December, 1919 
35 
THE GALLIC INVASION OF AMERICAN HOMES 
A Worthy Furniture Infiltration as Shown in the New York Apartment of 
Paul A. Isler, Esq. Decorations by Alavoine & Co. 
A LL our phraseology just now seems 
. to be tinged more or less by a 
military tone. We may, therefore, 
without qualm, make use of the term 
invasion in the parlance of interior 
decoration. An invasion is not neces¬ 
sarily repugnant to the invaded, and 
when the invaded have something 
tangible to gain and nothing at all 
to lose by the invasion, as in the in¬ 
stance about to be considered, it is 
distinctly a thing to be welcomed. 
For a long time French styles in 
furniture and in interior decoration, 
for the most part, were regarded with 
lurking suspicion, if not with down¬ 
right distrust and open animosity, 
because indiscreet decorators of vulgar 
taste in the second half of the 19 th 
Century disfigured and deluged the 
homes of so many wealthy parvenus 
with a super-gorgeous splurging of 
all that was worst in the most extreme 
manifestations of 18 th Century 
French decorative art. 
The gilded pill they administered, 
to their clients in particular and to 
the public in general, produced a 
nausea that wrought a cruel injustice 
to French art and caused us a loss 
COSTEN FITZ-GIBBON 
In one corner of the living room, stands an antique Louis 
Seize commode with an exquisite design in marquetry, which 
has a terra cotta group by Clodion as its sole ornamentation 
from which we have only begun to 
recover, now that a truer understand¬ 
ing of French decorative principles 
has at last made some appreciable 
headway amongst us. Cosmopolitan 
as we are inclined to be in our tastes, 
we are never loath to accept, from 
whatever source, a mode that we are 
convinced possesses intrinsic merit. 
And that such merit in full measure 
exists in French decorative modes of 
the 18th Century can no longer be 
gainsaid, even by those whose ac¬ 
quaintance therewith is altogether 
superficial. 
But, quite apart from all purely 
general considerations, the accom¬ 
panying illustrations of an apartment 
show several pertinent truths that we 
shall do well to keep in mind. In 
the first place, they convince one of 
the fitness of the more restrained 
expressions of 18th Century French 
modes, either in their strict historical 
interpretation or modified by appro¬ 
priate adaptations for the appoint¬ 
ment of small or moderate-sized 
apartments. The apartment in ques¬ 
tion is by no means extravagantly 
large. 
A harmony in soft browns is the living room, with its well-proportioned paneling in the natural colored French oak, and 
Regence settee and chairs covered in mellow-toned Beauvais tapestry. The table desk is a reproduction of one at the 
Louvre, and the crimson hangings add a brilliant note 
