Design for a Stage Set at the Opéra, Paris: a Greenhouse 1828 - 1890

Editor: So, here we have Eugène Cicéri's "Design for a Stage Set at the Opéra, Paris: a Greenhouse," dating sometime between 1828 and 1890. It's a pencil and print drawing. It gives me this fleeting, almost dreamlike impression. What really jumps out to you when you look at it? Curator: I see a space filled with symbols of growth and cultivation, deliberately set on a stage. Think about the greenhouse itself. It's an artificial Eden, controlled nature. For an opera stage, what does that tell us? The architecture here has inherent meanings associated with knowledge, class, luxury, power, leisure. Editor: Luxury makes sense, especially for an opera house! The pencil drawing makes the ornamentation seem ephemeral. Do you think the design would play differently in color? Curator: Color would fix its meaning much more definitively. Now, we see delicate pencil lines, unfinished edges and surfaces. The ephemeral quality evokes nostalgia, perhaps for a lost era or a world on the cusp of change. Even a longing to capture dreams otherwise lost to time. Editor: That’s interesting. So, it’s not just about showing something beautiful, but also reminding us that beauty, like a stage set, is often temporary and carefully constructed? Curator: Precisely. This fragility connects it with themes of mortality and the fleeting nature of beauty. How clever of you! And in that greenhouse…what stories might unfold? It offers us possibilities, just as Romanticism does itself, where truth is felt more than witnessed. Editor: I didn’t think about how Romanticism played into the very scene. Looking at the marks now, the design feels less precise, allowing for stories and memory. Curator: The marks become cues for imagination to complete it. Seeing this art becomes a dialogue with the image itself and evokes the past. Editor: Thanks! I feel I see and know a lot more than before.