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The visit of the second Turkish delegation to Paris in 1742 stimulated the French elite's taste for exotic interior decoration known as turquerie. The comte d'Artois (later Charles X of France), for instance, was clearly fond of such fantasy décors, for he had two rooms in his apartment in the south wing of Versailles furnished in the "Turkish" manner. The second of these rooms, an intimate cabinet that doubled as a library, was created between April and November of 1781. It had pilasters painted with arabesques and was elaborately draped with costly fabrics.
Jean-Siméon Rousseau de la Rottière and his brother Jules-Hugues Rousseau, who worked in a number of French royal palaces, most likely painted the lighthearted arabesques, fanciful turbaned figures, naiads with entwined fish tails, floral garlands, and strings of pearls on the room's four doors.
A cameolike medallion is painted in monochrome against a blue marbleised fond and framed by simulated gilt molding on the panel shown here, which originally formed the upper half of one of the doors in the comte d'Artois's Turkish Cabinet. In the medallion a sultan or pasha sits on a throne surmounted by a crescent moon while two odalisques offer him a long-stemmed pipe.
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