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Author	Topic: Serious bed
Patrick Vyvyan Posts: 640 Registered: May 2003	posted 07-23-2003 01:23 PM [01-1159] If I don't get to spend eternity in a "châsse", this bed will do nicely for my old age: Before you all accuse me of being vulgar, I should add it was made by Christofle at their Saint-Denis workshop in 1882. "The Christofle bed, made of solid silver, was built for a maharajah in 1882. At each of its corners was a life-size painted statue of a naked woman, holding a fan. When the maharajah lay down, his weight would start a music box in the mattresses and the statues would wave their fans. The bed weighed over a ton." IP: Logged
Anuh Posts: 190 Registered: Jan 2003	posted 07-30-2003 01:14 PM quote: Originally posted by Patrick Vyvyan: If I don't get to spend eternity in a "châsse", this bed will do nicely for my old age: Beautiful piece, but can you imagine trying to SLEEP in it! The music box alone would be enough to keep this old grandma awake! ------------------ Anuh IP: Logged
Kayvee Posts: 204 Registered: Oct 2004	posted 10-04-2008 04:57 PM This amazing object was made by Christofle in 1882-83 as a special, top-secret commission by the governor of the southern Punjab state of Bahwalpur, S.M.K. Nawab Sadik Muhammad Khan IV. The wood frame bed is covered with silver and vermeil. The four life-size bronze statues are painted in natural skin tones, have moving eyes and articulated arms and wear human hair wigs. They represent the Maharajah’s ideals of feminine beauty – French, Spanish, Italian and Greek. At his request the music box played six tunes – four happy and two melancholy. The President of Christofle tracked down the bed in the 1960’s in Pakistan where the descendants of the Marharajah did not want to part with it. Although it seems kind of silly today, I think the bed represents a time when anything seemed possible and companies were confident in their manufacturing capability. A reproduction of one of the statues is in the Christofle museum near Paris. She moves her arms to a tune by Gounod. I don’t know if silver covered beds were a tradition among the elite in India. In the big Art Deco exhibit that started at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2003 with stops in North America, there was a fabulous India-made silver bed dating to 1922. IP: Logged
bascall Posts: 1629 Registered: Nov 99	posted 10-04-2008 10:39 PM Terrific write up on this bed. Thank you! IP: Logged

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