Cast Iron
Height: 72" - Width: 120"
Weight: 1450 lbs
In the 1930s, the French Line commissioned top artists and designers to create a floating showpiece for national culture and industrial might: the SS Normandie. This ship, the fastest of its day, was the last great expression in the history of French Art Deco and was a tribute to elegance and glamour.
Our monumental cast iron plaque comes from the first class grill room of the Normandie and was originally topped by an engraved glass hood by Max Ingrand. The grill room's metal furniture was designed by Jean-Maurice Rothschild. Our plaque depicts imagery of the hunt — fowl, beasts, guns, and even a antlered prize, are all here accumulated in playful abstraction before a field a wheat.
The sculptor, Charles Hairon, is famous for his collaboration with the designer Henri Rapin. He is also the creator of an important bas-relief on the façade of the current Palais de Chaillot, located on the Trocadéro esplanade in Paris, created for the 1937 International Exposition.