THE SUMMER FAIR: OF COURTS AND COURTESANS

I’ve always loved the summer fair at Olympia because of the endless cultural and artistic surprises it reveals to sharp eyes.  There’s never any overall ‘look’ – that would be boring.  Just a cornucopia of great and decorative works of art spread across the centuries.
	Courts of Imperial China The private lives of the courts of Imperial China are always well represented at Olympia.  Vanderven and Vanderven for instance will show an extremely rare plaster figure of one of those dignitaries that ruled China, and Jacqueline Simcox has museum quality Chinese silk tapestries, embroideries and brocades dating from the 15th to the 19th Century, made for the Chinese court and aristocracy.  Think the Forbidden City and the setting for that superb Chinese novel of courtly love and longing The Red Room.
	… and Europe Carlton Hobbs always has amazing pieces and he is not going to disappoint this summer.  A pair of tables from the Palazzo Colonna for instance are, by family tradition, believed to have been designed by that pin-up boy of the Grand Tour, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose views of Ancient Rome were the ‘been there’ souvenirs brought home by aristocratic tourists in the late 18th Century.  And Hobbs has got another Grand Tourist piece.  It’s German, it’s 18th Century and it’s a metamorphic secretaire disguised in cork – wait for it – to appear to be a ruin.  O heaven! Old-school courtesans had fabulous taste;  think Madame de Pompadour for a start.  Pelham Galleries proves my point with their fabulous courtesan’s bed.  It’s attributed to Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and it is believed to have been supplied to Marie-Madeleine Guimard, the leading ballerina (and other things) of the Paris Opera during the reign of Louis XVI.  Marie-Madeleine was painted by Fragonard and Ledoux designed her impossibly grand house in the Chaussee d’Antin where she entertained lovers such as the Prince de Soubise on a one-to-one basis and, in the theatre, 500 spectators at a time.  What a woman!  What a bed!