Tea at Trianon: Madame Récamier in Art

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 7, 2013

Madame Récamier in Art

From Madame Guillotine:

The gorgeous brunette Jeanne-Françoise Julie Adélaïde Bernard, better known as Juliette, Madame Récamier, was born in Lyon on this day in 1777. There are so many representations of Madame from the austere portrait by David, which shows her reclining wide eyed and slightly timidly on a chaise longue to the much softer and more alluringly confident painting by Gérard to countless others, all of which show Madame wearing her trademark simple white gown, which was intended to represent a virginity that it was whispered she did not relinquish until she was in her forties. It was also whispered that the long suffering Monsieur Récamier, who doted on his young wife who was twenty six years his junior, was actually her father and that their marriage, which took place in April 1793 when Juliette was fifteen, was in fact a clever ruse to ensure that his love child would inherit the bulk of his fortune. This, however, has never been proven and is probably just scurrilous gossip of the sort that was endemic during this period. (Read more.)

More about Madame Récamier, HERE and HERE.

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