Hôtel Récamier: Six Floors, Six Faces, One Remarkable Woman (#725)

There are hotels that could be anywhere.

And then there are hotels that belong completely to their street, their neighborhood, and their city.

The Hôtel Récamier is one of those.

Tucked discreetly into a corner of the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris’s sixth arrondissement, the hotel seems almost reluctant to announce itself.

There is no grand entrance, no procession of taxis, no uniformed doorman standing beneath an enormous canopy.

At 3 bis Place Saint-Sulpice, Hôtel Récamier occupies a remarkably quiet position for somewhere in the middle of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Step outside and Paris immediately returns.

The great façade of the Church of Saint-Sulpice dominates the square. People cross on their way to cafés and shops. Dogs are walked. Children appear and disappear. Tables fill at lunchtime.

In the evening, the light changes across the stone buildings and the square gradually becomes quieter.

It is an unusually intimate corner of Paris.

And appropriately, the little hotel overlooking the square takes its name from a woman who understood better than most people the importance of conversation, beauty, friendship, art, and Paris.

Madame Récamier.

Jeanne-Françoise Julie Adélaïde Bernard - universally remembered as Juliette Récamier - was born in Lyon in 1777.

She married Jacques-Rose Récamier, a wealthy banker, while still a teenager and soon became one of the most celebrated women in France.

But calling Madame Récamier simply a celebrated beauty misses much of what made her extraordinary.

At a time when women possessed little formal political power, the salon offered another kind of influence. A talented hostess could bring writers, artists, politicians, philosophers and intellectuals together in her home.

Conversation became a form of currency. Introductions mattered. Ideas moved from person to person.

Madame Récamier became exceptionally good at creating such a world.

By the age of nineteen she was already presiding over a salon that attracted a distinguished circle. Her beauty certainly helped establish her fame. But charm, intelligence and an ability to bring interesting people together sustained it.

Her house itself became famous.

In 1798 her husband purchased the former Hôtel Necker in the fashionable Chaussée-d'Antin district. Its interiors were transformed in the new neoclassical taste, and Madame Récamier's bedroom became so celebrated that distinguished visitors to Paris came to see it. Its furnishings helped popularize the aesthetic that would develop into the Empire style.

Even furniture remembers her.

The word récamier came to describe the elegant backless couch or daybed associated with the pose in which she was famously portrayed - reclining gracefully, somewhere between sitting and lying down.

Jacques-Louis David painted her that way in 1800 in his famous, deliberately spare portrait.

Portrait of Madame Récamier. The unfinished portrait that was painted in 1800 and is widely regarded as among the best of the portraits created by French artist Jacques-Louis David. With its grace, simplicity, and economy, it is also regarded as one of the most successful examples of Neoclassical art. The subject of the painting, Juliette Récamier, was the darling of Parisian society. She was the wife of a wealthy banker, though she received the attentions of a host of other men. She commissioned this portrait from David, who was the most celebrated artist of his time. She is depicted reclining on a backless sofa, a style that by the end of the 19th century had come to be called a récamier. She wears an Empire-line dress and short hair, which were the height of fashion in France at that time. The woman’s gaze is candid and direct, but her body is turned away, unapproachable. There are many theories as to why the portrait remained unfinished. Reportedly Juliette was irked by David’s slowness. Another story is that she resented the fact that David lightened the shade of her hair, because it did not suit his color scheme. In any case, she commissioned another portrait from François Gérard. It is said that when he learned of this, David refused to continue. “Madame,” he reportedly declared, “ladies have their caprices; so do painters. Allow me to satisfy mine by keeping your portrait in its present state.” This decision may have been beneficial, for the stark severity of the picture gives it much of its impact.

A model and a muse, as well as a patroness and collector, Juliette Récamier was one of the most frequently painted women of her time.

Juliette Récamier was the epicenter of worldly life in the first decades of the 19th century.

Very conscious of her personal image, she controlled it thoroughly and ensured its proliferation by calling on the most well-known masters for her portraits and statues (including David, Gérard, Chinard and Canova).

François Gérard painted her.

Portrait de Juliette Récamier. In 1801, she ordered this portrait by François Gérard, which was very soon considered to be one of the painter’s masterpieces. He first planned to show her as a standing nude, but finally decided on this less daring composition. He painted her according to the fashion that socialites of the time fought over for their portraits: she is seated on an Antique chair, wearing a fashionable white dress in the Greek style that accentuates the body and wrapped in a brightly colored shawl. The way the work is executed brings out the delicate features and charm of Juliette Récamier, which were universally admired. Madame Récamier was fully satisfied with her portrait and, before making a gift of it to Prince Augustus of Prussia in 1822, she had copies of it distributed through engravings. Juliette Récamier was celebrated in French Empire society for her beauty and love affairs. Married at fifteen to a wealthy lawyer who may have been her natural father, she had a loveless, unconsummated marriage and carried on numerous flagrant affairs, the most celebrated with the Prussian Prince Augustus, the youngest brother of King Frederick II. In her Parisian townhouse, she held a fashionable literary salon frequented by the political and educated elite. Some of the most accomplished portraitists of the era sculpted, drew, and painted her image. Chinard's terracotta bust, considered one of the most successful at capturing her spirit and beauty, was produced in several different versions in both clay and marble.

