ORIGINAL ART: RANGE ROVER AT THE LOUVRE
Exemplary design has always been a Range Rover hallmark. Its creative brilliance was recognised almost at once – in a display at the Louvre Palace.
In 1971, the year after its launch, the Range Rover assumed a leading role in an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. It was chosen to exemplify the most innovative, advanced and experimental British design.
Getting a Range Rover into a building dating from the 17th century was impossible. Instead, its ingenious designers created an exquisite scale model to match the real thing that was on display in the museum’s entrance hall.
This quarter-sized recreation was a work of art in its own right. Measuring more than 1,2 metres in length, it was finished to a very high level of detail.
Presented in red, it had full instrumentation and trim, operative doors and tailgate and folding seats. Accompanying illustrations interpreted the creation of the pioneering luxury SUV.
The exhibition, titled Idea and Form, was officially opened by HRH Princess Margaret. It ran for two months from April 1971 at the museum in the Pavillon de Marsan, the north-western wing of the Louvre Palace, in central Paris.
Then as now, the Range Rover displayed a design-led form with a lack of superfluous ornamentation. A vehicle that was both a working machine and a tasteful symbol of discernment and achievement.
Today’s Range Rover continues this bloodline, sitting at the head of a family and leading by example with breathtaking modernity and unmatched capability.
It is engineered for peerless refinement, from next-generation noise-cancelling headrest speakers to the all-wheel steering that gives it the smallest turning circle of any current Range Rover.
That 1971 scale model is preserved in the collection of the British Motor Museum as a unique reminder of the origins of one of the world’s leading luxury brands.
