Madame de Lamballe Condemned

It is terrible how that guard is holding her in such a familiar manner. (Via Vive la Reine.) Share

A New Wedgwood Pattern

From Architectural Digest:

British designer Kit Kemp—who, with husband Tim, owns the popular brand Firmdale Hotels—has partnered with British tabletop company Wedgwood on a new design. The Mythical Creatures collection, which debuted earlier this fall, is based on Kemp’s identically named embroidered fabric line for Chelsea Textiles. The bone-china pieces, from plates and platters to tea and coffee accessories, are adorned with whimsical characters and hand-painted gold detailing that recalls a blanket stitch. Kemp has always been one to embrace color, pattern, and texture, and this newest project is no exception. (Read more.)

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Magnesium

From Wellness Mama:

Magnesium is necessary for hundreds of functions within the body, but is especially important for:

• Gives rigidity AND flexibility to your bones (more important than Calcium in many cases)
• Increases bioavailability of calcium
• Regulates and normalizes blood pressure
• Prevents and reverses kidney stone formation
• Promotes restful sleep
• Helps prevent congestive heart failure
• Eases muscle cramps and spasms
• Lowers serum cholesterol levels and triglycerides
• Decreases insulin resistance
• Can prevent atherosclerosis and stroke
• End cluster and migraine headaches
• Enhances circulation
• Relieves fibromyalgia and chronic pain
• Treats asthma and emphysema
• Helps make proteins
• Encourages proper elimination
• Prevents osteoporosis
• Proper Vitamin D absorption
• protection from radiation
• To aid weight loss
• Lessen or remove ADD or ADHD in children
• in proper digestion of carbohydrates
• emerging evidence is showing a preventative role in many cancers
• (source)

(Read more.)

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Birth of 18th Century Design

Mechanical Roll-Top Desk

A new exhibit at Versailles.

he exhibition offers a glimpse of the ingenuity of a bygone era viewed from a present-day perspective and showcases the innovative and avant-garde nature of the shapes, techniques, decorations and materials used in 18th century furniture.
The exhibition includes around 100 major works from collections at the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Palace of Fontainbleau and the Getty Museum, alongside works from private collections which will be on show to the public for the first time.
Cabinets, desks, writing tables, commodes and console tables, but also sofas, armchairs, folding chairs and seating chairs will testify to the revolution that the 18th century brought about in the history of furniture, a reflection of the evolving tastes of a society enamoured by modernity and wanting to live in comfort and luxury.
- See more at: http://en.chateauversailles.fr/news-/events/expositions/18e-aux-sources-du-design-en#sthash.8V24b9MG.dpuf

Madame de Mailly's Commode

he exhibition offers a glimpse of the ingenuity of a bygone era viewed from a present-day perspective and showcases the innovative and avant-garde nature of the shapes, techniques, decorations and materials used in 18th century furniture.
The exhibition includes around 100 major works from collections at the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Palace of Fontainbleau and the Getty Museum, alongside works from private collections which will be on show to the public for the first time.
Cabinets, desks, writing tables, commodes and console tables, but also sofas, armchairs, folding chairs and seating chairs will testify to the revolution that the 18th century brought about in the history of furniture, a reflection of the evolving tastes of a society enamoured by modernity and wanting to live in comfort and luxury.
- See more at: http://en.chateauversailles.fr/news-/events/expositions/18e-aux-sources-du-design-en#sthash.8V24b9MG.dpuf

he exhibition offers a glimpse of the ingenuity of a bygone era viewed from a present-day perspective and showcases the innovative and avant-garde nature of the shapes, techniques, decorations and materials used in 18th century furniture.
The exhibition includes around 100 major works from collections at the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Palace of Fontainbleau and the Getty Museum, alongside works from private collections which will be on show to the public for the first time.
Cabinets, desks, writing tables, commodes and console tables, but also sofas, armchairs, folding chairs and seating chairs will testify to the revolution that the 18th century brought about in the history of furniture, a reflection of the evolving tastes of a society enamoured by modernity and wanting to live in comfort and luxury.
- See more at: http://en.chateauversailles.fr/news-/events/expositions/18e-aux-sources-du-design-en#sthash.8V24b9MG.dpu

