![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() But the central work in that display, a piano made between 1884-87 decorated lavishly under Alma-Tadema’s supervision, is an instrument that tells the story of the painter, his wealthy philanthropist client and a period in which excess was pursued and celebrated.Īlma-Tadema was already famous when he was approached in the 1880s by the railroad and insurance baron Henry Gurdon Marquand to decorate a music room for the massive house that Marquand was constructing ten blocks south of the newly founded Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the businessman was a benefactor and trustee. And reconstruct would be an exaggeration, since so few of the since-dispersed objects from the room are reunited here. “Orchestrating Elegance” doesn’t reconstruct the entire house, demolished in 1912, but just the elements of a music room. And now an exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts has put Alma-Tadema on view in a show that reassembles elements of a Gilded Age interior that the painter himself designed on the northwest corner of Madison Avenue and 68th Street in Manhattan. ![]()
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