Pompeii No.45: Refinished Regency Chairs

Last August I posted about four Regency chairs that were a gift from my friend Sandy. I talked about them and their interesting history in Pompeii No. 24, here.

The chairs were painted an awful mustard yellow, and had very dated upholstery. When I took them to a local refinisher, I discovered that they were made of mahogany, but that they also had endured several repairs. The refinisher insisted that he could redo them so that I'd never notice the repairs, but he doesn't know me too well! I opted to paint them instead.

kohlerinteriors.com

I toyed with the idea of painting my chairs black and gold and upholstering them in a red fabric (which might have approximated the handsome Regency chairs above) but in the end, I decided to use colors from the mural. It's a small room, after all, and I wanted the chairs to complement rather than overshadow the art.

I had the chairs painted a color to match Sherwin Williams' "Arresting Auburn," and had them upholstered in a moire silk to match Sherwin Williams' "Alaea." Those are the two colors that one sees as the mural's columned backgrounds.

One of the refinished chairs

Here's one of the chairs in place. The chair and mural colors are more in sync than this photograph shows. Note that the back of the chair is level with the painted chair rail.

click to enlarge

Here's the first full view of the Pompeii Room as it appears today. Because the room is quite small, the chairs will eventually be grouped around a small table that will fit either under the window or against the wall opposite the right-hand doorway.

There are still details to address — the table I mentioned, a lamp for the table, a window treatment to replace the venetian blinds that I've been graying out, the tympanum that my faithful commentors urged me to detail, and the painting of a marble plaque to go over the window.

Those will all happen in due time.

But don't go away!! In my next posting, the mural of the Pompeii Room will migrate to the next room. I hope you'll be there for the next chapter!
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Pompeii No.44: The Moulding & Chair Rail

I often paint mouldings and frames into the art I do on canvas, like the detail above. As I was working on this canvas (which is as yet unfinished), I thought it would be fun to incorporate such a moulding as an element of the Pompeii Room. Maybe a little simpler, though.

The moulding I settled on was borrowed from this exceptional stone entrance that I photographed in New York City.

As you can see from this early diagram (used in Pompeii No. 13), it was almost from the beginning my intention to have a chair rail and moulding separating the green bar from the red wainscoting. So let's get started.

click to enlarge

Here's how the chair rail and moulding look today. The green takes on a very different quality now that it's framed by the yellow and not immediately juxtaposed to that deep red. Below are other images of the room, and its new moulding.

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Pompeii No.43: The Right Pompeian Red

commons.wikimedia.org

You may remember that when I started painting the Pompeii Room, I chose an earthy red that Sherwin Williams calls Ablaze. The Ablaze paint chip looks like the square below.

Certain paint colors — like red and yellow — can be tricky. When I study paint chips, I look at them in different lights, including taking the chip outdoors to see it in natural light. Nonetheless, the translation from chip to wall can be surprising. In my case, the almost brick red of the chip turned into a bright red on the wall.

While Ablaze was a little too bright for my specific purpose, it probably would have been the hue that the Pompeians themselves preferred.

activeartist.net  |  www.mining.com  |  commons.wkimedia.org  |  www.wildcolours.co.uk

The Pompeians derived their reds from the earth, using — from left to right — red ochre, iron ore, hematite and madder root. The image on the far left (of red ochre) is from the Wilgie Mia Mine in Australia.

Of course, when working with stuff that was quite brown in its raw state, a brighter color would be the most preferred. The best red of Pompeii was a vermilion made from the cinnabar mineral. We've come to associate the word cinnabar with fine Asian objets d'art like the box below, in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

photo by R. Weller/Cochise College  |  collections.vam.ac.uk

The Pompeian paint made from cinnabar was 16 times more expensive than the paint made from red ochre, and the raw materials to make the paint would have been supplied by the wealthy client.

Despite the prestige of a bright red made from cinnabar, I opted to use a darker red, more like red ochre. My thought was that the darker red would better complement the auburn that is the base color for the upper panels. I went with a color Sherwin Williams calls Cochineal, and above you can see the difference between the before and after.

I bought two quarts of Cochineal and began painting over the original red. To my great dismay, the darker red would not cover the brighter red! I went to Sherwin Williams (I am not remunerated for mentioning the brand), and the employees there informed me that I would need to cover the original red with a gray primer, and then paint at least three coats of the Cochineal red.

gettyimages.com

 I have to admit that for a moment I reverted to an earlier mode of expression.

Here's the wainscoting brought back to a gray primer. The paint store said I would need a least three coats of the new red, but in fact I painted four coats of Cochineal.

Here you can see the progression from Ablaze to gray to Cochineal. The Cochineal is essentially the color of the window frame's original shadow.

And here's the revised, deeper red. I still have to paint the switch plate, but I'm leaving that for a little later. In my next posting, we'll do something fun with that bar of gray, so I hope you'll check back then!
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