Villa proud - Queen Alexandra and the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna at Hvidøre, circa 1908-11

 

These photographs are attributed to Mary Steen and Jens Johan Danielsen.

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Hvidøre is a villa at Klampenborg, just south of Bellevue Beach, on the Øresund coast north of Copenhagen.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, King John of Denmark built a royal residence at Hvidøre. The castle changed hands many times over the centuries, eventually being acquired by civil servant and diplomat Frederik Christian Bruun in 1871. He had the existing building demolished and commissioned architect Johan Schrøder to design a villa to be built in its place, meant for his family's use as a summer residence. Bruun died sixteen years later, at the age of only fifty-nine, but his widow kept Hvidøre until 1906.

In February 1906, King Christian IX's daughters, Queen Alexandra of the United Kingdom and Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia, acquired the building for use during their frequent visits to their native Denmark. They hired an aging Johan Schrøder to adapt and update the house with modern conveniences such as central heating, while the British firm Waring & Gillow was put in charge of most of the interior decorations. A tunnel was also dug to provide direct access to the beach, which belonged to the Hvidøre property, but was separated from it by the coastal road.

In the years that followed, the royal and imperial sisters generally stayed at Hvidøre in the autumn, from September until November. These visits sadly came to an end with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

In 1919, two years after the fall of the Romanov dynasty, the dowager empress was evacuated from revolutionary Russia, and eventually settled at Hvidøre. Joined by her daughter, the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, her son-in-law, and their two children, she remained there until her death in 1928.

In 1930, the Grand Duchess Olga and her older sister, the Grand Duchess Xenia, sold Hvidøre.

In 1932, Musse Scheel, the daughter of Frederik Christian Bruun, acquired her childhood home. She only lived in the house for two years, and in 1937 the Hvidøre estate was acquired by Novo Industry. Today it serves as a conference and training venue for the Novo Group.

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I can't help but comment on the retouching evident in many of these photographs, though much here is subtle enough to go without notice by most. As I've stated elsewhere, retouching of photographs came in at almost the same moment as photography itself. And it would be rare, indeed, beginning around the last third of the nineteenth century, to find images of aristocratic and royal ladies, especially, that didn't evince at least some degree of aesthetic "correction." Queen Alexandra was a fairly infamous user/abuser of retouching. There isn't evidence of a great amount of it in these images... but there is this very strange detail. (The full image is above.) Beyond the work done on the hem of her dress, her waist, and her hip, quite noticeable is the rather alarming lightening of her face and bust. Eerie. The retouchers of the time, suffering with such crude methods, could only dream about modern wonders like Photoshop...!

The king's children - three portraits by Jean Clouet, circa 1522

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Charlotte (23 October 1516, Château d'Amboise - 18 September 1524, Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye), the second child and second daughter of François I and his wife Claude. Following the death of her older sister, the three-year-old Louise, in 1518, Charlotte took her place as the fiancée of King Carlos I of Spain under the Treaty of Noyon, but she died of measles at the age of seven.

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François (28 February 1518, Château d'Amboise - 10 August 1536, Château de Tournon), the third child and first son of the king, was dauphin of France and, after 1524, duc de Bretagne. When he was eight years old, he and his younger brother, Henri, were exchanged as hostages for their father, François I, who had been captured at the Battle of Pavia. They would be hostages for three years. He later died at the age of eighteen, possibly from tuberculosis, though there was contemporary suspicion of poisoning.

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A later inscription misidentified the subject of the portrait as being Madeleine's older sister, Charlotte.

Madeleine (10 August 1520, Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye - 7 July 1537, Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh), the fifth child and third daughter of the royal couple. She briefly became Queen of Scotland as the first wife of King James V. The marriage was arranged in accordance with the Treaty of Rouen, and they were married at Notre-Dame de Paris in January 1537, despite reservations over her failing health. She died in July of that same year at the age of sixteen, only six months after the wedding and less than two months after arriving in Scotland, resulting in her poignant nickname, the "Summer Queen".

