Pierre Gouthière
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
—Wallace Stevens, ‘Final Soliloquy of the Internal Paramour’
I.
You start to make a list of all the gold things in the world.
You start with your earliest memory—an apple handed to you by your grandmother. There is a particular evening light in childhood in the low hills and beech woods near Troyes in Champagne. This also matters.
You start with touch, the feel of it. A golden coin, the Louis d’or aux lunettes, France and Navarre held at an angle below the heavy crown, the king’s hair a cascade.
Or the movement of a chain running through your hands or, later, the texture of the arm of a carved and gilded chair. Or a skein of silk.
You recall the signs outside your workshops. The first as an apprentice of the gilder Ceriset on the sixth floor of Quai Pelletier: the sign of the Soleil d’Or. Your second at the sign of the Boucle d’Or. And you recall the advertisement for the sale of your work: ‘This week at the premises of Mr. Gouthière, Chaser-Gilder to the King, Rue du Faubourg St-Martin, near the Guardhouse, can be seen Tables, Vases, and Wall lights, in gilt bronze, with arabesques in reliefs, the execution of which is a great credit to this Artist and will surely arouse Connoisseurs’ curiosity.’ Curiosity is key.
A memory of an engraving. The old king in his costume as Apollo, the sun on his chest, a belt of such profligate heaviness. His head radiating the rays of the sun. The theme is apparent.
You start with intensity, with the sight of gold. You start with the fugitive, the memory of gold.
You name places, the elsewhere. There are travelers’ tales. It is said that streams in the land of Colchis held so many particles of gold that you could immerse a sheepskin and draw it out as a golden fleece. You think of the texture of a golden fleece, the depth rising between your fingers.
You name the history of wasteful, intemperate gold. ‘It is anomalous that wealth should be of such a kind that a man may be well supplied with it and yet die of hunger, like the famous Midas in the legend, when owing to the insatiable covetousness of his prayer, all the viands served up to him turned to gold.’ It is said that when traveling in Phrygia spring water turned to gold as Midas bathed: the virtue granted by the god, as it departed from his body, tinged the stream with gold. ‘And even to this hour adjoining fields, touched by this ancient vein of gold, are hardened where the river flows and colored with the gold that Midas left.’
And Midas makes you think of turning things to gold.
You turn bark, hair and fur, skin, a snake’s scales, the feathers of an eagle to gold. The beard of a river god. The brow of a young girl. You make acorns, vines and grapes, acanthus and ivy, sycamore, roses, ribbons, and drapery gold. The horns of a ram, a bridle stretched across a camel, and lion’s paws, and ram’s hooves and eagle’s talons and sphinx’s claws. Fire and water, the insubstantial and the quicksilver, become gold.
You make gold ornamentation for carriages and sedan chairs. For columns and vases, chimneypieces and wall sconces, tables, firedogs, chandeliers. And for a pair of candelabras holding—tightly—a pair of fiercely white hard-paste porcelain.
Alchemy is donum dei, a gift of god. The alchemists’ stone, the arcanum, turns lead to gold. It has turned white clay to white gold, to porcelain. Your skill is as a modeler, a chaser, a gilder. This, too, is a kind of alchemy, a turning of one thing into another, an idea, a place on a mantelpiece, a sketch, commission, transformed into an ineluctable, weightless object that changes the space around it. You take desire and make it more real.
You want poetry, the beautiful taking off from the ground into the air. Even the word chrysopoeia—from khrusos, the Greek word for gold, and poien, to make—for the act of transmutation into gold has an airiness to it, an echoing openness that lifts your heart.
You always end up with aura. Gold does something to the things near it. Aura is a good word too and a very good place to start.
II.
Another way of starting. Another list.
Think of the different speeds of working. Think of a great unspooling list of transitive verbs. Gouthière is doing.
His work is holding, supporting, entwining, framing, and balancing rarified and exalted materials—Chinese and Japanese porcelains, the whitest porcelain from Meissen, ivory, white marble, blue turquin marble, porphyry, jasper serpentine, agate, granite, Algerian onyx. His work is to make the stasis of these materials, their haecceity, more exalted.
Think of these porcelains, the distance they have come, their arcane meanings, the strangeness of the decoration, the grotesqueness of the masks modeled under this deep-sea celadon green glaze.
