CIRCA 1820-40, PROBABLY RUSSIAN

Anna Thomson Dodge (1871-1970) was a leading patron of the arts in Detroit and during the 1930s procured what was considered to be one of the most distinguished and extensive groups of French decorative arts in any American private collection or museum. After her death, the contents her magnificent Music Room at Rose Terrace on the Grosse Pointe Farms estate, Michigan was given to The Detroit Institute of Arts, and the rest of the contents was dispersed at the seminal auction at Christie’s, London in June 1971.
In 1920, after the unexpected death of her husband Horace Elgin Dodge (1868-1920), Mrs. Dodge found herself in command of an enormous fortune amassed from his automobile manufacturing frm Dodge Brothers Company. With encouragement from her close friend Eva Storesbury, the distinguished Philadelphia and Palm Beach hostess and collector of French decorative arts, and her new husband, the former actor Hugh Dillman (1865-1956) she commissioned what was to be the costliest mansion ever to be built in Detroit, Rose Terrace.
Built in the Louis XVI style, Mrs. Dodge’s ambitious vision was modelled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Her architect Horace Trumbauer (1868-1938) had previously built the impressive mansion Miramar, Newport on Rhode Island for George D. Widener, but Rose Terrace was to be on an even grander scale. Unlike most wealthy Americans who embarked upon similar projects in the early 20th century, Mrs. Dodge was determined to fill Rose Terrace with genuine 18th century French decorative arts, rather than 19th century reproductions. She was adamant she was to have the very best possible, and therefore was drawn to pieces with impeccable provenance, made by the greatest craftsmen of the day. Many of the pieces were commissioned by the French, Russian or Polish royalty, for example, the ormolu-mounted jewel coffer adorned with Sèvres porcelain plaques, a masterpiece by the ébéniste Martin Carlin, was a wedding present from Friederike Sophie Dorothea, Duchess of Württemberg, to her daughter Maria Feodorovna upon her marriage in 1776 to Paul I, Grand Duke and later Tsar of Russia.
The majority of these significant purchases were made as a result of her close relationship with the renowned English art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869-1939), who sourced a number of important pieces from Russia in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In a letter dated 13 November 1931, Duveen wrote to Mrs. Dodge: ‘You will have been told of my purchases made last summer in Russia from the Emperor’s and Pavlovsk Palaces, and I am looking forward to the pleasure of showing them to you upon your return to America’. Other pieces with a Russian connection include a bureau plat said to have been made for Catherine the Great. Theodore Dell asserted that these Duveen sourced acquisitions were ‘far superior to those [Mrs. Dodge] had bought in Paris on her own or through Alavoine [her designers], and they gave her collection its special eminence’ (The Dodge Collection of Eighteenth-Century French and English-Art in The Detroit Institute of Arts, New York, 2002, p. 28).
Despite wishing to gift the entire collection at Rose Terrace to the Detroit Institute of Arts, without a supporting endowment to maintain the property, the museum was forced to decline. The contents were dispersed in 1971 and Rose Terrace was demolished in 1976.