Tea at Trianon: Marie-Antoinette at the Grand Palais

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Marie-Antoinette at the Grand Palais

There is a phenomenal exhibit about Marie-Antoinette at the Grand Palais in Paris. (Thanks for the links, Terry and Richard!) Author Catherine Delors writes of it as well.

As one article says:

Marie-Antoinette has long been the subject of speculation and derision by her contemporaries and historians alike.... To some degree, the Grand Palais' exhibition liberates the last queen of France from a history of ridicule. Marie-Antoinette allows the monarch to be seen as a sophisticated artistic patron during the years leading up to the French Revolution.

Another article gives more details:

If Marie-Antoinette leaned toward a natural freshness and artistic modernity, it was surely a predictable reaction against a stultifying, over-ripe court rather than an urge to create a contemporary culture. The pieces seem more like a final fling of Rococo than the first stirrings of Neo-Classicism.

Carsen says that he wanted to emphasize the taste of Marie-Antoinette, rather than her style. A second rotunda shows a defiant queen using Vigée Lebrun to underscore her image. Beside the portraits is a copy of the infamous diamond necklace, falsely claimed as proof of the careless greed of the so-called "Madame Deficit." Yet the exhibition's most shocking moment comes in the stairwell below the drawings of towering hairdos. The ode to vanity ends with a smashed mirror and a spidery reflection of the broken glass.