Large Art Nouveau Decorative Panel with the Temple of Love and Swans, Autumn Landscape, Circa 1900

This large painted panel features an autumn landscape of romantic inspiration: a circular colonnaded temple of love, crowned with a dome, stands on an islet at the edge of a pool where two white swans move. Tall trees with russet and gold foliage frame the scene, treated in a soft palette of greens, ochres and blues. The composition is set within a reserve with re-entrant spandrels, bordered by a fillet on a cream ground, and the whole is held by a moulded wooden moulding. This type of large mural panel, painted circa 1900, belongs to the décor of the Art Nouveau period: intended to adorn interiors, cafes or shopfronts, it draws on the repertoire of the 18th-century follies — temple of love, swans, bodies of water — revisited with the landscape sensibility and chromatic softness of the turn of the century. Condition report: Good general condition for a painted décor of more than a century old. Network of surface craquelure conferring an authentic patinated charm, small visible split at the centre of the composition and scattered wear at the border, without consequence for the reading of the scene. A large décor full of poetry, ideal at the head of a bed, above a sideboard or as the focal point of a living room.