Tea at Trianon: Dervish

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, January 19, 2019

Dervish

From The Art Newspaper:

Sotheby’s announced today (10 January) the full line up of the Female Triumphant, a selection of masterworks by 14 female artists from the 16th through the 19th centuries, which will headline its Masters Week sales this January in New York. While anticipation for the sale has been high since the auction house announced the all-female component last November, the works included reveal there is more than socially conscious marketing to the hype.

Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun’s monumental Portrait of Muhammad Dervish Khan, Full Length, Holding His Sword in a Landscape (1788) will be the star lot of the evening sale on 30 January. The portrait painter to Marie Antoinette, Le Brun's life-sized painting is one of the most significant paintings in her body of work to hit the auction block and is estimated to sell for $4-$6m. Calvine Harvey, a specialist in Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department, says “the condition of the work is far and above what we’ve ever seen before”.

A student of Le Brun, Marie-Victoire Lemoine’s Still Life of Spring Flowers in a Basket (1807) is estimated at $80,000-$120,000 and is the only known still life by the artist. A female-centric scene of Saint Sebastian’s rehabilitation recently re-attributed to Baroque “proto-feminist” painter Artemisia Gentileschi is expected to fetch between $600,000 and $800,000. (Read more.)