Tea at Trianon: Remarkable Story Of Marie-Antoinette’s Favorite Painter

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, August 3, 2025

Remarkable Story Of Marie-Antoinette’s Favorite Painter

From GirlTalkHQ:

Vigée Le Brun adored her father. Pastelist Louis Vigée died when his daughter was twelve. He had been her teacher and mentor. This mattered. Women were barred from attending life classes at the Académie royale de peinture et sculpture because they were thought too modest to look at the male nudes who posed for art students so that they could learn anatomy.

Basic to an artist’s education, drawing from life was also the bedrock of history painting, which glorified the human (mostly male) body in heroic action. History painting represented the top tier of artistic recognition, one every ambitious artist, male or female, coveted.

Feminine modesty also barred girls from schools where aspiring male artists learned the mechanics of their profession — the mathematics needed for drawing perspective and creating complex compositions; basic subjects for history painting (anatomy, geography, history, and literature.) Because contemporary wisdom – if wisdom was what one could call it – held that studying such intellectual subjects would harm a woman’s health and hurt her ability to reproduce. Her gender thus stood in the way of Vigée Le Brun’s ultimate recognition as a professional painter. (Read more.)