Emilio Terry

Emilio Rene Terry y Sánchez (1890–1969), known as Emilio Terry was a French architect, artist, interior decorator and landscape designer of Cuban-Irish ancestry. Creating furniture, tapestries 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 XVII style". Life Terry was born in Paris on 13 September 1890<ref>Arizzoli-Clementel, Pierre. Emilio Terry: Architecte et decorateur", Paris: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2013.</ref> to Francisco Terry y Dorticós, scion of a prominent Cuban family, Spanish and Irish in origin, that made its fortune in the sugar plantations. His mother, a great beauty, was the former Antonia Sánchez. His paternal grandfather was sugar baron Tomás Terry, a Venezuelan-born Irishman known as the "Cuban Croesus", and his paternal grandmother was Teresa Dorticós y Gómez de Leys, a daughter of Andrés Dorticós y Casson, the millionaire Governor of Cienfuegos, Cuba.Ben Macintyre, The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief (Random House Digital, Inc., Apr 5, 2011), page 130 One of his uncles, Antonio Terry, married the American soprano Sybil Sanderson. After 1897 Francisco Terry moved his family to New York City, where Antonia and her daughter, Natividad (later Countess Stanislas de Castellane), were painted in 1897 by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury. The family later moved to France, where Francisco Terry's brother José-Emilio—his son's namesake—had purchased Château de Chenonceaux in 1891."Blois, Amboise, Chambord and Chenonceaux", American architect and architecture, Volume 37 (Hearst Magazines, Inc., 1892), page 39 The château was sold in 1896 to Francisco Terry. Emilio Terry 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. 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. »