The J. Paul Getty Museum

Object Description

The painted doors and panels and the gilt plaster relief sculptures in the overdoors in this room come from the main reception room of a house built for Jean-Baptiste Hosten. Hosten, a wealthy planter from Santo Domingo, commissioned the celebrated architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux to build his Paris residence, the Maison Hosten, starting around 1790. This building was the focus of a larger housing scheme and was to be surrounded by fifteen other townhouses built on speculation. When the French Revolution forced Hosten to flee France in 1795, only six of the townhouses along with this one had been completed. The paneling in this room was removed at the end of the 1800s when the entire house was demolished.

In this project, one of Ledoux's last, the architect called on some of the most celebrated painters and sculptors of his era to implement his decorative scheme. The grotesque decoration, which combines graceful arabesques and winged centaurs with palmettes and sphinxes, shows some of the finest decorative work of the late 1700s.