It is not always easy to separate my collector’s persona from the decorator’s one but it is a necessary choice if one does not want to turn one’s home into a museum. We want our home to be a liveable and comfortable space, which is not a quality we associate with a museum even if it is a recreation of an actual living space, such as a royal palace or a private château.
Home v. Museum
When walking through the gorgeous apartments of Blenheim Place, Hatfield and Burleigh Houses, Osterley, Syon, Kenwood Houses, Houghton Hall, the nearby Windsor Castle, Potsdam palaces and many magnificent châteaux and hôtels particuliers in France and other more or less spectacular private residences turned into museums, I often found myself wondering what it would feel like to actually live there. In many cases I found that they lacked the essential qualities that we associate with home, such as coziness and intimacy.
All those incredibly high ceilings, endless enfilades of rooms on a single axis, with inevitable draughts, impossible to property heat in winter. I could easily sympathise with Louis XV or Marie Antoinette, who preferred much smaller and intimate spaces of private apartments or Petit Trianon to the cold grandeur of the Versailles Palace (or château as the French call it).
And those marvellous objects filling those spaces, furniture, tapestries, paintings, vases and mirrors, that I coveted as a collector, as beautiful as they were to behold, were also too precious and fragile to be used in everyday life. So they were cordoned off from visitors to prevent them from touching or God forbid sitting on them to preserve their integrity and looks for as long as possible.
Well, if I were not one of the thousands of paying visitors but the actual owner of the place which would not be open to public, I asked myself, would I act differently? Would I allow my guests with a glass of champagne or a cocktail to relax in 18th century armchairs and sofas upholstered in beautiful silks?
Or even if I did, would I feel quite at ease myself? Or would I watch them closely and nervously, while trying to look perfectly relaxed myself, lest they spill the contents of their glasses on the precious fabric or the beautiful Savonnerie carpets? And when some guest actually does so, with what happens to be red wine, and apologises (assuming they do), would I reassure them by saying “oh, don’t worry, it’s only the last surviving piece of Madame Dubarry’s boudoir set”?
Of course, lecturing my guests on the need to treat these objects with utmost care or just extolling their historical and cultural value would completely kill my image of a well-bred, good-mannered and open-minded chatelain and could ruin the party.
So as much as I could be inspired by the exquisite beauty of those grand interiors, I would not attempt to recreate them at my home using the authentic pieces of furniture, rugs or carpets dating to centuries ago. They belong in a museum. My home is not a museum, even if contains some of those pieces. I could use bits of original items like paintings, tapestries, mirrors or maps, because as a passionate collector I want to be able to enjoy their sight and show them to my guests.
Blenheim Palace, Woodstock
But their authenticity is not a condition for my home to be beautiful and comfortable, as well as unique and amazing, expressing my taste and aesthetic preferences, or even a bit of acquired English eccentricity.
Authentic v. Fake
The term “fake”, either as a noun or as an adjective, is not a direct antonym of the word “authentic”. While the notion of authenticity is rather fluid and ambivalent, the notion of “fake” (like forgery) necessarily carries the connotation of deliberate deceit and fraud, as an intent to pass something for what it is not with the view to gaining unlawful profit. When something is made with the intention of recreating the original splendour of an old object either lost or damaged, it is not a fake, while one could argue on the degree of its authenticity.
Hotel de la Marine, Paris
Indeed, the authenticity of a work of art may be relative. When a very decrepit object, like a painting, is restored to look new based on some second-hand or disputable records as to what it looked like originally, its authenticity may be subject to debate, mainly among experts and art historians. For the rest of us, who did not have an opportunity to see the original piece, it is simply a question of perception and trust. Do we like it or not? Do we trust the person or organization that restored it?
I shall cite just two simple examples.
