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WHEN THE SS Normandie arrived in New York City on June 3, 1935, at the end of its maiden voyage from Le Havre, it was the largest, fastest, and most luxurious ocean liner ever constructed. Built by the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique and subsidized by the French government, the Normandie epitomized Art Deco taste, which had been brought to the world's attention at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. A special issue of the journal L'Illustration, celebrating the launch of the Normandie, called it "une exposition flottante de tous les arts décoratifs français."* 1
The walls of the lavish first-class grand salon of the Normandie (measuring 27 feet high by 112 feet long by 90 feet wide) were almost entirely covered with four murals composed of reverse-painted glass panels.2 3 The overall design of the murals was created by Jean Dupas (1882-1964), and the panels were executed by Jacques-Charles Champigneulle (1907-1955). Each of the four murals was 20 feet high and 50 feet wide, and each was subdivided into three vertical sections that folded over the edges of the cruciform room like a screen.' The collective subject is usually called The History of Navigation, while the individual mythological scenes in the four murals were titled The Birth of Aphrodite, The Chariot of Thetis, The Chariot of Poseidon, and The Rape of Europa. The panels now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which are the focus of this article, originated from The Chariot of Poseidon and were located in the port forward corner of the grand salon.
The History of Navigation combined mythological sea creatures and historical ships in bold, almost Mannerist, compositions (Fig. 1). The life-size figures (human and animal), the smoke emanating from the ships, and other details were modeled with black paint. The paint was applied by stippling in broad areas to produce a variety of matte tones, with very few lines. Highlights were created by selectively removing the paint from the stippled areas (Fig. 2). A few details were picked out in pastel pink and blue paint, while vast expanses of the scenes were filled in with gold- and silver-colored metal leaf in different shades and degrees of reflectivity, giving the whole a dazzling mirrorlike...