Tea at Trianon: How Winslow Homer’s Paintings Captured 19th-Century America

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

Saturday, April 25, 2026

How Winslow Homer’s Paintings Captured 19th-Century America

From The Collector:

Despite living in New York in the 1870s, most of Winslow Homer’s art doesn’t focus on progress and industrialization. Instead, he portrays rural New England. Homer’s paintings of this period focus on farm life, games, leisure, and a happy country childhood. The lighter color palette and frequent use of outdoor settings and everyday subjects mirror the influence of the Impressionists, whose works Homer might have encountered during his travels, yet his interpretation is entirely grounded in his American surroundings. Winslow Homer often created watercolor studies that he later used as the basis for larger oil paintings. Although Homer never married or had children of his own, children were a major theme in his art. Homer seems to have enjoyed painting them, and their joyfulness made paintings of children a particularly optimistic and sought-after subject after the war’s deprivations. (Read more.)