And then think of these hardstones. Their density is not only physical—hard to carve and heavy—but visually complex. They are also dense with classical association, with Greece, Alexandria, Rome. A pair of vases are carved from the ‘green granite from the cathedral of San Lorenzo,’ outside the Aurelian Wall in Rome. Porphyry is storied with Cleopatra and Mark Anthony. In Gouthière’s Paris workshops, these stones and marbles become altars, incense burners, urns you could imagine storing imperial ashes. These urns entwined with delicate gold are placed atop a pair of columns discovered near the Temple of Vesta: histories and stories interweaving further.
‘The price of various items I want to remember,’ notes Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin in a notebook, ‘a small antique monument in ivory, marble, and gilt bronze made by Gouthière, 600 livres.’ You commission an antique monument or an incense burner—three flaring hooved legs, satyrs’ masks, a snake tensing its spiral up through the center, garlands and tendrils of vines, clusters of grapes—and then you imagine the coiling of the smoke of incense.
Gouthière’s reversal is to make these highly sculpted polished, sculpted, honed hardstone urns and ewers, this gray granite column eight feet tall, these porcelain vases, disappear. These worked materials become the staging for something other, something found. It is as if you had discovered this urn buried in some Piranesian rubble —held for a millennium with the vines grown over it. Or these laurel leaves, overlapping and twisting in lengthy garlands loosely tied together, resting on this lidded jar and, like flames, reaching round the vessel.
With your chased and gilded sculptures, you entwine objects and make them older.
III.
In Diderot’s Encyclopédie, there are definitions for the crafts of serrurier, ciseleur, orfèvre, graveur, arquebusier, bijoutier, metteur-en-oeuvre, and damasquineur.
It is recorded in the regulations of the gilders’ corporation that if you are a gilder on metal you cannot gild on wood. It is important that these trades are policed with severity. Definitions are significant.
It is recorded—at length—how bad you are with money. You lose money on ventures for refining Spanish copper and on the Guadalcanal salt mines in Estremadura. Your accounts are chaotic. Clients beg you to send in your invoices for the work you have completed. You don’t. You plan your new house, buy the land, start to build, cannot complete. Try to raise money against further projects, past projects. Fail.
There is a story that Marie-Antoinette mistakes a gilt-brass rose by Gouthière for being made of gold.
You are chaser-gilder to the king. For eight months in 1794, you are imprisoned alongside architects, writers, and artists in the Saint-Lazare prison, ‘brought herein as a suspect, on the basis of a ruling made on a decree by the National Convention’s general security committee.’
On your release, you gild the new sign for the Ministère de la Police on the pediment of the former residence of the Duchess of Mazarin, who has commissioned you, inter alia, for firedogs and chimneypieces and torchères and pedestals.
You become chaser-gilder to the Corps Législatif.
A hundred years after your death, Atget photographs the Hôtel Gouthière. Atget is, of course, another arcanist. He used gelatin-silver negative glass plates with a long exposure time, printing by making contact between the glass negative and light-sensitive paper. The photographs were then washed, gold-toned, and fixed before being washed again. They have aura.
IV.
There is not much space on the upper floors of the workshop, but then you don’t have to carry much up the stairs. Your materials are wax and plaster, brass and copper and gold. You need a forge to pour molten pewter into the mold you have taken from your wax model. Only a small forge, as pewter melts over a low fire, a sudden gray liquefaction and then the sudden return to form in the mold. It’s difficult to love pewter. It feels so easy to please, pliable so that you can hold a tendril of modeled vine against the curve of a porcelain vase until it sits true and can be cast again in brass. But that casting, in the fine sand, happens elsewhere, the sections brought carefully back up these stairs again. Small sections. Each of the legs of the Duke of Mazarin’s table consists of sixty pieces, I note. This is work that requires calibration, making a golden garland fall across marble with legerity needs planning, drilling, measuring.
So, I continue, wood and coal for a small forge.
You can run your business with a journeyman and a few apprentices. What else do you need?
You need your bench of ciselets, your chasing tools. There are hundreds. Your hand reaches over.
