The figure of Charles Baudelaire hangs heavily, like a whiff of opiated incense, in the enchanted air of the Wisteria Dining Room. This artificial paradise was designed by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer between 1910 and 1914 and has now been reconstructed in the new 19th-Century Galleries of the Metropolitan Museum.

It was part of Baudelaire’s aesthetic doctrine that the modern world, especially in Paris during the middle years of the 1800s, was an ugly place, and that anyone of an artistic temperament must take up arms against that ugliness. If, like Baudelaire and most of his bohemian confrères, one had limited resources, a fine vest, a lace cuff, a draft of opium, or a bowlful of hashish might prove an effective means of escape. But if you were as wealthy as Auguste Rateau (1863–1930), who commissioned the Wisteria Room and made his fortune in turbines and internal combustion engines, then you could create a far more enduring paradise on earth, one that engaged the most effete and febrile artists and artisans of the Belle Époque.

One of such was Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1865–1953), a largely forgotten figure in the evolution of Symbolism and Art Nouveau, who designed several rooms for Rateau’s house in Paris, at 10 bis Avenue Élysée-Reclus, near the Eiffel Tower. The French have a beautiful word to describe artists such as Lévy-Dhurmer: ensemblier, meaning a person who conjured into being ensembles or total environments that united painting, architecture, furniture, glasswork, pottery and whatever else engaged the refined visual intelligence of fin de siècle Europe. Frank Lloyd Wright, Victor Horta, and Hector Guimard were other examples of this type, though the finest ensemble of all may be Whistler’s Peacock Room in the Freer Gallery in Washington.

Lévy-Dhurmer’s career began in lithography, after which he moved on to making pottery in the Islamic style. His greatest claim to artistic relevance, however, was the paintings he created beginning in 1895. The masterpiece of the period was probably his portrait of the frail, sandy-haired poet Georges Rodenbach, a Belgian dandy whose hyper-aesthetic sensibility fully matched his own. That portrait, like most of the paintings of Lévy-Dhurmer, exhibited a stippled technique that had its origin in the pointillism of Georges Seurat. But in Lévy-Dhurmer it relinquished any claim or pretension to scientific color theory. It is invoked for no other reason than the fact that that, in its accumulated delicacy, it suggests a field strewn with petals of lilacs or roses.

At the Met, this technique is invoked in the painted wisteria blooms that line the walls of the dining room of Auguste Rateau, murals that were also furnished with those herons and peacocks that were fixtures in the aesthetic vocabulary of fin de siècle France and England. But it is the tendrilous blooms of the wisteria that dominate and unite the dining room. Its dark walnut boiserie is inlaid with purple that represents clustering wisteria; further blooms of wisteria reappear on the legs of the table and are even stamped onto the leather upholstery of the chairs. Meanwhile, bronze-and-alabaster torchères are configured to suggest the twining vines of wisteria, as is nearly every other detail in the room, from door handles and drawer pulls to a gilded fire screen. Even the rug evokes the pale purple of wisteria. The overall effect suggests a sort of fin de siècle Gothic in the dark interplay of the walnut and the pale reveries of the wisteria panels. And the result is a rarefied precinct of peace and almost unutterable refinement.

In keeping with the doctrine of synaesthesia, that confused interpenetration of the senses that is fundamental to the aesthetic theory of Symbolism, the room feels like the visual projection of the music of Debussy. Indeed, he was a friend of the artist and — according to one account — even accompanied Lévy-Dhurmer on the piano as the artist was painting his portraits. The almost cloistered seclusion of the Wisteria Room, with little or no natural light, evokes nothing so much as the narcotic reverie of the composer’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune,” not to mention the Mallarmé poem that inspired it.

There is, finally, a haunting poignancy in the fact that Lévy-Dhurmer lived as long as he did, surviving into a changed world that had no use for his precious vision. This was a postwar period of rigid geometry, of burp guns and atomic bombs and the industrialized death of the concentration camps from which he, though a Jew, managed to escape without ever leaving France.

Though the Wisteria Chamber was purchased by the Met in 1966, it is hard to imagine a place more truculently antagonistic to its aesthetic creed than New York in the age of hard-edge abstraction and the glass and steel towers of Midtown. It is no wonder, then, that this masterpiece of interior décor should have languished in complete obscurity for nearly half a century. But now at last its moment has come, a portal into a world lovelier than ours.