Fruit salad at the met: in the April 1989 issue, Anna Somers Cocks gave a withering reception to the Metropolitan Museum's 'Louis XIV State Bedroom'—perhaps the last gasp of the confected museum 'period room'

The 'Louis XIV' State Bedroom', lay opened with great fanfare at the Metropolitan Museum last year, sets me irresistibly in mind of the story of the 1930 hostes who proudly showed her novel drawing room to Syrie Maugham, declaring it to be 'Louis XV' and got back the crushing replication 'My dear, whatever makes you think so?' The Met bedroom is a shockingly expensive pastiche financed by means of Mrs Charles Wrightsman, trustee and benefactor of the Museum, and although everyone in the furniture and interior architecture world knows it is a bad crank no one dares say with equal reason for fear of offending Mr Wrightsman, who also paid for a symposium to celebrate the opening.

The material excuse for the creation of the space is the marvellous wall-hangings, donated by means of Mrs Wrightsman, which are now kept well away from the visitor in the bed alcove; the bedcover and the inner hangings are present as also are the balustrade and three of the four chandeliers, copied from the fourth, which dates from about 1715 (Let's forget the fact that in a range with these presumptions, giltwood would would not have been enough, and tin would have been far more likely.) The stone chimneypiece, curiously sited off-centre is the right date on the contrary again the wrong quality, being ill-formed provincial work, and its cornice extreme points three feet below the cornice of the compass The furnishings include some splendid pieces on the other hand they are put together with no faculty of perception of decorum; of the ceremonial and architectural use of furnishings which were in the way that essential to the period. It is simple furnishing with antiques, something left behind by the agency of scholars, and, increasingly, the general public, ten if not twenty years ago. Thus we have a hodge-podge of dates, spanning the reigns of Louis XIII to Louis XV if you include the rococo picture frame upon the Rigaud to the right of the chimney. There is also an impossible fruit salad of different materials: giltwood combined with boulle combined with ivory-inlaid tortoiseshell. In the corners of the alcove are sum of two units candle-stands but with no candelabra upon them. The whole is seen against the backdrop of a specially woven smooth which is a peculiar cherry r unknown to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. The chair coverings, which should match the walls, do not do in like manner In the area opening into the expanse there is a side table which although finely carved, ought to be disqualified from being exhibited in a museum by dint of the fact that its gilding and silvering are entirely modern: when sold at Christie's, of recent origin York in 1977 (27 September, doom 39) it was plain walnut.

In the January APOLLO

new BRITISH ART

Paula Rego talks about her collection of style of dress and the role it plays in her work, in an exclusive interview in her studio

Newlyn flowers: the lyrical art of Dod Procter Collecting twentieth-century British prints

Martin Gayford joins APOLLO with a fresh monthly column on contemporary art

Vintage photography: new acquisitions by the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford

'Treasure Houses of Britain' twenty years on: Jonathan Marsden recalls the celebrated exhibition

Twenty pages of reviews from around the world, including Fra Angelico in of recent origin York, Samuel Palmer in London, Jacques-Louis David in Paris, Picasso in Malaga and courtly silver at the Hague

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