Tea at Trianon: Historical American Art

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

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Historical American Art


Frederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs (1861). Courtesy: Dallas Museum of Art

George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

From Artnet:

When New York art dealer Marianne Boesky makes her debut at the TEFAF Maastricht fair in the Netherlands next week, she will present an intriguing pairing of two artists born a century apart. One is Danielle Mckinney, an emerging artist whom Boesky represents and whose prices are rising rapidly. (A 2021 canvas fetched about $340,000 at Christie’s in London this week.) The other is the great American realist Edward Hopper (1882-1967), whose painting Chop Suey (1929) sold for $91.9 million at Christie’s in 2018, a record for a historical American painting. Hopper is a logical choice for a fair that focuses on centuries-old treasures. Mckinney, a 43-year-old rising star, is a bit more surprising. But TEFAF, which is often termed the “grande dame of art fairs,” leaned into contemporary art in recent years, as wet paint became all the rage for the rich. (Read more.)