Banqueting Hall

The large Banqueting Hall of the Couven-Museum reflects the bourgeois self-conception towards the end of the 18th century. As in the courtly castle architecture, the bourgeoisie built representative rooms – banqueting halls and salons – in which chamber music concerts and receptions were given. The entrance to the hall is via generous winged doors with supraports from the former „Kerstenscher Pavillon“. Like the panelling modelled on designs by Johann Joseph Couven, they too show the typical Aachen Rococo carvings.

While the five windows look out onto the Hühnermarkt with a panorama of medieval Aachen with the Granus Tower, the large 18th-century canvas paintings bring a view of idealised landscapes. Idyllic scenes, quite in accordance with the spirit of „Folies-Bergère“, in which the members of the Rococo society with relish abandon themselves to the staging of simple life, dominate the paintings. Influenced by the playful and pretty paintings of Watteau or Boucher, painting studios in France and the Netherlands created innumerable examples of such landscape paintings. During the restoration work on the Couven-Museum from 1999 to 2002 the painting was elaborately restored by the Cologne „Group for Conservation and Restoration“. The mounting, specially developed for the Couven-Museum, ensures there is ventilation behind the painting, but also allows for a presentation of this wall-hanging-type decoration very close to the wall.

The Liège glass cabinet, already exhibited in the hall of the Ludwigs-Fey family in the first Couven-Museum, is, unlike the homogeneous Aachen furniture, clearly made up of two separate parts: a massive lower construction and a set-back glass cabinet.