Jose Emilio Terry y Dorticos (1890–1969), known as Emilio Terry was a Cuban artist, interior designer, artist and landscape artist, best known for his career in France. Creating furniture, tapisteries and objets d'art, he was influenced by the château de Chenonceau, acquired by his family, and he created a style that was at once classical and baroque, which he called the "Louis XIX style".
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The Terry y Dorticos family was Hispano-Irish in origin, and had made its fortune in the sugar plantations on Cuba. His mother Antonia Terry, married to Francesco Terry, was a great beauty and after 1897 she and her husband moved to New York, where she and her daughter Natica were painted in 1897 by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury - Mrs Terry's portrait is in a London private collection, Natica's portrait is unlocated; and after their daughter Natica's marriage to Count Stanislas de Castellane and her move to France shortly afterwards, the Terrys followed her there, where eventually they acquired the Chateau de Rochecotte; Antonia Terry is buried in a mausoleum in the grounds. For 30 years, until the end of the First World War, Emilio Terry divided his life between Paris and Havana.
Emilio owned a villa on the Côte d'Azur and a Paris apartment at 2, place du Palais-Bourbon. He bought the Paris residence from Boni de Castellane in 1914.[1] Boni records in his Mémoires : "I didn't have much money. […] M. Terry, brother of my sister in law Stanislas […], fell in love with my apartment, and […] and asked me to give over the lease to him. […] I sold my furniture to this noble Cuban. » [2]
On 24 June 1934, Emilio Terry bought from his brother in law Stanislas the historic château de Rochecotte, near Langeais (Indre-et-Loire), famous for having belonged to Dorothée de Courlande, duchesse of Dino and received Talleyrand on frequent visits. Pendant 35 ans, Emilio Terry restored this château and decorated it in the right period style.[3] He bequeathed Rochecotte to his great-nephew Henri-Jean de Castellane, but this was sold in the early 1980s and is now a country house hotel.
At once neoclassical and baroque, Emilio Terry designed furniture, tapisteries, objets, houses, gardens, and the interior decor of apartments and châteaux. He launched an architectural style which he named the "style Louis XVII", an imaginary style freely inspired by historical examples, notably those of Palladio or Claude Nicolas Ledoux.
In 1933, he realised a model of a double-spiral house, called "en colimaçon" ("snail-style"), which illustrated one of his theories, that the art of architecture expressed a "dream to be realised" ("rêve à réaliser").[4] A 1936 portrait of Emilio Terry by Salvador Dali shows this and other models in the foreground. Expressions of the "style Louis XVII" can be found in the work of the landscape artist Achille Duchêne and the designer Madeleine Castaing (in the latter case an amicable rivalry arose between her and Terry in the 1950s, with them both claiming to be the author of a certain motifs[5]
Among his clients, Emilio Terry worked for the Greek arms-manufacturer Stavros Niarchos as well as Rainier III of Monaco (for whom he decorated an apartment intend for princess Grace [6]) and the Beauvau-Craon family (for whom he redesigned the gardens around their château d'Haroué in Lorraine in the French style).
From the 1950s, Emilio Terry took on the interior design of the Château de Groussay, at Montfort-l'Amaury (Yvelines), acquired in 1939 by the multi-millionaire Carlos de Beistegui. He decorated each piece, designed the furniture, created an Italian-style theatre for artists of the Comédie-Française, designed a new park à l'anglaise and added 18th century style buildings.[7]
The château and parc de Groussay appeared in Marc Allégret's film Le Bal du comte d'Orgel, with Jean-Claude Brialy, and the bibliothèque de Groussay was the setting for Frédéric Mitterrand's television broadcast Plaisir de France.