Paneled Room (salon de compagnie)

Look closely at the painted panels by Jean-Siméon Rousseau de la Rottière, one of the best decorative painters in Paris. The ornament is called grotesque, after the designs found in the buried rooms of Nero's palace in Rome, and it is neoclassicism at its most refined, fine lines and pastel tints on a light ground. Ledoux, a visionary who designed ideal cities and the toll gates of Paris, gave the room its crisp proportions and the plaster reliefs over the doors. The Getty's decorative arts rooms are arranged so that you pass from the heavy gilt of Louis the Fourteenth through this lightness to the Empire, and the change is easy to feel.

The story behind it is darker. Hosten's money came from a sugar plantation in Saint-Domingue worked by some two hundred enslaved people, and as this room was being finished the revolution that would create Haiti was under way. Hosten returned to the colony and was executed there in eighteen hundred and two. The Getty acquired the panelling in nineteen ninety eight and installed it here with furniture and objects that the original owner might have recognised.

Did You Know? The J. Paul Getty Museum began as a display of French furniture in Getty's own ranch house in Malibu, and decorative arts remain one of its deepest collections.