Wall Panel with Rose Bush and Three Birds
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One of a set of six wall panels decorated with flowers. A slim rose bush grows up from a patch of ground, with plants on either side. The roses are pale pink. Two finches perch on the top of the bush and another one flies in the air just above.
Summer flowers and birds decorate eleven canvas panels attributed to the French ornamentalist painter, Alexis Peyrotte. Six panels show rose bushes on simple patches of ground (acc. nos 140.1996.1-6). Five are more complex, depicting birds surrounded by verdant cartouches (acc. nos 161.1996.1-5). Panels of elegant fowl, plants and rose bushes are combined in a similar fashion in a design for an octagonal boudoir traditionally attributed to Peyrotte, also at Waddesdon (acc. no. 1881).
The sinuous roses in this panel share some of the qualities of Peyrotte's flowing chalk studies of flowers (e.g. see Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. no. 61.557.3). Although the panel lacks the Rococo design elements Peyrotte included in his drawings. Similar little birds perched on branches appear in a painting by Peyrotte set into a screen (Waddesdon Manor, acc. no. 2168).
As an interior decorator working in the Rococo idiom, Alexis Peyrotte contributed to several royal schemes: at Choisy-le-roi and Versaille in the 1740s, and at Fontainebleau, where he painted floral elements and allegorical trophies in the Salle du Conseil in 1753, alongside Carle van Loo. The panels at Waddesdon show the influence of the restrained neo-classical taste fashionable from the late 1750s on. The Waddesdon drawing (acc. no. 1881) has a similar transitional feel, and may have been a reworking of one of Peyrotte's decorative schemes made in the late 1760s or early 1770s. It was around this time when Jean-Baptiste Pillement's designs of fantastical birds and flowers became popular, although Pillement used chinoserie patterns to organise his designs, a feature lacking in the Waddesdon panels.
Peyrotte also produced satirical paintings of monkeys and birds, including turkeys, similar to those featured in some of the panels at Waddesdon. Peyrotte's gouache of a monkey dressed as a Franciscan monk preaching to turkeys with a fox looking on, although very different in tone, shows a similar understanding of the decorative qualities of these birds (Sotheby's, New York, 25 January 2006, lot 145).
The panels originally decorated Dorothy de Rothschild's bedroom in St James's Place, London, bought around 1930, when they were considered to be in the style of Pillement. They were moved to Waddesdon in the mid 1990s. All of them except two concave panels (acc. nos 140.1996.5-6) have been installed into the panelling of the East Boudoir in the Bachelors' Wing. Conservation work carried out in 1997 revealed that the canvas surrounding the central designs had layers of different coloured paint, indicating that the panels had been used in several different interiors.
Phillippa Plock, 2012
Dimensions (mm) / weight (mg)
1990 x 680
1980 x 652 - sight
Signature & date
not signed or dated
Provenance
- Acquired by James de Rothschild (b.1878, d.1957) for 23 St James's Place, London; inherited by his wife Dorothy de Rothschild (b.1895, d.1988); then to a Rothschild Family Trust.
Collection
- Waddesdon (Rothschild Family)
- On loan since 1996