Tea at Trianon: Rescuers of Victorian 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

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Rescuers of Victorian Art

From The Guardian:

In the early 1960s, Andrew Lloyd Webber, while a pupil at Westminster School, came across an unframed canvas in a shop on the Fulham Road and instantly fell in love with it. The painting, or at least what he could see of it through a thick film of dirt, showed a slumbrous young woman, swathed in diaphanous hot orange, sprawled heavily across a sofa, the sky molten behind her. The owner of the shop – it would be pushing it to call it a gallery – told his young customer that the painting was by a former president of the Royal Academy, Lord Leighton. Schoolboy Lloyd Webber didn’t have the £50 necessary to buy the grubby canvas and his grandmother, when beseeched to cough up the cash, growled: “I will not have Victorian junk in my flat.” Instead, Flaming June went to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, from where it was recently granted a rare exeat. In recent weeks it has been making a guest appearance at Leighton House, the grand studio-mansion in Holland Park where Frederic Leighton lived and worked for the last three decades of his life. The painting, long primped back to luminous loveliness, is now worth … well, no one will say exactly, probably because no one really knows, but it must be multiples of millions.

Like any endlessly repeated story, the discovery of Flaming June after 60 years in hiding has acquired the patina of a fairytale, with the painting cast as a princess disguised in dirty rags and Lloyd Webber as the heroic prince who realises her true worth. But he wasn’t the only young knight in that psychedelic decade who embarked on a quest to rescue the despised art of the previous century. Rob Dickins, subsequently chairman of Warner Music UK, was another creative mogul in the making who took to haunting country house sales and obscure provincial auctions in the hope of finding something wonderful buried among the dismal junk. The museum curator turned newspaper critic Richard Dorment was another, as was Richard Ormond, soon to become 19th-century curator at the National Portrait Gallery. (Read more.)