View allAll Photos Tagged plaster
This plaster horse has been sitting along route 441 in Falmouth Pennsylvania for longer than I can remember. I'm pretty sure it was used in some kind of advertising. When I was a teenager somebody tried to pull it's head off. That's why it has a collar. That's where it was repaired.
Plaster cast angels. Painted with watered down Acrylic wash and over painted with irridescent orange paint but the camera hasn't picked it up very well.
You find all sorts of interesting things ripping out an old house, including many tufts of horse hair that they used to mix in with the plaster to strengthen it.
I'd assumed there would be lath underneath the plaster. Nope. The bricks underneath are the wall between our house and the next.
These plaster statues were made by injecting plaster into air pockets in the volcanic rock when excavating Pompeii. Basically the ash covered the city, the ash hardened, then over the course of hundreds of years the bodys decomposed and left air pockets. When the archaeologists would find an air pocket they would inject it with plaster, let it set, then break away all the ash. View this photo on my blog here.
a potter, dead in his workshop. This is an actual cast made from the vocanic ash that formed around his body during the eruption.
Tapestry Room from Croome Court, 1763–71
Plaster, pine, mahogany, bronze-gilt, marble, lapis lazuli, steel; wool and silk
Room after a design by Robert Adam; Tapestries and furniture covers manufactured by Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins; Low-warp workshop of Jacques Neilson; Tapestry general conception by Jacques Germain Soufflot of the Royal Gobelins Manufactory; Tapestry medallions after designs by François Boucher; Furniture and curtain cornices made by William Ince and John Mayhew for the firm Ince and Mayhew; Tapestry alentours and seat covers designed by Maurice Jacques and Louis Tessier; Chair rails and paneling carved by Sefferin Alken; Plaster ceiling and cornice moldings by Joseph Rose; Chimneypiece by John Wildsmith with frieze carved by Joseph Wilton; Grate basket and fender by Thomas Blockley; Doors by John Hobcraft; Marquery commode made by Peter Langlois.
Croome Court was built by George William (1721–1809), sixth earl of Coventry. He inherited the estate in 1751 and hired Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716–1783) to improve both the grounds and the damp old Jacobean house. Demolishing everything but the chimneys, Brown built a Palladian-style rectangular block of Bath stone with corner turrets and a large tetrastyle Ionic portico. In 1760, Coventry engaged the more fashionable architect Robert Adam (1728–1792) to design several of the principal rooms. Although Adam had only recently established his practice in London, his new Neoclassical style found a ready and eager audience with the nobility and gentry. At Croome, Adam and Coventry worked together, if not always harmoniously, to create three splendid rooms: the gallery, the library, and the tapestry room, which were widely admired by contemporaries and greatly preferred to the sober exterior.
There had been a long history in England of rooms hung with sets of tapestry, and Coventry would have known a recent example, emulating French Rococo style, at nearby Hagley Hall in Worcestershire. He may have thought he could improve on this by having his own tapestry room custom-made in France, and had an opportunity to do so when the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763. In August of that year, Coventry traveled to Paris to visit the Royal Gobelins Manufactory, where the popular artist François Boucher had recently been brought over from the competing manufactory at Beauvais to execute paintings to serve as tapestry cartoons. Architect Jacques Germain Soufflot (1713–1780) appears to have conceived of the new tapestry composition of medallions containing scenes by Boucher. This scheme was further elaborated by the decorative painter Maurice Jacques (1712–1784), who placed the medallions on a crimson and dark pink ground patterned with flowers and leaves simulating silk damask and suspended them from a frame-like border resembling carved and gilded wood. The new design could be adjusted to fit any size wall, allowed for endless variation of animals and flowers in the decorative surrounds, and could be complemented with matching furniture covers. Coventry was the first to see the new scheme and brought several sketches back to Croome to show Adam, who took the basic idea and provided his own drawings with Neoclassical, rather than Rococo, motifs. The earl ignored these, the tapestry set went into production at the Gobelins in 1764, and Coventry and Adam continued their somewhat bumpy working relationship.
