Marble Panelled Room with Wine Cisterns
Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur (1822-1893)
Date: Circa 1883 (marble panelling), 1700-1730 (wine cisterns)
Place Made: England and France
Materials & Techniques: Italian, Belgian and French marbles, cut, carved and used as wall decorations.
Accession Number: Waddesdon Manor 3568 & 3897.1-2
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The walls of this room are covered with large slabs of marble, a type of stone. It was compressed at the bottom of the sea for millions of years and comes in many colours.
These marbles were attached to the walls by very large screws over 100 years ago. The different colours are used to make a design of panels. Some are simple, like the rectangular one at the bottom of the wall, but others are more complicated with curves and carved decoration. The patterns in the marble add to the decoration.
The room was designed by a Frenchman, Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur, in 1883. He re-used the wall mounted fountain and basins from elsewhere. They are over 100 years older than the rest of the room. The fountain is in the form of a man’s head with an open mouth through which the water flows. This room is the Ante Room or Lobby to the Dining Room at Waddesdon and contains two wall fountains, which would have been used to cool wine bottles before they were taken to the table.
Teachers' Information
The marble slabs, or revetments, that line this room were quarried in Italy, Belgium and France, some time before 1883 when the room was constructed. Using marble in this way became very fashionable at Versailles, the Palace of Louis XIV, and Waddesdon's architect Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur was no doubt thinking of this when he designed the room.
The different colours in the marble are used to highlight the doorways and frames of the panels. The largest panels are composed of four sheets of marble, cut from the same piece of rock, and assembled in an almost symmetrical arrangement of veins and colours.
Marble is a sedimentary rock formed by compression of sea-bed sediment. It is coloured by minerals and ores. For example carbon creates a black tone. Deposits of iron in different chemical combinations will create red coloured marbles, and copper forms green.
It is quarried using various techniques including explosive charges. Once the stone is in smaller, more manageable, pieces it is cut up into sections using a specialist machine-driven saw and either polished mechanically, or sculpted into a three dimensional object like a statue using stonemasons' chisels and drills.
Activities
1. Discuss where marble might be used in a house, and why. It can be grand, as in a palace or a church, or practical as in a bathroom. What colours would be most appropriate?
2. Your pupils could create their own marbled patterns using paper and paint, painting half of the paper and then folding it to create mirrored pattern repeats. Once they have dried, use the papers to create a collage design of marble panelling.
Or can you drip coloured oils into a tray of water and lay paper on the surface. When you take the paper away a marble pattern will have been transferred onto the surface.