something that caused that transition. It's kind of like what you know you have waves of tolerance and conservatism kicking in from time to time again. So that explains changes in in habitat and in moses. You know it's like it's like when we were also being naked in the 80s and today who would do it. You know I mean it's like apart from the fact that we got older you know but you know it's a real change of culture. You know and that's the same because you read these books and you wouldn't believe what you read how French ballrooms were acting what was happening. You know so yeah that was a big change. Good. Thank you very much.