The story
Inside the Louvre palace, in the wing that runs along the Rue de Rivoli, you can walk into the bedroom of a Paris couturière. Jeanne Lanvin, the fashion designer, had the decorator Armand-Albert Rateau furnish her apartment in 1924 and 1925, with furniture in patinated bronze, oak and gilded wood. When her house was demolished in 1965, the bedroom, the boudoir and the bathroom were taken apart and rebuilt here.
That is how the Musée des Arts Décoratifs works. It grew out of the Union centrale, a society founded in 1864 to bring good design into French industry, and after years in temporary homes it opened in the Pavillon de Marsan in 1905. Its galleries follow French interiors from the Middle Ages to today, through period rooms and long runs of furniture, ceramics, glass, wallpaper, toys, jewellery and fashion.
Paintings turn up here as part of that story, and some are unexpected. There is a small view by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, painted in Rome in 1807 when he was a prize-winning student at the French Academy, of the Casina of Raphael in the Villa Borghese gardens, seen from the Villa Medici. There are two portraits by him from the mid-1840s, of Queen Marie-Amélie, wife of King Louis-Philippe, and of Hélène of Mecklenburg, the widowed Duchess of Orléans. Nearby hangs a still life with red mullet painted in 1880 by James Ensor, the Belgian artist.
