Le Petit Salon: The Journey of an Eighteenth-Century Room from Paris to Vermont

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The Middlebury College Museum of Art possesses a jewel of French neoclassicism, Le Petit Salon, a delicately painted, paneled room made around 1776 for a Parisian mansion.

view of le Petit Salon as it was installed in Le Chateau on the Middlebury College campus
Pierre Adrien Pâris (French, 1745–1819), Boiseries [Paneling], Private Dining Room from the Hôtel d’Aumont / Crillon, Paris, 1776–77, paint on white oak, poplar, and birch. Collection of Middlebury College Museum of Art, Vermont. Gift of Susan Dwight Bliss in 1959, 0.115.

It was designed by Pierre-Adrien Pâris, subsequently the architect of court fêtes for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. His client was the duc d’Aumont, a renowned collector and patron of the arts, who had the panels installed in his Paris home, now the Hôtel de Crillon on Place de La Concorde. Gifted to Middlebury in 1959, but held in storage since the 1990s, the room will be reassembled for the first time in three decades.

The exhibition follows the journey of Le Petit Salon from Paris to Middlebury via Manhattan, where for fifty years it formed part of the decor of the Bliss family’s Gilded Age mansion. At Middlebury, the Petit Salon became part of Le Château, the college’s French language dorm, itself a fanciful recreation of a 16th-century Norman manoir. The exhibition incorporates Pâris’s 1776 exquisite watercolor elevations of Aumont’s mansion, as well as studies from his long educational sojourn in Rome and Naples. Included in the exhibition are loans from Bowdoin College, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Fine Arts Museum of Besançon.