The ceiling design used in this room was made by Adam in 1763 and intended for the adjoining library, but Coventry, as was his wont, changed his mind. The work was executed by Joseph Rose, one of the best plasterers of the time, but the result is not entirely successful. Stylistically incompatible with the tapestries and overscaled for the room, it seems symptomatic of the difficulties possibly inherent in this Anglo-French venture. In 1763 and the following year, Boucher painted the subjects for the medallions: allegories of the Elements (now Musée du Louvre, Paris, and Grand Trianon, Versailles). Air (Cephalus and Aurora) and Earth (Vertumnus and Pomona) appear on the chimney wall, while Fire (Venus Visiting Vulcan) and Water (Neptune Rescuing Amymone) are on the left and right walls, respectively. Maurice Jacques worked on the decorative surrounds, and from 1760 to 1767 produced floral cartoons for furniture covers with decorative artist Louis Tessier (1719/20–1781).
Early accounts of the Croome tapestry room credit the design of the seat furniture to Adam, but recent research suggests that it must have originated at the Gobelins, perhaps by Soufflot. The chairs and settees, as well as a large pier mirror, were produced in 1769 by the leading London cabinetmakers John Mayhew and William Ince. The mirror frame may well have been designed by Adam, as the goat’s head at the base and mask at the top have close affinities with his style. Below it stood a pier table with a carved and gilt six-legged base, possibly executed at the same time as the mirror frame, topped by a slab of inlaid marble that was produced some ten years earlier by John Wildsmith (active 1757–69). Mayhew and Ince replaced the original base with the present one in 1794. In addition to supplying the top for the pier table, Wildsmith executed in 1760 the chimneypiece with white-marble decorative elements on a ground of orange Veronese marble. The large tablet of lapis lazuli set in the center was provided by the sculptor Joseph Wilton, who specialized in richly ornamented chimneypieces and, in 1764, became Sculptor to His Majesty. One of the specimen squares in the tabletop is also of lapis, suggesting that Coventry was particularly fond of this rare dark blue mineral flecked with brilliant pyrites. By June 1771, all the pieces from the Gobelins had arrived, and Mayhew and Ince sent a crew to hang the tapestries and apply the seat covers, completing work in the room.
Nine sets of medallion tapestries, known at the Gobelins as the Tentures de Boucher, were woven before the Revolution, with variations in iconography, design, and ground color; five of them went to England. The practice there of covering large areas of wall with tapestry, in conjunction with the taste for things French during the second half of the eighteenth century, may explain why Gobelins tapestry rooms became fashionable. Less explainable is the fact that they did not become fashionable in France.
The Croome Court tapestries have survived in good condition because the room, when not in use, was protected from the light by “paper case hangings” and later by those of chamois. Through the visits of George III, Queen Victoria, and many others, it remained the favorite room at Croome until about 1902, when the tapestries and the seat furniture were sold by the ninth earl of Coventry to a dealer in Paris. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation acquired the ceiling, carved chair rails and door surrounds, mahogany doors, chimneypiece, and floors in 1949 and gave them to the Museum in 1958. Through the Kress Foundation, the following year the Museum acquired the chair and sofa frames, which have been re-covered with their original tapestry seats, backs, and armrests.*
Taken in the gallery
The Croome Court Tapestry Room
In 1760, George William, 6th Earl of Coventry engaged the fashionable architect Robert Adam to design several of the principal rooms for Croome Court, including this tapestry room. In the immediate aftermath of the Seven Years War, Coventry traveled to Paris where he visited the Royal Gobelins Manufactory and commissioned this suite designed by the architect Jacques Germain Soufflot with medallions containing scenes by François Boucher. His new design, which could be adjusted to fit any size wall, allowed for endless variation of animals and flowers in the decorative surrounds, and could be complemented with matching furniture covers.
[*The Met]
In the Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was conceived in Paris by John Jay in Paris, 1866, as a "national institution and gallery of art" for the American people. The Union League Club in New York campaigned for funding, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened to the public in 1870, in the Dodworth Building 681 Fifth Avenue. Initially formed from donations by its founders, the Museum collection increased to the point that it outgrew the initial site, and then a consecutive one, moving to its current location (on Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street) in 1880.
The initial museum building was designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, with extensions added from 1888 onwards - the Fifth Avenue facade, Grand Stairway, and Great Hall, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, opened 1902, and the Fifth Avenue wings by McKim, Mead & White in 1910. The last major development was the installation of glass at the sides and rear of the building, designed by Roch-Dinkeloo in 2011-12.
Taken in Manhattan
Book design, called closure, a book about closure, which when finished is going to be closed for good.
the plaster wasn't such a brilliant idea...
Plastering tools are used in the renovation of a Habitat homeowner's house in Nshavan, Armenia. ©Habitat for Humanity International
A random mixture of white plaster, painted and unpainted, old and new, from Chiavenna and surroundings.