18 Interiors


Jim Tompson founded the highly successful international silk company that bears his name today


by Denise Heywood


In bustling modern Bangkok, down an alley off a crowded street, is a tranquil corner of old Siam: Te Jim Tompson Museum. To visit it is to enter a magical world. Set in a fragrant tropical garden, this historic teak wood house is filled with antique Tai furniture, sculptures, bronzes, wood carvings, porcelain, ceramics,


paintings, manuscripts, calligraphy, votive plaques and


sacred Buddhist and Hindu objects, displayed within an atmospheric décor of shimmering silk. Tis recreation of Siam’s


rich


artistic heritage was the vision of one man, an American, Jim Tompson, who came here during the second world war as an army officer, fell in love with it and stayed. He was inspired to resuscitate ancient silk weaving traditions that were disappearing,


rescued hundreds of


weavers from poverty, provided silk for films such as Te King and I and created an exquisite home made from six original old teak houses where he became a legendary host. But his dream would not last. Fifty years ago this year, in 1967, at the height of his success and fame, Tompson went for a walk in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia while staying with friends and disappeared. Without any clues or evidence of what happened, his demise has remained steeped in mystery. But his life was one of brilliance, creativity and imagination, a celebration of the arts of Tailand. From the moment that James


Harrison Wilson Tompson, who was born in Greenville, Delaware, in 1906 to a prosperous family, arrived in Tailand in 1944 he felt an affinity with it. Parachuted in during World War II as an army officer who had started the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Princeton graduate was sent to help liberate the Northeast. When the war ended – Siam was renamed Tailand only in 1949 – he went to Bangkok and worked for the American Legation. Ten, with a group of affluent friends, some of whom were members of royalty, he embarked on a project to restore the dilapidated 19th-century Oriental Hotel, today one of the finest hotels in the world. But after a disagreement, he withdrew. Instead, Tompson, an aesthete and inveterate art collector, sought out the old markets where he discovered glorious hand-woven silk which he found he could sell. Realising that the skills these represented were vanishing in the aftermath of war, superceded by an influx of machine made silk from China, he began studying silk in the National Museum and finding old weavers in the Bangkrua district of the city to commission pieces from


ASIAN ART OCTOBER 2017


Jim Thompson in Bangkok


them. He co-founded Te Tai Silk Company in 1948, giving his weavers shares in the company. It went rapidly from strength to strength as he recreated intricate patterns and radiant colours, for which he had an innate taste and sensibility, favouring the rich magenta, purple, crimson, rose and cerise pink beloved of Tais, by using special artifical dyes that would last. Creating such a luxurious product in the beleaguered post war years, he soon found a market in America through his contact with the editor at Vogue magazine, Edna Woolman Chase, who enthusiastically featured it in the next issue. Shortly afterwards his silks were chosen for the 1956 film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Te King and I by its designer, Irene Sharaff, to adorn the handsome star Yul Brynner as King Mongkut and his captivating 80 children and their English governess Anna in the 1860s. In an age of predominantly American western films with rugged cowboys decked out in denim jeans and leather boots, Brynner’s appearance in silk and sequins, an earring dangling from one lobe, outshone all his rivals for dashing masculinity. Te questionable portrayal of the monarch, much criticised since, did nothing to diminish the success of the film. Tompson was launched. Te film’s glittering costumes in dazzling colours brought him wealth and fame. Visitors came from all over the world to his silk shop in Surawong Road and to meet an adventurous American in Southeast Asia whose hospitality became as renowned as his wares. From this success emerged the realisation of his dream of a traditional Tai house filled with the objects that he had already started voraciously collecting.


