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Recent CommissionsIn the past year we have had the pleasure and privilege to receive commissions to document several extraordinary interiors and exteriors, both public and private, from California to the Ukraine. In fact, the majority of our time has increasingly been devoted to a variety of commissions, with subjects ranging from garden views to penthouse terraces, as well as interior perspectives and the large-scale elevational façades for which we are best known.Top left: The court elevation of the former Potocki Palace in Lviv—today a residence of the President of Ukraine—was commissioned by the head of the family to document his family's former seat and the place of his birth. The magnificent late 19th-century town palace, commingling Renaissance revival influences and French Beaux-Arts classicism, was originally set in parkland but today is encroached by the city of Lviv. The building suffered greatly from the Soviet invasion of the Second World War, when the Potocki family lost its ownership, but was recently restored by the Ukrainian state with exceptional care. Second left: This Italian Renaissance inspired garden pavilion, of great simplicity and beauty of proportions, stands amid lush gardens in Pasadena, California. Its garden setting and simple arched windows evoke an orangerie, though its handsomely decorated interiors belie that notion. Built in the early 20th century, the pavilion is today a private residence of great character and warmth. Third and fourth left: Perspective views of the Music Room and Gartensaal of the Schloss Fasanerie Museum, located in the countryside near Fulda, Germany. Commissioned by HRH Moritz Landgraf von Hessen, the watercolor and that below it document two rooms in the massive baroque archbishop's palace that today houses the Hessian House Foundation, which displays the decorative arts collections of the Landgrafs von Hessen, until 1918 rulers of the German state of Hesse. The Music Room is notable both for its fine Biedermeier furniture and its exceptionally rich stencilled panoramic wallpaper. The Gartensaal is an octagonally shaped room that was added to the palace by the commissioner's father, the Landgraf Philipp von Hessen, and is dedicated to Greco-Roman antiquities. It features trompe l'œil Palladian loggias of stencilled wallpaper depicting Arcadian garden views. The view is drawn as a section-perspective, in which the borders of the drawing are in actuality scaled to the elevation of the room; the interior is then projected in one-point perspective. Displayed upon the room's central socle are sculptural fragments of two heads of warriors from the freize of the Parthenon. Bottom left: A one-point perspective view of the salon of the duchess Élisabeth-Charlotte d'Orléans at the Château de Lunéville in Lorraine. The watercolor reconstitutes the room and its furnishings during the 1730s, based upon the research of its commissioner, M. Jacques Charles-Gaffiot, a French authority on Lunéville, the seat of the exiled king of Poland, and its court. Lunéville was tragically devastated by fire in 2003 and its future is currently unclear. The salon depicted in the watercolor was nonetheless extensively remodeled later in the 18th century, and the watercolor was drawn using the original plans for its boiseries. The provenance of all the furnishings was traced by M. Charles-Gaffiot to the duchess; the watercolor attempts to depict the salon with as much historical accuracy as possible and will be published in a volume on the history of the château and its furnishings. |