Ornament from Hotel de Clugny 1875 - 1885

Editor: So this is "Ornament from Hotel de Clugny" from the late 1870s or early 1880s by Richardson Ellson & Co., a print and drawing rendered in pencil. It has a loose sketch-like feel. It reminds me of architectural renderings of decorative elements... what do you see here? Curator: I see a negotiation of power and display through ornamentation. The Hotel de Clugny, now the Musée de Cluny, was a potent symbol of French history and aristocratic heritage. Drawings like this provided crucial information to artisans and builders to reproduce design elements across different social settings. What this does, effectively, is democratize design principles originally purposed for nobility. How might this relate to changes in political power? Editor: Interesting! So, copying elements from fancy buildings helped to redistribute high class architectural features more broadly? Curator: Exactly. The availability and circulation of such ornament through prints signaled the shift from exclusive aristocratic patronage to broader, potentially bourgeois, consumption and aesthetic appreciation. This print offered visual models for those who wished to imbue their own environments with signifiers of status, power, or cultural sophistication. Is this appropriation or cultural exchange? Editor: Hmmm. That really muddies the waters for me. On the one hand, there's the argument of making high culture accessible, but it also hints at erasure of meaning and value? Curator: Precisely. So we have to think about who benefits. I'm still thinking about those luxury hotels... Who got to stay there at that time? And whose design aesthetic were they replicating, anyway? Editor: It definitely pushes the boundaries of cultural consumption into complicated areas. Now I need to look at ornamentation in architecture a little differently.