Royal Palace of Stockholm, The West Octagonal Cabinet

In the summer of 1732, a group of French painters and sculptors arrived in Stockholm, the result of negotiations Carl Hårleman (1700–1753) had conducted in Paris over the preceding winter on behalf of the Swedish crown (Royal Court of Sweden, n.d.). Among them was Guillaume-Thomas-Raphaël Taraval (1701–1750), a Paris-born painter trained under Claude Audran III (1658–1734), who had been recruited specifically to bring the new French taste, what contemporaries called the goût nouveau, to the rebuilding of the Royal Palace. The recruitment was not an isolated gesture. It belonged to a pattern stretching back to the previous generation of French craftsmen brought to Stockholm by the architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger (1654–1728) after 1693 (Hinners, 2012). Tessin’s first generation of French recruits had its work largely undone by catastrophe: the medieval Tre Kronor castle burned down on 7 May 1697, destroying most of what had already been completed, and construction of its Baroque successor stalled for lack of funds during the Great Northern War before resuming in earnest only in 1727. Taraval’s generation arrived into that resumption, five years into a rebuilding effort that needed, once again, craftsmen capable of the latest Parisian style. A second wave of French sculptors followed across the 1730s, 1740s and into the 1760s, recruited under broadly the same arrangement of generous pay and the promise of a career; thirty in total over this period (Michel, 2015).

The room now known as the West Octagonal Cabinet, one of a pair of small corner rooms flanking the Bernadotte Gallery in the palace’s state apartments, is among the more direct results of the 1732 recruitment. Its ceiling was painted by Taraval in the Rococo idiom he had brought from Paris. Taraval’s ceiling paintings at the palace are airy and festive in character, a quality that follows directly from his training under Claude Audran III, whose own decorative style favoured light grotesque ornament, pale grounds and figures set against open sky rather than the dense, weighted compositions of the preceding Baroque generation. Given the room’s octagonal plan and modest dimensions, a ceiling on this scale followed the conventional Rococo format for a small cabinet: a central oval or octagonal field, framed by painted or stuccoed rocaille ornament, with figures disposed loosely around its edge rather than massed in a single dense scene, the kind of composition built to be glanced up at from a seated conversation rather than studied as a programme.

Rooms of this scale and type served a function quite different from the palace’s larger ceremonial spaces. Cabinets, in the vocabulary of European court architecture, were not designed for audiences or formal reception but for retreat, conversation, and the display of small prized objects, a category that encouraged a more intimate and personal decorative idiom even when executed with the same technical sophistication as the grander rooms nearby. The eastern counterpart to the West Octagonal Cabinet, on the opposite side of the Bernadotte Gallery, served in this more functional role as well, used for the formal reception of newly arrived foreign ambassadors presenting their credentials, while its decorative programme drew on a different set of allegorical associations suited to a room originally assigned to the queen’s apartments (Royal Court of Sweden, n.d.). Together the two cabinets represent a category distinct from the palace’s state rooms: spaces built for private use but finished with the same craftsmanship that defined Sweden’s emerging Rococo court style.

Because the palace contains more than six hundred rooms spanning several centuries of redecoration, the rooms that survive substantially unaltered from this first eighteenth-century building campaign carry a particular kind of evidential value. The grander ceremonial spaces were periodically reworked to match later fashions, as happened across the nineteenth century under King Oscar II (1829–1907), but the smaller and less frequently used cabinets escaped most of this revision, leaving them as comparatively direct evidence of the decorative thinking that guided the palace’s reconstruction in the years immediately following 1727.

References

Hinners, L. (2012) De fransöske handtwerkarne vid Stockholms slott 1693–1713: Yrkesroller, organisation, arbetsprocesser. Doctoral dissertation. Stockholm University. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/47039902 (Accessed: 28 April 2024).

Michel, A.-S. (2015) ‘Une communauté d’artistes et d’artisans français à l’étranger: le cas des sculpteurs au château royal de Stockholm au XVIIIe siècle’, 1700-tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 12, pp. 117–131. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7557/4.3528 (Accessed: 28 April 2024).

Royal Court of Sweden (n.d.) A History of Style – Rococo. Available at: https://www.kungligaslotten.se/english/articles-movies-360/royal-palaces/2021-03-26-a-history-of-style—rococo.html (Accessed: 28 April 2024).