One end of the tool is stumped and blunt, the other has endless gradations of thickness and sharpness, curve and modulation, depth and angle. There are ones for stippling the surface of a berry, for creating the tracery on the petals of a poppy, for feathering an acanthus leaf, for moving the fur of the ram’s head from snout to horns, for smoothing and burnishing out the folds of a ribbon, or for making pellucid the eyes of this nymph, for droplets of water, for this bunch of ripe grapes. Some surfaces need to feel random, others are studies in exacting detail. There is depth here and clear surface there, and the shadows need to be kept in check as it is an endless series of judgments about where to work in texture and where to leave be. This vase of porphyry is held by a pair of ram’s heads, the horns arcing and twisting back. The snout of the beast is almost casually worked, but the energy increases into deeply chased runnels of fur around his brows and then into the glissando of the horns themselves.
Or these mute swans. Launching themselves from a turquoise porcelain covered jar, they are all about their necks—pure sinew of stippled fury.
This is poiesis. Each of these is something becoming other, a metamorphosis slowed in front of us. In this pair of porphyry ewers, bodies elide between states. This faun is somewhere in between man and ram, this siren a woman and a sea creature. The images are powerful. These firedogs are smoldering vases and incense containers. Eagles hold a fire bolt and a salamander under their talons.
And all this is the staging for gold. The modeling and chasing, the modulations in surface and depth, allow Gouthière to gild with both matteness and brightness, softness and luster. He creates openness and denseness through his burnishing. He is universally acknowledged to understand gilding in a way that no one had before.
His work gleams as you move around it.
So, finally, you need very good light in your workshop.
And air? Breathing in the vapors cast off from the vaporizing of the mercury amalgam was toxic. ‘Very few of the gilders reach old age.’
Here, again, is a kinship with the creators of white gold. Few live beyond their thirties.
V.
Have we lost the ability to look at these objects? Current taste demands lucidity, a telling-it-straight, materials that look like themselves. But materials are metamorphic—that is at the heart of working. Tell me the essence of clay. What is natural gold? What does marble look like in a quarry? What kind of quarry? Material is a place of departure.
This is a fierce didacticism, a policing of authenticity by those who do not make things. Imagine walking into the Bibliothèque du Roi at the Château de Versailles. It is a place where everything is something else. It is a baroque riposte to truth to materials; here one material segues into another, your hand touches gold on the arms of the chair on which you sit. There are plaques of porcelain set into the furniture, one thing in the form of another. This is an interior as performance in which you too are a protagonist, catching sight of yourself in the mirrors. Everything is multiple, mirrored, paired, reflected, repeated. This great slow cadenced repetition of candelabras, vases, firedogs, pier glasses, tables, and chairs, the guéridons and flambeaux—it all comes alive as you move through the space. Objects are not seen by themselves but discovered among others.
Singularity, the thing in itself, the existential object is what we crave. There is that Chardin moment of the shuffle between warm teapot and slop basin and teacups, sugar bowl and milk jug, the small sounds of liquid, the glints of silver and bright linen to make the porcelain seem even whiter. We know their weight, we can reach effortlessly into the memory of the warmth of a full teapot against the cupped palm of a hand. This is what intimacy feels like, a known place, framed.
Proust loved Chardin’s paintings. He cared about the settling of disorder and chance into image, ‘the life of still life.’
This scale of ownership seems possible, somatically resonant. Still life happens near us. And so the sheer scale of Gouthière’s moment of creation of objects for spaces, for buildings and estates, complicates our reach to him. It becomes the story of taste, of ownership and collection, of transmission and inheritance—the ascents and descents of avowal and disavowal, approbation and dislike, that choke the narrative. From treasure to stuff, from princely catalogues to salerooms and dealers, we find ourselves faced with fame. Gouthière—'very famous, the one who works for Mme Du Barry’—lives in proximity to the great collectors of the last two centuries, Marie-Antoinette, the Duke of Aumont, sundry Rothschilds, the Marquess of Hertford and his illegitimate son Richard Wallace, and through the great dealers Wertheimer and Duveen to the American generation of Pierpont Morgan, Chester Beatty, and Frick.
