Many of the most famous artists and designers of the Art Deco era were employed to decorate the interiors of the luxury liner SS Normandie, a virtual floating palace to that most glamorous of inter-war design movements.
Among them was the French artist Jean Dupas, born in Bordeaux and renowned for his large-scale mural paintings. Dupas was commissioned to decorate the Grand Salon, one of the Normandie’s largest spaces.
He devised a scheme depicting the history of navigation on 56 painted glass panels conceived in a technique known as verre eglomisé and featuring maritime and mythological subjects.