I Come to Sans Souci After a Life-Time’s Wait «

I Come to Sans Souci After a Life-Time’s Wait

Friday 9th May 2014

Ever since I saw in a picture book Sans Souci, the Summer Pavilion of King Frederick the Great at Potsdam, I’ve craved it. That was in the 60s at Prep. In the 80s, Val and I planned to do our own Rococo but never got round to it. He was going to learn scagliola which is fake marble essentially done with Plaster of Paris and any fragments of stone you’ve got in stock. It’s the smoothing down and polishing that takes days if not years so a whole suite of console tables would have been quite ambitious.

The Rococo flowered from the Baroque which as architecture has no flat surfaces. Rococo went further; forms begin to dissolve. Some have suggested that it is an Art of glass and mirrors, tittering on the brink of disappearance, so fine and intricate and fragile.

So on Sunday at last I came to Sans Souci, bused in with the elderly American cruisers from the River Cruise and minus Val who was unable to attend owing to over-saucing. Such a shame. He’s lived for the Rococo.

It was a freezing cold day. Modern Sans Souci has become enmeshed in roads, the garden is a suburban park. The Pavilion sits anyway on a somewhat charmless bare gravel expanse. But what a Pavilion! No building like it. Really quite compact for a great emperor’s palace, more of a lodge, slung low on the ground, a most satisfying lozenge but at the same time swirling upwards with its bizarre decoration. Brackets support the roof out of which burst naked figures in stone. This is the freedom of the Rococo, the freedom to fly away altogether.

Within, you’ve never seen such a swirl of gilded carved palm trees and sea shells, mirrors and glass. In the Music Room, sculpted flower garlands are strewn about the ceiling. The chandelier is flowers. But blank space, where decoration has exhausted itself and petered out, is part of the strange, unsettling effect. In the slender picture gallery the pink damask settees were purely decorative, too narrow to sit on but essential for colour and vigour of a more solid kind to try to anchor the filigree enthusiasm of the ceiling.

In ordinary life, the rococo is seen when somebody blows bubbles or scatters glitter. Sans Souci lives best in the imagination. When actually there it is troublesome that there are floors in particular and the rooms are so dark, as all historic interiors these days, with the blinds drawn. The light should be pouring in through the windows. But do go and imagine. It is a glory.