Château de La Roche-Guyon - Chinese Boudoir

Two rooms in the Pavillon d’Enville at the château of La Roche-Guyon, the antechamber of the duchesse on the principal floor and the cabinet de toilette or dressing room on the floor above, are hung with rare sets of relatively well-preserved block printed and hand-painted Chinese wallpapers. Their presence here speaks to the fascination for China and Chinese export goods amongst French elites in the second half of the eighteenth century. As artifacts, the Chinese wallpapers are remarkable in their own right as cultural hybrids that bear witness to the transformative cultural and commercial ties between China and Western Europe in the 1760s and 1770s. The wallpapers also open a window onto the personal tastes of the château’s owner, Louise Élisabeth de La Rochefoucauld, duchesse d’Enville (1716-1797), and the social geography, coding and gendering of late-Enlightenment aristocratic domestic spaces.