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Jean "Janet" Clouet (1480 - 1541), miniaturist and painter who worked in France during the High Renaissance. Likely a native of the Southern Netherlands - his actual name was probably Cloet - 1516 marks his first recorded appearance at the court of François I. He lived for some time in Tours, where he married the daughter of a jeweler; their son was the future court painter François Clouet. And in 1523 he was made a valet de chambre by the king and given a stipend. His brother, known as Clouet de Navarre, was in the service of the king's sister, Marguerite d'Angoulême.

Surpassing the "master" - selected interiors by Diego de Mora

 

Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Venice, 2018.

House in Fribourg, Switzerland, 2010. 

Passage in Newbridge House, Ireland, 2014.

I suppose it's bad form to start off an appreciation of one artist by disparaging another. Especially when the latter greatly influenced the former, who now "follows in his footsteps." When the two even knew each other. But I've just never liked that other artist's work.

Hatchlands Park, library, 2017.

House in Fribourg, Switzerland, 2011.

Paris, 2016.

Alexandre Serebriakoff (7 September 1907, Neskoutchnoye, in modern day Ukraine - 10 January 1995, Paris), was the twentieth century's most celebrated painter of interiors. He was born into a family of famous artists - his mother was Zinaïda Serebriakova; I don't like her work, either! - but, as a child, along with other family members, was forced to leave post-revolution Russia. As an adult, his starry clientele was drawn from the highest of Parisian and London high society, and the wealthy on both sides of the Atlantic. He portrayed the interiors of châteaux, mansions, luxe apartments, inhabited by the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Mr. and Mrs. Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, baron Alexis de Redé, Charles de Beistegui, the Rothschilds. 

Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Venice, 2021.

Chinese room in a French country house, 2011.

 Interior of a tower in Piedmont, 2013.

Much of his work is charming. But I can't help comparing his oeuvre with those who worked along similar lines, and in the country of his birth, pre-revolutionary Russia. I think foremost of Luigi Premazzi, Eduard Hau, and others who, during the nineteenth century, precisely portrayed the interiors of Romanov and aristocratic palaces and mansions. (In the meantime providing a quite priceless record, which proved indispensable after the devastation that would be dealt in following century.) They were able to achieve a quite remarkable exactitude, while still filling their watercolor portraits with atmospheric and realistic lighting, and a palpable feeling of life going on in the rooms portrayed. But I also think of other artists, more evocative in their work than exact. Painters like Stanislav Zhukovsky, whose paintings are quite loosely described, but still capture that same sense of grounded truth.

Paris, 2007.

Two views of the same room.

Based on the architecture and wall color, this is surely related to the two views of the room above.

But all of the above succeed where I feel Serebriakoff too often failed. His lighting is nearly always generalized, flat. There is no sunlight streaming in, no feeling of LIFE in his work. But the thing that most disturbs me is how often his perspective is off, scale is confused. And the way, especially, furniture so frequently does not sit correctly on the visual plane; a chair will be seen to be leaning, its cushion looking ready to slide off onto the floor. Some apologists might make the argument that these "glitches" are whimsical, that it was a stylistic choice. But I really think he just got it wrong. And therefore I really don't think he earns the praise heaped upon his work, his status as a twentieth century "master."

2011. Two more views of the house in Fribourg, Switzerland, seen above in the first and second sections.

2006.

Two rooms in a French country house, 2007. 

On the other hand... I definitely feel that this contemporary artist working in interiors, Diego de Mora, is a worthy successor to Premazzi, Hau, et al. I've been able to find NOTHING about this artist other than what little he includes on his website - Views of Interiors.  - and on his Instagram page, but I admire his work tremendously. 

From his website: 

Young Diego de Mora met Serebriakoff when he was a very old man, in his studio in Paris, and was soon producing his own paintings of interiors with commissions ranging from the Royal Palace in Madrid to a ski club in St Moritz, from an Ottoman house on the Bosphorus to a Georgian house on Green Park, from a harness room in Extremadura to an Art Déco bathroom in Paris.

Apsley House, Striped Room, 2019.

Château d’Ussé, 2010.

Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Venice, 2021.

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And then... late in the game, I discovered that the artist is properly and more fully addressed as Diego de Mora-Figueroa Iturbe, 8th Marqués de Saavedra (13 November 1967, Cádiz). Married to Alejandra María de Salinas Harnden in 2002, they had a son and daughter together before divorcing in 2014.