Tea at Trianon: "Travelling Companions"

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, December 29, 2012

"Travelling Companions"

From the Victorian Web:

Augustus Egg's Travelling Companions strikes the viewer at once with the near-perfection of its symmetry — the identical billowing dresses, the hats perched on the laps, the brunette-framed faces that face one another like a woman and her mirror. In fact, it might at first compare to some children's puzzle, in which one must point out the few things discrepancies between the one half of the image and the other. But as one begins to look, one finds a greater diversity of detail than is first apparent. One sits with a basket while the other sits with a bouquet, one reads while the other dozes, and outside the window a vivid and varied landscape expands, filling the center of the image.

And it is in this latter element that arises a point of particular interest. While the window-view confronts the viewer (by virtue of the vantage point from which the image was painted), drawing him outside to the colorful, the asymmetrical, the mesh of forest, lake and mountain ridge, the two women's eyes remain focused inward, the one on some novel or poem, the other on her private meditations. They travel — as the title indicates — and yet they do not leave the world in which they began; they remain in the carriage box with the drab color scheme and what might appear to a first glance as absolute uniformity.

The second word in the title also suggests a certain irony. The two are companions in that they share the same space, and even share the same dress, and yet they do not interact. Each seems apathetic to all external elements of the experience: both the landscape far off, and the person nearby. In this painting the luxuries of the aristocracy and the rise of modern transportation capabilities intersect to isolate the two figures from everything beyond the individual: they travel in such comfort, with all the familiar amenities, that they discard the experience of traveling altogether. (Read entire post.)