French fashion designer Pierre Balmain was born on May 18, 1914. He was studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1934 when Edward Molyneux offered him a job. He had already undertaken some freelance design drawing work for Robert Piguet in previous years, but his post at Molyneux saw him abandon his studies. After five years, he joined Lucien Lelong and worked throughout the war alongside Christian Dior.
Balmain opened his own Maison right after the war ended in 1945, a veritable year of crisis for the haute couture industry. Yet his first collection was one of the few that managed to attract favorable reviews that year – the most famous and arguably most influential one written by his friend American writer Gertrude Stein. He showcased long cloche skirts and small waists, hinting at things to come. His elegant yet wearable clothes gained him immediate success and celebrity customers, including the Duchess of Windsor.
The house became known for its daytime classics, but especially for its opulent and luxurious evening gowns that earned him the press title “the king of French fashion,” or “le roi de la mode français” (luh rwa duh lah mowed frahn-seh). Like those of his contemporaries, his designs had a sculpural quality that presented an uber-feminine essence. His use of luxurious silk brocades gave the dresses a shape of their own. He offset their stiffness through layering with delicate laces and with the resplendent finery and exquisite embroideries for which the Maison was most famous. His sophistication was particularly popular in the United States, where his designs were felt to embody Parisian ladylike chic – the perfect 1950s jolie madame. He capitalized on this reputation by selling prêt-à-porter lines in North America that earned him the Neiman Marcus Fashion award in 1955.
By the 1960s, Balmain had started presenting more pared-down shapes in line with the current fashion. He continued to make extravagant evening wear for theater and movie productions, for Hollywood actresses, and most famously for Queen Sirikit of Thailand, who all continued to turn to him for gowns befitting award ceremonies or official occasions. While Balmain was no exceptional design innovator, his version of Parisian elegance summed up a decade, furthermore, his international outlook and early ventures in prêt-à-porter marked him out as a truly modern designer.
Fit for a Queen: Her Majesty Queen Sirkit’s Creations by Balmain (affiliate link)
Since armchair traveling is still all that we can currently do, I was delighted to go en coulisses, or backstage of the most beautiful fashion exhibit I’ve ever seen, the stunning seventieth anniversary Christian Dior at the Musée des Arts Décoratif from 2017. Available on Youtube, 
I have a very nice husband. Not long after we moved to the States in the mid-90s, I saw an article about an exhibit dedicated to Russian Imperial treasures. Having been fascinated by the Romanovs for many years – even our bedroom was festooned with fabric adorned with Faberge eggs – I naturally wanted to see this exhibit. The only small catch was that it was in Jackson, Mississippi, and we were in southern New Jersey. We decided to have a road trip, taking in a few other stops along the way.
The catalogue also highlighted the influence of French art on this northern Russian city. Peterhof, the palace built by Peter the Great, was built to rival Versailles. Catherine the Great imported artisans from all over Europe to train local craftsmen so that Russia could enjoy the same artistic and cultural adornments as other countries. Other pieces of the French decorative arts in the palaces had been diplomatic gifts, such as the tapestry given to Alexander I by Napoleon or the mirror given to an Empress by Louis XV. If you removed all the clocks, candelabras, mirrors, and furniture by French craftsmen, there would be a lot less glitz and glamor in the Palaces of St. Petersburg.
At the end of my summer job in Paris last hear, my team game me a lovely coffee table book, 
1. Art Nouveau was the name of the movement in France and Belgium, but similar styles appeared at much the same time throughout Europe and the United States under different names, such as Arts and Crafts, Berliner and Wiener Secession, and Jugendstil, In Spain, you can see the style in the fantastical architecture of Antoni Gaudi.
2. All of these styles shared certain hallmarks that can be traced back to Japanese prints: curving lines, forms inspired by plants, flattened perspective, sharply defined outlines, and fairly large swaths of colors. (Monet was a major collector of these. I remember seeing them displayed at his home, Giverny.) The curving lines are often described as “whiplash” and women’s hair is frequently shown in “macaroni” tendrils. Peacocks are a recurring theme.
3. Art Nouveau was perfect for the new medium of posters printed with a system of color separations. Many artists, like Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, and Steinlen, were kept busy creating art for advertising posters.
4. Although Art Nouveau was really only popular from about 1885 to 1905 and totally gone by the end of the Great War, it’s influence permeated the art world at the end of the 19th century. You can see elements of Art Nouveau in works by Gauguin, the Nabis, Edvard Munch, and Gustave Klimt, among many others. I’ve always loved Pointillism, and this style, too, was influenced by Art Nouveau. The book introduced me to a new (to me) pointillist, Theo van Rysselberghe of Ghent, whose work (above) is just so beautiful.
