Chaise longue 1895 - 1935

Léon Laroche made this lithograph of a “Chaise Longue” sometime in the past, maybe even the distant past, with ink and watercolor on paper. I’m just loving all the gentle touches of pink, blue and gold! It looks as if it came into being through layering. This is what it’s like to be a painter—it's never about the thing; it's about the sensation of the thing. Here, the layers evoke that experience of slow-motion thought. I can imagine Laroche thinking, “Well, I want to make a functional object look a bit dreamier, a bit more elevated—like a royal throne or even a palanquin.” It’s a little world there, all on its own. You could just dive into the details of the pattern, the frills, and the tassels. The result is a real sense of play. Thinking about the ways we play with patterns and styles over time, I think of other designers like Charles and Ray Eames, or even, in a different way, the painter Henri Matisse. We are all in conversation, you know?