Tea at Trianon: “Animalia"

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

Thursday, July 9, 2026

“Animalia"

From Galerie:

When Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah Al Thani sold off the Hotel Lambert in Paris and its extraordinary contents in 2022, the depth and extent of his collecting became a thing of legend. A soup tureen gifted to Catherine the Great by Count Orloff; a gilded candelabra commissioned by Marie Antoinette; a hand-painted screen of the Bay of Naples that had belonged to Coco Chanel… it took five distinctive lots to deliver this unparalleled treasure trove of decorative arts to the market. The sale made $76.56 million, and the house—an early baroque palace by architect Louis Le Vau with interiors by Charles le Brun and Eustache Le Sueur—sold for $226 million to the French businessman and art collector Xavier Niel. Actually not bad for a mini-Versailles: the same design team went on to make the most famous palace in the world.
But Sheikh Hamad, a key member of the Qatari royal family who is now in his mid-40s, has not stopped collecting. Since 2021, carefully curated exhibitions at the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris have shown highlights from The Al Thani Collection, which now contains over 5,000 works of art, including very contemporary paintings by artists including Issy Wood and Adrian Ghenie. The latest exhibition, called “Animalia,” offers a look at man’s relationship to animals through the medium of finely crafted objects, from Neolithic times to 1900.

“Sheik Hamad has the mind and the eyes of a falcon,” Giambatista Valli, the couturier who is a friend of the prince, told me at the time of the Hotel Lambert sale. “He is passionate about beauty first and foremost. He is driven by a curiosity which is backed up by incredible knowledge.” (Read more.)