Tea at Trianon: The Van der Doort Inventory

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, May 3, 2022

The Van der Doort Inventory

Emblem showing differences of Peace and War by Peter Paul Rubens

The inventory taken of the art collection of Charles I. From Royal Collection Trust:

The collection is presented here in the order of the inventory made by the keeper of the royal collection, Abraham van der Doort, around 1639. Unlike the Sale, the inventory is only a partial view of the collection; it focusses on Whitehall Palace and begins to tackle a handful of other residences in briefer form towards the end of its contents.

Van der Doort's original information is spread throughout a set of source manuscripts, each differing slightly. Some information included in the 1960 Walpole Society transcription has been omitted online to avoid duplication in the database, notably the 'Frizell List' and 'Titian List' (pp.181-4 and 192-3). We also include supplementary information from another roughly contemporaneous inventory (c.1640) not drawn up by van der Doort (the V&A MS.). The St James's Palace section is taken wholly from that V&A manuscript. Note that not every inventory number online is taken from the original sources, where some items are unnumbered. Van der Doort's measurements, as he states, are taken within the frames; and measurements sometimes differ across the source manuscripts. Where online information is taken from more than one source manuscript, brackets are used to differentiate; square brackets offer twenty-first-century knowledge or opinion. We encourage students of the collection to refer to the Walpole Society pages for further detail and provide a glossary to clarify our translation of the seventeenth-century information into digital format.

Each online entry contains a view of the work in question and could have as many as three sections: current knowledge about the work, and the information from van der Doort's inventory and from the Sale inventory. Each entry also includes where possible an image of the work, as well as (in the case of the van der Doort inventory) the relevant page from the Walpole Society transcriptions of the inventories, which may be found by scrolling to the right of the image. (Read more.)