The vanished decor of the City Hall

The Salon de la Paix at the Hôtel de Ville was one of Delacroix's most ambitious decorative ensembles — and one that no longer exists. The room, and the paintings within it, burned during the Commune in 1871, leaving only preparatory studies, written descriptions, and a handful of period photographs.

This area assembles every surviving trace — sketches, contemporary critical accounts, archival photographs, and comparable surviving decors elsewhere — into a digital reconstruction of the Salon as it stood before its destruction.

The reconstruction is deliberately annotated with its own uncertainty: where a source is thin, the model says so, rather than filling the gap with invention.