First, it is a well-known fact that the historic city of Dresden, the real jewel of Saxony, was virtually completely destroyed by the allies’ bombardment at the end of the Second World War. Leaving aside the question as to whether this was morally or militarily justified, the practical question after the war was whether to restore it from ruins. The question having been answered in the affirmative (although the answer was not necessarily so obvious), what we can see now is a total recreation with the use of modern materials based on surviving records, including fortunately photography. No one pretends otherwise, the fact being of common knowledge. So it is not a “fake” in the sense described above. But is it authentic?
Second, it is also a (slightly less) known fact that the antic architecture and statuary, including ancient Greek ones that we can still admire in Greece, North Africa, Turkey and the British (https://www.britishmuseum.org/) and other museums (including the famous or infamous Parthenon friezes) in their various conditions of preservation, were originally painted in colours. Virtually no colours have survived, and we are used to seeing them in monochrome as if stripped of clothing, “naked”.
Part of the Parthenon frieze in the British Museum, London
Apparently, there are no reliable records of what they looked like in all their original colours. There is generally no doubt as to their “authenticity” such as they are. But if somebody tried to restore them to their original colours based on second-hand records or through “imaginative reconstruction”, would they become more or less authentic?
I leave both questions unanswered because there is no obvious answer. It is partly a matter of how convincing and beautiful the restored or recreated object is and whether it conforms to our ideas of what it must have looked like originally based on other analogous objects and records (if any). I would personally struggle to accept the authenticity of repainted Greek statues because there is nothing to compare them to. I might perhaps be impressed visually by the result. Or I might not, it remains to be seen. I think it is an experiment worth attempting for the sake of experiment.
But I guess we would still prefer to enjoy them “naked” white, the colour of marble, because it is the way we have seen them for centuries. It has defined our notion of beauty as applied to statuary, which implies a fundamental difference between statuary and painting, the difference that apparently the ancient Greeks did not have, or at least such an antithesis. For us, it has in fact become an element of authenticity of antique statues. Painting them now would not be unlike colouring monochrome prints post-factum (see Engraving and Photography: continuity or disruption?) with all the inevitable arbitrariness that it involves.
Conclusion: Originality v. Authenticity
All this is to emphasize the relativity and ambivalence of the notion of authenticity, which depends on so many various objective and subjective factors.
I was glad to read in the recent article in the Sunday Times https://www.thetimes.com (published on 28 July 2024) by Will Gompertz, the director of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London (https://www.soane.org/), that he also thinks there is nothing inherently wrong with replacing an original with a high-quality copy.
He pointed to a rather common practice of even leading museums to display high-quality copies (or facsimile as he calls them) instead of originals, be it monochrome prints or colour oil paintings. The modern digital technologies allow to replicate not only the colours but also the texture of the latter, so that even a specialist would have hard time telling a copy from the original. Tellingly, his article is entitled “Could you spot a fake painting? Even experts are struggling”. He goes on to draw a distinction between “fake” and “facsimile” largely along the same lines as I suggested above for the meaning of “fake” (i.e. based on the underlying intent).
Well, Mr. Gomperts was referring mainly to works of art displayed in museums and art galleries. When it comes to interior decoration, the difference between “fake” and “authentic” is even more muddled. I think originality is a more relevant term.
As a collector, of course, I care about the authenticity of the objects I acquire for my collection, which is also a question of the adequacy of the price I pay for them (no one wants to overpay for anything). As a decorator, authenticity is a secondary consideration for me, subordinate to the notions of originality, harmony and comfort. When I say “originality”, which is a multivalent word in English, I refer to the notions of creativity and imagination, rather than an item being original v. copy.
I have absolutely no problem using modern fabric to upholster “original” or “style of” pieces of furniture or to put up on my walls copies of “original” prints, as long as they are of excellent quality, both of which I do. So if an inquisitive guest interrogates me on the authenticity of a piece in my home, I can easily be elusive and answer the question with a question: “well, what do you think?” Or I could be mischievous and call a copy the original and vice versa. Let them figure it out!