The book is set up as though Corrigan has invited you to a country weekend party at his home. You see the house as his guests would, touring the impressive hall and salon before traipsing out to the gardens, seeing which one of the fourteen guest rooms he has selected for you, having breakfast and so on through a magical country weekend. You can sense Corrigan at your elbow, regaling you with the history of the house and triumphs and travails of its restoration. His mantra is “comfortable elegance” in rooms that are genuinely used, not period showpieces.
Corrigan’s bid to return it to its glory as a private home was successful, but he had to follow strict guidelines in restoring the parts that were deemed historically significant. For example, some replica French doors were unacceptable because the mullions were a 1/4” wider than the originals. When it came to adding a kitchen, Corrigan had to build fake walls from which to hang the cabinetry in order to protect the 18th century boiserie (woodwork) from any damage.
My favorite room, Le Salon chinois, features rare painted panels depicting the artist’s highly exotic vision of China. The panels were hidden behind boards that had protected the room during its years as a hospital. Corrigan surmised that the Germans would have looted this treasure had they known it was there. And speaking of treasure, paintings from the Louvre were hidden beneath the stage of the château’s own theater to keep them safe during the Occupation.
Théodore Rousseau was born in Paris on April 15, 1812. This French landscape painter, hailed as the leader of the Barbizon school, came from a family with no connection to the art world. Rousseau developed a deep love of the countryside at an early age. After working briefly in a sawmill, he decided to take up landscape painting and trained with Joseph Rémond. The latter produced classical landscapes, however, and Rousseau’s naturalistic tendencies were better served by the study of foreign artists, such as Ruisdael and Constable. He adopted the practice of making sketches outdoor — a foretaste of Impressionism — although he still preferred to finish his paintings in the studio.
Rousseau’s favorite location was the Barbizon region, at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. By the late 1840s, this area had become the focus for a group of like-minded artists known as the Barbizon School. Headed by Rousseau, this circle included Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, and Millet. In the 1850s, Rousseau’s work achieved widespread recognition, fetching high prices, but he preferred to remain in Barbizon, campaigning to preserve the character of the forest. He died in his cottage on December 22, 1867, in the arms of fellow landscape artist Jean-François Millet.
I finished another book I’d been slowly working my way through, thanks to the necessity of staying at hime for social distancing. 
Théodore-Ernest Cognacq had to give up his education when his father died. He came to Paris and became a salesperson at the elegant department store “La Belle Héloïse.” When he was summarily fired for having made a simple error, he opened his own shop, which flopped. He set up a stall in one of the half-moons of the Pont-Neuf from which he sold linens and trimmings. He scraped and saved until he could once again open a shop, this time “La Samaritaine” and finally marry his sweetheart, another salesperson at “La Belle Héloïse,” Marie-Louise Jay. She had come to the capital as a teen from a rough life of poverty in the mountains.
In 1905, at the height of the Art Nouveau movement, Cognacq built a new building for “La Samaritaine” that was stunningly beautiful with an elaborate frieze in Egyptian motifs. It was within sight of his old stall on the bridge. (It closed in 2005 for restauration as it was actually becoming dangerous and is set to reopen in a new guise once we can all come out of our homes again.) He then built another store for his more expensive merchandise on the Grands Boulevards near the big competition of Printemps and Les Galeries Lafayette.
Cognacq also began to organize exhibitions of his art collection. He sought advice about what to buy and picked up some big name works, such as Canaletto and Tiepolo. The lovely Greuze, above, is on the jacket of the book and it my personal favorite in the museum. He developed the idea of founding an independent museum to house his collection after his death. Cognacq began to buy a lot from one particular dealer, some of which was quite good but much of which was simply mediocre. Was the dealer taking advantage of his client, now very old and almost blind, or did he simply make a LOT of very bad judgements? Who can say? The dealer even insisted on becoming the first head of Cognacq’s museum.
The catalogue described each of the 116 paintings in detail, giving some history and an opinion of the artistic merits of each piece. Quite often, the opinions were pretty harsh. Many paintings were dismissed as mediocre copies, erroneously attributed to a major artist. Some were by the “school of” or “student of” the artist, and thus not fakes, but certainly not the masterpieces that Cognacq thought he was buying. I guess the lessons that I learned were:
