Tea at Trianon: A Colonial Revival in Maine

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

Thursday, July 20, 2023

A Colonial Revival in Maine

From Veranda:

For many families the interiors were nearly move-in ready: white plaster walls, cotton rugs, some toile-covered furnishings. “Simple and lovely,” he reports. That undecorated feel is the norm in much of coastal Maine, where many cottages change hands generationally and without much aesthetic fuss.
A combination of Yankee ingenuity and the vestiges of Puritanism makes for homes that feel more “put together” than decorated. And near the water especially, there’s an accepted shabbiness: The salt air lends a gracious patina to whale-motif weather vanes but also flays the undercarriages of Volvos.
There’s a real vernacular here, and as Carter’s first project in Maine, he could have enjoyed months of drinking in the source material, but he had to stay true to his clients. As he is, they’re southerners. Shabby wasn’t going to fly for the new homeowners, a Kentucky couple with adult children and grandchildren beginning to accumulate. “They wanted to vamp it up a bit,” says Carter. “They have traditional taste—art, maps, antiques—but also a high threshold for color and pattern.” (Read more.)