Napa Valley Art Institute
Première Partie · La Salle de Bal
The Grand Ballroom
The social heart of the chateau · two evenings folded into one room
Eighty feet of parquet de Versailles. Crystal chandeliers descended from the ceiling moulding. Gilded boiserie picked out in candle-warmed gold. The ballroom does not choose between the centuries — it lets you walk between them. Begin under the candelabra of a French court evening. Stay until midnight, and the room reassembles around a jazz band, beaded gowns, and the long champagne flutes of nineteen twenty-six.
Choose the evening
Period dancing
A French chateau ballroom · candlelight · period dance
The evening opens under crystal chandeliers and the gilt boiserie of the chateau's grandest room. A small string ensemble strikes the first bourrée. The dancers — in court costume — fold into the parquet de Versailles, and the guests step into the figure with them. This is the room the family has used to receive guests for three hundred years. It begins as it has always begun.
Programme · Period dancing
From the ballroom
I
The Sitting Nude on the wall
Modigliani · Kiki at sixteen · the centrepiece of the evening.
II
Live bidding, intimate
When the band takes its first break, the gavel begins next door.
III
Through the back corridor
Chagall on the walls. The bohemian room before the Grand Hall.