Portrait of
Vincent
Fourcade
Vincent Gabriel Fourcade
(February 27 1934 –
December 23 1992)
was a French
interior designer and the business and life
partner of Robert Denning.
"Outrageous luxury is what our clients want," he once said.
Family and youth
"Born...to
a family of distinguished French aesthetes,
the designer spent many of his formative years in a twenty-bedroom
house replete with made-to-order Majorelle furnishings." "I learned my
trade by going out every evening as a young man," he told art
historian
Rosamond Bernier. "I went
to every pretty house in France and Italy and other places too, and
I remembered them all, even down to what was on each little table."
Vincent was educated at University College London.
New York City
A handsome eligible bachelor, he was never without invitations in
the United States either.
He tried a career in banking, the business of
his father and grandfather in Paris
. He
met Robert Denning in 1959.
Denning a protégé of Edgar de Evia, had acquired an eye for design
and effect from working with the photographer on sets for many
fabric and furniture accounts, and with whom he shared one of the
most magnificent Manhattan
apartments on the top three floors of the Rhinelander
Mansion
. It would be here that early clients such as
Lillian Bostwick Phipps and
her husband Ogden Phipps would be
entertained as de Evia was spending more and more time on his
estate in Greenwich,
Connecticut
. While Vincent would take Ogden Phipps to
good dealers where he would spend millions of dollars on signed
pieces of French furniture, Bob would take Lillian Bostwick Phipps
down to 11th Street. "It infuriated Vincent. He used to say 'Bobby,
you have ruined the Phippses for me by giving Mrs. Phipps that
strange appetite for 11th Street.'"
Denning & Fourcade
Slowly the pair became known for an extreme of luxury compared to
le goût Rothschild. An early
party that they styled included covering the floor with a hundred
old raccoon coats. In 1960 they formed the firm of
Denning & Fourcade, Inc.
which would for over forty-five years set a standard for a list of
clients that read like a social registry. Referred to in
New York magazine as
"...the Odd Couple. Boyish, down-to-earth Denning is the hardest
worker, while Fourcade sniffs the client air to gauge if it's
socially registered before he goes beyond the fringe." Early
clients included old friends that he had known socially such as
Michel David-Weill.
Jackie Kennedy met his mark and
two of her notes to him survive, the first thanking him for his
letter after the assassination of her brother-in-law
Robert F. Kennedy,
with the cancellation over her signature since as the widow of a
president of the United
States
she still had franking privileges.
She lost this when she remarried. The other, a handwritten note
postmarked
October 28,
1976 over a thirteen cent stamp —
- Dear Vincent, I have never eaten such delicious food in such
incredibly beautiful surroundings in my life. Thank you so very
very much. affectionately Jackie.
The return address also handwritten – Onassis, 1040 5th Ave.
Homes
Living with AIDS
Early in the 1980s Fourcade contracted
AIDS. He
kept his looks and strength through most of that decade as Denning
and he would divide their time between New York and Paris, crossing
the Atlantic on the
Concorde. His older
brother
Xavier Fourcade, the
internationally known contemporary art dealer, died of the disease
in 1987 at
St.
Lukes's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City.
By 1990
the disease would take control his life and early in 1992 Denning
& Fourcade would with a nurse take the Concorde one last time
to Paris where he would live his remaining days in their apartment
at 16 rue de Chazelles, just up the street from the studio of the
sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi who is best
known for the Statue of
Liberty
.
References
External links
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