Lot Essay
Madame Castaing (1896-1992) created the most influential decorating style to emerge in the post-war period. In 1941, in the darkest days of the War during the occupation, she opened her first antique shop in the Rue Cherche-Midi, but she is forever identified with unchanging black-painted premises at the corner of the Rue Jacob and the Rue Bonaparte in the heart of the Bohemian left bank quarter of Paris, where she lived and had her business from 1947.
The rather low-set windows of the shop revealed a negligently arranged interior, rather like a room from which the occupant has just departed. The tempting contents, re-inforcing the impression of a private living-room were not priced and Madame Castaing parted with them reluctantly, at very substantial prices. This did nothing to diminish their desirability in the eyes of her many devotees, whose rooms bear the stamp of her sure touch. She was proud to name Jean Cocteau among her patrons, and she moved in the inner circle of Parisian artistic life combining her reputation as an arbiter of taste with a more cerebral involvement, shared with her husband Marcellin, in supporting the Lithuanian Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine.
Madame Castaing invented the neo-nineteenth-century look, a mixture of Neo-classical, Beidermeier and Regency styles combined with judicious use of the capitonné upholstery of the Second Empire. She was responsible for making English mahogany chic, for showing the way to mix museum-quality antique pieces with the bibelots, lamps and cache-pots which were once to be found in markets. The effect was remote from either the austere scholarship of the English Regency Revival or the claustrophobic stage-setting of 'Victoriana'. 'I don't care about periods' she remarked, 'If a room is finished and there is no life to it, there is nothing there.' Her decorating philosophy was perfectly exemplified in her Parisian apartments - the remises, full of cobwebby and shrouded furniture, frozen like a series of sets at a moment when a card party has left the tables for elegantly presented refreshments - and at Lèvres, the Castaing's country property near Chârtres.
Her personal touches, such as flowered needlework or distinctively striped carpets, a particular colour of watery turquoise, known as 'Castaing Green', used with sky-blue, sienna, Pompeian red and grey and much black for emphasis, her own distinctive designs for low seating in quilted satin, and for lacquered coffee tables, and the shock factor of a piece of the frankly esoteric in the form of stag-horn furniture or a large painted steel chandelier - the effect both amusing and chic, reminiscent of de Beistegui's pre-war fantasies - these remained unchanged from her first forays into decorating in the mid-forties. She introduced new frames of reference into interior decorating, from her insistence that she must feel a total rapport with her patron, and her love of Balzac as a source of inspiration.
The drawings by Alexandre Serebriakoff, recording the hallway of Madame Ferenzi and Madame Castaing's stand at the 1948 Salon des Antiquaires, schemes from the early years of her career, document an important stage in the evolution of twentieth century interior decoration. These were made only shortly after Serebriakoff had recorded the delightful little Gothic-style country retreat of John Fowler, Madame Castaing's closest English counterpart
The rather low-set windows of the shop revealed a negligently arranged interior, rather like a room from which the occupant has just departed. The tempting contents, re-inforcing the impression of a private living-room were not priced and Madame Castaing parted with them reluctantly, at very substantial prices. This did nothing to diminish their desirability in the eyes of her many devotees, whose rooms bear the stamp of her sure touch. She was proud to name Jean Cocteau among her patrons, and she moved in the inner circle of Parisian artistic life combining her reputation as an arbiter of taste with a more cerebral involvement, shared with her husband Marcellin, in supporting the Lithuanian Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine.
Madame Castaing invented the neo-nineteenth-century look, a mixture of Neo-classical, Beidermeier and Regency styles combined with judicious use of the capitonné upholstery of the Second Empire. She was responsible for making English mahogany chic, for showing the way to mix museum-quality antique pieces with the bibelots, lamps and cache-pots which were once to be found in markets. The effect was remote from either the austere scholarship of the English Regency Revival or the claustrophobic stage-setting of 'Victoriana'. 'I don't care about periods' she remarked, 'If a room is finished and there is no life to it, there is nothing there.' Her decorating philosophy was perfectly exemplified in her Parisian apartments - the remises, full of cobwebby and shrouded furniture, frozen like a series of sets at a moment when a card party has left the tables for elegantly presented refreshments - and at Lèvres, the Castaing's country property near Chârtres.
Her personal touches, such as flowered needlework or distinctively striped carpets, a particular colour of watery turquoise, known as 'Castaing Green', used with sky-blue, sienna, Pompeian red and grey and much black for emphasis, her own distinctive designs for low seating in quilted satin, and for lacquered coffee tables, and the shock factor of a piece of the frankly esoteric in the form of stag-horn furniture or a large painted steel chandelier - the effect both amusing and chic, reminiscent of de Beistegui's pre-war fantasies - these remained unchanged from her first forays into decorating in the mid-forties. She introduced new frames of reference into interior decorating, from her insistence that she must feel a total rapport with her patron, and her love of Balzac as a source of inspiration.
The drawings by Alexandre Serebriakoff, recording the hallway of Madame Ferenzi and Madame Castaing's stand at the 1948 Salon des Antiquaires, schemes from the early years of her career, document an important stage in the evolution of twentieth century interior decoration. These were made only shortly after Serebriakoff had recorded the delightful little Gothic-style country retreat of John Fowler, Madame Castaing's closest English counterpart