Tea at Trianon: How to Use Damasks for Decorating

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, January 5, 2025

How to Use Damasks for Decorating

From Home and Garden:

For the last decade or so, symmetrical, mirror-image foliate patterns known as ‘damasks’, have been notably absent in the new collections of big fabric houses. Perhaps this is because, in their purple or silver form, mica-beaded or flocked as wallpaper, they have been tainted by the ‘glam’ look of the early noughties. Think of the decor of the British high street beauty salon, all faux-Louis chairs and champagne-themed wall decals and you’ll be along the right lines. But in the last year, our editors have noticed that these patterns, reinterpreted and given a new lease of life, are curling and furling their way right back ‘in’.
Damasks are named after the city of Damascus in Syria, which is where the patterned fabrics were often produced and certainly traded from the mediaeval times onwards. They actually stem back to woven silk fabrics produced in China, where a design was woven in a monochrome silk, the pattern being picked out between darker, duller threads and brighter, shinier threads. The patterns that gained huge popularity in Europe and so spread along the ‘silk route’ to Damascus were often medallion-esque repeats that used curved foliage and fruit motifs and relied on mirror-image symmetry. In fact, symmetry and the use of foliage are the features that define damasks to this day, although some purists might demand that one ought to be woven in two-toned silk in order to really ‘count’. (Read more.)