Tea at Trianon: A Glimpse Into a Vanished Art Style

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, August 26, 2022

A Glimpse Into a Vanished Art Style

From Artnet:

A long-lost relic of Jewish folk art has been revealed after being hidden—but not forgotten—behind a wall for more than 30 years. “The Lost Mural” is an interior apse painting created in 1910 by Ben Zion Black, a 24-year-old Lithuananian playwright, poet, and sign painter, for the former Chai Adam synagogue in Burlington, Vermont. Aaron Goldberg, a descendant of Burlington’s earliest Jewish residents, founded the Lost Mural Project to recover Black’s work.
According to the project’s website, Black’s 155-square-foot triptych “is part of a long tradition of synagogue wall painting that was particularly advanced in Eastern Europe between the early 18th- and mid-20th centuries.” Most artworks in this genre were set ablaze during the Holocaust, remembered now only through old photos and watercolor renditions. (Read more.)