Tea at Trianon: The Mystery Behind a Masterpiece

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

Monday, June 13, 2022

The Mystery Behind a Masterpiece

From Crime Reads:

Against all odds, Lady with an Ermine endured a five-century passage through Europe, making its way across borders while nations and governments fell, while fortunes were built and squandered, while battles were won and lost, while begrudging political collaborations were agreed to and then often ignored, and while plagues and pandemics ravished. Exiled during the Poland-Soviet war to Paris’ Ile St. Louis, one of the few people who might have seen it hanging in the Hôtel Lambert was Fredrick Chopin. Returning to Poland, it was bricked up in a hidden cellar in advance of the German invasion and then discovered by the Gestapo on Hitler’s orders. Rescued after the war from a depot in Munich and deemed bourgeois under Stalin’s Communist reign, it was shut away in a warehouse until the the end of the Cold War when it seen for the first time in the West. It traveled—perhaps too much—until it came to a rest in the darkened museum room in Krakow.

While I had remained in one geographical location for two years, the five-century journey of a portrait that measures little more than 21” x 15” provided me with rich mental life. A young woman and her white ermine continued to prove their steadfast relationship with time by holding my imagination. (Read more.)