Henry James, caught up in his own journey through fascination with fame and disgust with himself, describes this complication. ‘I am a lonely, suffering and occasionally a very miserable individual indeed despite the gilded and marble rooms in which I live,’ he writes. And after a long weekend at Waddesdon, the faux chateau of the Rothschilds deep in the English countryside, surrounded by French furniture, ‘the gilded bondage of that gorgeous palace.’ And, yet, he also knows why objects matter:
There isn’t one of them I don’t know and love—yes, as one remembers and cherishes the happiest moments of one’s life. Blindfold, in the dark, with the brush of a finger, I could tell one from another. They’re living things to me; they know me, they return the touch of my hand.
VI.
I’m standing in a conservation studio at the Frick. My heart knocks in my chest. Here are the candelabra by Gouthière, dismantled. His great chased and gilded carapace is held, delicately, to one side, and the two white porcelain jars stand next to each other. They feel totally different from each other. They have left a few clues in the archives described as ancien blanc de Saxe, the descriptor for the first Meissen porcelains, and as porcelaines d’ancien blanc du Japon, the catch-all descriptor for unknown porcelain that looks Oriental. And old white.
Two old white jars. Not a pair but associated, as they say in the trade. One made to copy the other. A copy that looks fine at a distance but less so as you come nearer, a little glassier in sheen, the swelling form from the splayed footring a little less confident, the shoulder less sure of itself. Made by someone with the original in front of them, quick glance back and forth, judgments made and returned to.
And one is better than the other. One is alive. Blue gloves are proffered and then discarded, and I pick up one of the jars and turn it to assess the balance, run a thumb along the unglazed base to feel the quality of the porcelain body. And then pick up the other.
I know this.
As a potter’s apprentice at seventeen, I’ve propped a Sung dynasty Chinese bowl on the edge of my wheel, stacked dozens of balls of porcelain to my left, and copied it. Attempting, as the dozens of balls became simulacra of the lithe, nonchalant swelling bowl in front of me, to understand how to make something that worked from the inside, not from a profile.
But here it is and it’s a story. Could the better white vase have been an original Chinese vessel, perhaps one of the first to reach Europe along the Silk Road? One of those porcelains that are counted in princely treasuries and end up in basilicas? And then used as the ne plus ultra object for the struggling arcanists in Dresden tasked with either turning lead to gold, or clay to porcelain, or preferably both? That would be the perfect balance for these candelabras.
As I hold this jar, I remember the moment when Johann Böttger, the arcanist who has been apprehended after his public display of alchemy and then, fleeing from Berlin, is brought before the authorities in Dresden. He is eighteen years old, caught in his net of storytelling. It is November 29, 1701, and there is the document signed by two court officials, swearing ‘with three upraised fingers’ to guard him. This is when the suitcase of the goldmaker is opened and the courtier orders that the alchemist’s tinctures and crucible be repacked in a silver case, ‘with gilding,’ if it is to be shown to the king, Augustus the Strong. The Philosopher’s Stone needs some gravitas, some proper packaging. The arcanum is mythic, part of history, a kind of proximity to Events that no one could have anticipated. Were you there when the lame walked, the fig tree died, when mercury turned to gold?
I’m in the presence of two arcanists, two men who have studied how to transmute. Alchemy is, after all, a work of fire to be skeined with goldsmithing and distilling, disciplines that require you to know the color of flame, the sound of a melt, the distinction in fumes. And both of them possess that element of the magical reveal: the elision of process, the moment of triumph.
And it becomes clear that the good white jar is from Meissen. And the second jar is a later copy. Made by someone forgotten or lost. Or undiscovered.
So I have Gouthière with this white jar in his left hand, caressing the pewter model of his chased, modeled—yet to be gilded—tendrils of vines around the shoulder. This forms an open autumnal carapace of leaves and grapes that will be entwined with the beards of the three young goats that—somehow—become the base of the whole three-branched candelabras that rise to the candle holders, pause for a baroque moment with ripe gourds and grapes, and then end where the candles start. So that you have white candles held high above white porcelain, candlelight playing over gold.
For what Gouthière is doing is creating a kind of music with the way light falls. He works with proximity to a fireplace, above the chimney, near a mirror, on a pedestal, the pedestal a table itself. He makes works for fire and light: firedogs, candelabras, wall sconces, chandeliers, chimneypieces. He knows where windows are in relation to his objects, how shadows tell the world aslant.
He knows that there is a kind of agency in how light changes things. He knows about aura.
VII.