LE PETIT SALON

For the past three decades, the petit salon, an exquisite Louis XVI-era painted décor designed by the royal architect Pierre Adrien Pâris around 1776, has remained largely unseen in storage at the Middlebury College Museum of Art in Vermont. The salon was originally made for the duc d’Aumont, a noted connoisseur and patron of the arts in the pre-Revolutionary France. It was given to the college in the 1950s by Susan Dwight Bliss when she broke up the collection of European period decors that graced her family’s Manhattan mansion since the early 20th century. 

This book, and the accompanying exhibition, re-creates for the first time in 120 years the original form of the intimate aristocratic retreat. It examines its peripatetic history and its successive incarnations in 19th century Paris, Gilded Age New York, and the Middlebury College campus.