Tea at Trianon: An Eighteenth-century House in Lancashire

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, April 12, 2024

An Eighteenth-century House in Lancashire

From House and Garden:

There is something unusually satisfying about a simple, classically composed façade between two pedimented wings: it is the essence of that vision of the Palladian form that runs as a golden thread through English architecture from the early eighteenth century. Beckside House, on the edge of the village of Barbon, on the remote north Lancashire border, is the home of distinguished herald, historian and author Dr John Martin Robinson, whose latest book Wilton House is published this week.
The house was built in 1767 – the date is inscribed on a lintel – and is perched above a stream but neatly tucked into rising land that gives it shelter. It was extended by the addition of low wings in the late twentieth century, in a manner that perhaps enhances the historic core and includes a full-depth room with windows to the east and south, which can only be described as the Englishman’s dream library.
Built of rubble stone, the front of the house is rendered and painted, with projecting stone quoins, all under a Westmorland slate roof. It has a happily formal, almost sculpted, character that represents the meeting of new metropolitan fashions with long-standing vernacular building practices. Part of the particular charm is the slightly old fashioned quality of the elegant classical detail, especially the interior joinery, with a combination of earlier Palladian and rococo elements. The finely carved pedimented front door was modelled on a type popularised by James Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture (1728). (Read more.)