Joseph Chinard sculpted her.

Bust of Juliette Récamier. Coyly looking down, Madame Récamier holds a veil across her chest. The sheath both demurely conceals and reveals her breasts. Sculptor Joseph Chinard cleverly compensated for the artificiality of the bust form by elongating the bust to mid-torso and covering the transition between the body and pedestal with drapery, creating a work of surprising naturalism. The softly modeled limbs and the slight twists of her head and shoulders suggest a living presence while the upswept hairstyle suggests Récamier's elegance .

Artists seemed unable to resist her.

Antonio Canova. Tête idéale, Juliette Récamier en Béatrice (1822).

But her life was hardly an uninterrupted progression of fashionable evenings.

Madame Récamier's salon attracted people opposed to Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon had little patience for independent centers of political influence, particularly ones over which he had no control. Her relationship with his regime deteriorated, and in 1811 she was ordered to leave Paris.

She traveled, lived for periods elsewhere in France and Europe, and eventually returned.

Her later life became closely associated with the Abbaye-aux-Bois, a former convent on the Left Bank. She lived there for roughly three decades, but retirement did not mean disappearance. Once again, people came to her. Her salon attracted writers, musicians, artists, scholars and politicians.

Among the most important was François-René de Chateaubriand, a French writer, politician, diplomat, and historian who influenced French literature of the 19th century.

Chateaubriand became Madame Récamier's intimate companion during the later decades of their lives. Their relationship - intellectual, emotional and deeply affectionate - became one of the celebrated relationships of nineteenth-century literary Paris. He died in 1848.

Madame Récamier followed him the next year, dying in Paris in 1849.

She was seventy-one.

Six Floors, Six Récamiers

More than 175 years later, she is still receiving visitors.

This is perhaps my favorite detail about the Hôtel Récamier.

The hotel has six floors, and on each floor is a niche containing a bust of Madame Récamier.

But these are not simply six identical reproductions of a nineteenth-century sculpture.

Each Madame Récamier has been reimagined in the manner of a different modern artist.

The inspirations include Daniel Buren, Nikki de Saint Phalle, Christo, Arman, Jean Dubuffet and Yves Klein.

So, you step from the elevator and meet Madame Récamier again. And again. And again.

Six floors. Six interpretations. Six versions of the same woman.

One may seem playful. Another abstract. Another brightly colored. Another unmistakably influenced by Pop Art.

The woman who posed for David and Gérard has somehow wandered through two centuries of art history and emerged differently on every floor.

It is clever without being overwhelming.

And it captures something important about memory.

We do not really remember historical figures as they were. We reinvent them. Each generation looks at them through its own eyes.

The six Récamiers make that idea wonderfully literal.

A Hotel That Doesn't Shout

The same restraint characterizes the rest of the hotel.

The Récamier is small - just twenty-four rooms - and the interiors were redesigned by Jean-Louis Deniot. Rather than making every room identical, the hotel was conceived around different palettes, fabrics and decorative schemes. An account of its redesign describes six color schemes and some 150 fabrics.

There is a comfortable salon downstairs rather than an enormous lobby. There is a small interior courtyard. The atmosphere is closer to an elegant private residence than to a conventional international hotel.

That seems particularly appropriate for a hotel named after Madame Récamier.

Her fame, after all, was built not in palaces or public auditoriums but in rooms.

People came through her door. They sat. They talked. They argued. They listened. They exchanged ideas.

The room became important because of the people inside it.

Staying With History

There is no claim that Madame Récamier herself lived in this particular building on Place Saint-Sulpice. The connection is commemorative rather than biographical.

But perhaps that makes the hotel more interesting.

It is not attempting to be a museum.

Instead, it plays with her legacy.

Her name is on the door. Her image waits beside the elevator. The decorative language nods toward the Directoire and later French design while remaining unmistakably contemporary.

Outside is Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the part of Paris that would itself become synonymous with writers, artists, philosophers and cafés.

And on every floor Madame Récamier is waiting.

Not quite the same Madame Récamier.

Christo sees one woman.

Yves Klein sees another.

And perhaps that is an unexpectedly appropriate tribute to someone whose appearance was painted, drawn, sculpted, described, and discussed throughout her life.

More than two centuries ago, people traveled to see Madame Récamier's famous rooms.

Today, we travel to Paris and stay in a hotel bearing her name.

There is a pleasing symmetry in that.

Each morning we could step outside into Place Saint-Sulpice and begin walking through Paris.

Each evening we could return through the small doorway of the Hôtel Récamier, cross the lobby, enter the elevator and rise through a building populated by six different versions of a woman who had once been one of the most famous women in the city.

Paris does this remarkably well.

History rarely announces itself with a sign saying history happened here.

Sometimes it is simply embedded in a name. Sometimes in a painting. Sometimes in a piece of furniture.

And sometimes you step out of an elevator and find Madame Récamier quietly waiting for you.

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