Tea at Trianon: François Boucher's Chinese Fantasies

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

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

François Boucher's Chinese Fantasies

The exhibition is now over but it was quite marvelous. From Museums Pass:

This exhibition will be devoted to one of the most beautiful curiosities of the museum, the series of ten paintings produced by François Boucher in 1742 to serve as models for the weavers of the Beauvais workshops, who will put on the trade for twenty years the second Chinese wall hanging. Kept in the museum since the legacy of Pierre-Adrien Pâris in 1819, who acquired them at the Bergeret de Grancourt sale of 1786, these modelli constitute the starting point for a reflection on the place of China in Boucher's art whose curators, Yohan Rimaud, curator in charge of fine art collections and Alastair Laing, associate curator, will propose a renewed approach. (Read more.)