Tea at Trianon: The Case for the All-Red Room

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, April 29, 2024

The Case for the All-Red Room

From Architectural Digest:

In the mid 1930s, legendary Vogue editor in chief Diana Vreeland began writing a column for Harper’s Bazaar called Why Don’t You? in which she would encourage readers to try something new, almost as an absurdly glamorous dare. Among her suggestions was the idea that readers might decorate their homes entirely in green, with a verdant mix of houseplants and glazed porcelain. But Vreeland’s personal favorite color was red, specifically “the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.”In 1955, she asked interior designer Billy Baldwin to create her famed New York apartment, which was completed in 1957 and later featured in the September/October 1975 issue of Architectural Digest. The living room, which Vreeland enthusiastically described as “a garden in hell,” is a master class in the art of monochromatic design. It’s not just that the room is all red: It’s that Baldwin and Vreeland combined red carpet, red upholstery, and red paint with objects that are culturally red, like playing cards and plaid throws. (Vreeland herself made the needlework pillows on the sofa.) (Read more.)