Tea at Trianon: Impressionism and Fashion

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

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Impressionism and Fashion

A new exhibit. According to The Wall Street Journal:

The Paris version, called "Impressionism and Fashion," starts Sept. 25 and ends Jan. 20. It features 74 paintings, 37 period costumes, a range of fashion illustrations and such accessories as shoes, gloves, parasols and—of course—a corset. Next February the show will travel to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and then, in the summer, to the Art Institute of Chicago, where curator Gloria Groom first came up with the whole idea in 2008.

While the U.S. will see a different selection of clothing (the Paris pieces are too fragile to travel), for the first time Americans will get Paris's surviving fragments from Monet's enormous abandoned work, "Luncheon on the Grass" (1865-66). They are full of superbly dressed picnickers.

The show is breaking ground for the Musée d'Orsay, which has yet to mount the fashion-related shows that have proven such crowd-pleasers for its New York collaborator.

The Paris version draws on local collections of historical clothes, including the Musée Galliera, a city-run fashion museum. Before Coco Chanel's Little Black Dress, there were the big black dresses of early Belle Époque Paris—flowing cascades of perfectly dyed black silk, meant to show off the wearer's fashionably pale skin. The show overflows with black dresses, on canvas and on mannequins—from Édouard Manet's 1878 masterpiece "La Parisienne," on loan from Stockholm, to a circa 1878 organza dress by Parisian dressmaker Madame Roger. (Read entire article.)