The drawing and dining Rooms

The house’s new owner has suggested an answer in the polychrome painted décor that now adorns the ceilings and parts of the walls, an ensemble whose motifs and iconography were entirely dreamt up by Christie and the decorative painter François Roux on the basis of historic examples to be found in the region. In shimmering colors – blue and yellow for the drawing room, pink and green for the dining room – a charming, naïve picture of country life is evoked. But these images of culinary plenty, rural customs and floral splendor are also a way for Christie to portray himself – not so much literally as allegorically. For among these typically seventeenth-century motifs can be found the initials WLC – William Lincoln Christie – and spades, flutes and musical scores that allude to the life’s work of a gardener-musician.