Tea at Trianon: The Louis XVI Chair

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

Sunday, July 3, 2011

The Louis XVI Chair

Variations on a theme from The Foundary.

The history of the Louis XVI chair really begins with the Roman town of Herculaneum. Mount Vesuvius buried it under 20 meters of ash and debris for 1,700 years. Its excavation sparked a renewed interest in the classics and influenced the furnishings of the French court.

The Louis XVI style rejected the outmoded curves and cabriole legs of its predecessors and introduced distinctive straight legs, fluted to resemble Roman columns. This reinterpretation of antiquity defined the neoclassical movement.

Over 200 hundred years of history (and the cold-blooded efficiency of the guillotine) have democratized the pedigreed Louis XVI chair and made it a staple of interior design. (Read entire article.)