He gradually acquired six old


houses, ruen Tai derm, several from Ayutthaya and the central region, and reassembled them on land acquired alongside a klong, the Saen Saeb canal, close to the Bangkrua weavers. As William Warren writes in Jim Tompson: Te House on the Klong, his decision to ‘erect a traditional Tai house and live in it was a novel decision in the 1950s’. Wealthier people, he adds, would have used it as a


entertaining but lived in a Western building. Yet,


‘quaint touch of nostalgia’ architecturally


for the


vernacular Tai house in wood and bamboo is ideal for the tropics, on stilts to protect it from flooding in the rainy season, with open verandas for cool breezes and gabled, steeply pitched roofs for shade, the materials lending themselves to a rural way of life integrated harmoniously with the environment. Tese structures in teak, a strong wood resistant to termites and the elements and easy to carve, are elegant and graceful and prized


today throughout Southeast Asia where they have become scarce. Placed auspiciously, facing east or west, blessed by Teravada Buddhist monks before habitation, they would have a spirit house at the entrance for the Phra Phum, guardian spirit of the place, an ornate hamyon carved above the door to protect occupants from malevolent spirits, and a spirit altar in the main room decorated with offerings of flowers, incense and candles. As Professor Ruethai Chaichongrak points out in Te Tai House, History and Evolution, houses such as these were an integral part of a community and a social structure centred on Teravada Buddhism,


‘embodying ancient beliefs and a way of life that has almost vanished’. Tompson’s


house, whose


construction had been blessed by monks in an inaugural ceremony on 15 September 1958 and officially opened with ceremonies on 3 April 1959,


occupation. Tompson’s home, entertained nightly,


enchanted


Jim Tompson outside his house in Bangkok


visitors. To be seated at a 100-year- old carved teak dining table that once belonged to King Chulalongkorn (as a gaming table rather than for dining since they would have been seated on the floor for meals) and to gaze up at a 19th-century crystal chandelier from a former palace, was to immerse oneself in an exotic and romantic evocation of a bygone era. Although true to architectural traditions, many windows, originally on the outside of an old house, were ingeniously turned outside-in to become niches displaying objects such as 19th-century Burmese wood carved nats, spirit images, in the main living room, or a standing Buddha image in the study, its iconography


was deemed ready for where he


typical of that found in Lopburi province from the Dvaravati school dating back to the 8th century of early Northern Tailand.


Tis


contemplative limestone sculpture, the wide face with downcast eyes, the hair tightly curled to frame the forehead,


radiates serenity. Even


though hands and legs are missing, the torso, clothed in a simply incised robe of an ascetic monk, the uttarasanga, one shoulder uncovered, is one of quiet strength and control. Te other important Buddha image in the house is a sandstone Buddha, also from the Lopburi school, dating from the 13th century. Tis 80 cm tall statue is of the Buddha seated cross- legged in meditation, on a naga, right foot over the left, the hands folded in dhyana mudra, a mudra, or pang in Tai, being one of the main gestures of the Teravada Buddhist canon. With downcast eyes and subtle, gentle smile, the image is one of transcendent peace and is placed in a special alcove framed by an archway.


Clearly


Tompson felt a profound affinity with these sacred sculptures, displaying them not just as objets d’art but honouring their context by positioning them as they would be in a temple on a raised dais. It is flanked on either side, in niches, by small 12th-century limestone figures of Shiva and Uma in a style influenced by Khmer statuary. Among other significant bronze Buddhas is a small, fine, adorned one,


regally from the 13/14th


century, seated in bhumisparca mudra, calling the earth to witness, the diadem and pendants influenced by the Pala-Sena art of Bengal, India. Wood-carved images from the 19th century – earlier wood images perished in the humid climate – include an angel with hands joined in the traditional wai, and several temple doors, of the Bangkok-school style, with guardian deities carved within the rectangular space. Tompson admired Chinese blue and white porcelain, especially from the Yuan period (1271-1368), today of soaring value, and acquired many other plates, bowls and vases from as early as the 17th century, on display throughout the house. His collection of Bencharong, Tai-style porcelain made in China, its name referring to the multi-coloured aspect of pieces decorated in green, yellow, blue, black,


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36