Tea at Trianon: Pink Paint Ideas

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

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Pink Paint Ideas

From House and Garden:

The cultural history of pink has seen the colour morph both in terms of its gender associations and socio-political alignments. In The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St Clair describes how 'the strict girl-pink boy-blue divide only dates from the mid-twentieth century'. Blue - the traditional colour in which the Virgin Mary is depicted - was seen as the more feminine, delicate colour. Whereas pink, basically a toned-down red, was by association the colour of strength, masculinity and warfare.Over the 20^th century pink enjoyed a renaissance, particularly in the shade described as 'shocking pink', which became 'the colour of choice for ... women who wanted to be both seen and heard.' Fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli was immediately enchanted with the colour, making it the shade of the packaging for her first perfume as well as using it in many of her subsequent clothing designs. Marilyn Monroe later immortalised shocking pink with the dress that she wore to sing 'Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend' in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The mid-2010s saw the rise of the now-ubiquitous ‘millennial pink’, a shade which achieves a happy-medium, being both bright and muted, light and dark. ‘Rose gold’, a shinier cousin to ‘millennial pink', also became another of the millennial generation's favourite colours, manifesting on everything from iPhones to bathroom hardware. (Read more.)