Tea at Trianon: Marjorie Post and Marie Antoinette

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

Friday, December 13, 2019

Marjorie Post and Marie Antoinette

Marjorie Post dressed as Marie Antoinette for a costume ball

From Hillwood Museum:

Marjorie Merriweather Post was particularly attracted to exquisite French decorative arts with aristocratic and royal provenance. In her successive New York City residences, Post amassed an impressive collection of French treasures that epitomize the period’s taste for French royals, especially Queen Marie Antoinette.

This lecture will explore the lesser-known early collecting period of Marjorie Post in the context of American taste, and shed new light on several works of art from Hillwood’s collection....

Dr. Wilfried Zeisler is Hillwood’s chief curator. He is a graduate of Sorbonne University and the Ecole du Louvre, Paris. Wilfried has written extensively on French and Russian decorative arts, including a 2010 book on ceramics and several articles. Wilfried’s dissertation, L’Objet d’art et de luxe français en Russie (1881-1917) [French Objets d’art and Luxury Goods in Russia], was published in Paris in 2014. Between 2009 and 2011, he has participated in and curated exhibitions in Paris and Monaco. At Hillwood, he has curated Splendor and Surprise: Elegant Containers, Antique to Modern (2015),  Konstantin Makovsky: The Tsar's Painter (2016), and Fabergé Rediscovered (2018), and has contributed to Friends and Fashion: An American Diplomat in 1820s Russia (2017) and The Artistic Table (2018). Wilfried wrote Fabergé Rediscovered, and co-authored Konstantin Makovsky: The Tsar's Painter in America and Paris  (2015). (Read more.)