Ancien hôtel Lecourt

English translation

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History

The building preserves vaulted rooms on the ground floor. In the 18th century, a campaign of works pierces seven Italian windows on the ground floor and appears to correspond with the creation, on the first floor, of five small iron balconies. The building has retained its 18th-century interior decoration (plasterwork and paintings). These decorations are unique to Montpellier in the scope and quality of execution of the programme. On the first floor is a room decorated with grotesques and mythological scenes. The walls are entirely hung with canvases painted in oil around 1720. The Chinese salon was to have been initially decorated with at least three large panels of canvases painted in oil and other smaller elements (missing overdoor) in purple monochrome probably dating from the 1750s. They represent fantastical scenes taking place in a landscape (hunting, offering to an idol, military triumph...). Only one door with painted medallions remains, a plasterwork chimney and perhaps another sealed door. The rest of the decoration was removed in the 1960s and dispersed. On the second floor, the Orientalist salon is entirely decorated with oil paintings on moulded yellow panels and wood elements, illustrated with exotic decorative compositions. The fourth floor retains a fragment of mouldings with an overdoor painted in the Chinese taste. In the 19th century, the owners had the façades retouched.