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Jerusalem and Babylon

 From Vultus Christi:

From the Exposition of Psalm 63 by St Augustine, Bishop & Doctor

The Israelites were taken captive and transported from the city of Jerusalem to a life of servitude in Babylon. The holy man Jeremiah, however, prophesied that seventy years later they should return from captivity and the city of Jerusalem, over whose fall into enemy hands he had lamented, should be restored.  At that time there were Prophets among the captive people in Babylon, and one of these was Ezekiel.  The people were looking forward to the end of the seventy years predicted by Jeremiah: and indeed when the seventy years were up, the majority of the people did return and the Temple which had been destroyed was rebuilt. But since the Apostle says: “These things happened to them as a warning, and were written down as a lesson for us upon whom the end of the ages has come,” we too must first be aware of our captivity and then of our liberation; we must be aware of Babylon, where we are enslaved, and of the Jerusalem, to which we long to return.

Consider the names of these two cities, Babylon and Jerusalem. Babylon means “confusion”, Jerusalem “vision of peace”; now take note of the city of confusion in order to understand the vision of peace.  You endure the former while you long for the latter.  How can these two cities be told apart?  Can we possibly separate them from one another in this world?  They are intermingled; they have been from the very origin of the human race, and shall remain so until the end of time.  What proof have we now then that they are intermingled?  The Lord will make it plain when he places some at his right hand and others at his left; Jerusalem will be on his right, Babylon on his left. Jerusalem will hear him say: “Come, you who have my Father’s blessing, take possession of the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world.” Babylon will hear: “Depart into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Read more.)

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Robert Webster

From Smithsonian:

A newly surfaced photograph, published here for the first time, gives a good idea of what he looked like: round of face yet square of chin, with dark, widely spaced eyes that seemed to hold a melancholy gaze. The portrait, which measures just 2 3⁄4 by 3 1⁄4 inches, is what is known as a sixth-plate ambrotype, a positive image on a glass plate reduced to one-sixth its normal size. Most surprising, it shows the slave wearing what appears to be a Confederate Army shell jacket.

Images of African-American men in Confederate uniform are among the greatest rarities of 19th-century photography: Only eight were known to exist, according to Jeff Rosenheim, curator of the 2013 exhibition “Photography and the American Civil War” at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The portrait of Robert Webster adds a ninth to that roster. Such images, says John Coski, vice president and director of historical research at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, are “tantalizing in what they do and do not tell us.” One thing they don’t tell us, he says, is that the men in the photographs fought in the Confederate Army, contrary to the belief of some researchers eager to show that African-Americans did so. Of the slaves photographed in Confederate uniform, the names and fortunes of only four are known. All four went to the front as servants to their owners, who were Confederate officers.
Robert Webster went to the front in Virginia in 1861 with Benjamin Yancey Jr., an enormously wealthy planter, lawyer and sometime politician who owned scores of slaves scattered among several houses and three plantations, including one in Georgia that covered more than 2,000 cultivated acres and another of 1,000 acres in Alabama. Yancey owned Webster for almost 20 years, and valued him highly. “I would have trusted him with anything,” Yancey said in later years. Indeed, after he became alarmed about Federal threats to the lower South, Yancey sent his wife and three children with Webster back to Alabama, where the slave was to “boss the plantation in his absence,” according to Yancey family lore. Yancey didn’t stay long in the fight, though, returning home in the spring of 1862 to oversee his plantations himself. With itinerant photographers often accompanying troops, the Webster portrait was in all likelihood made while the slave was in Virginia.

It has remained with Yancey’s descendants through five generations. Representatives of the family told me about it after I published The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta, my 2009 book, in which Webster played a prominent role. Yancey’s great-great-granddaughter Dorothea Fink says she remembers seeing the portrait on her grandmother’s mantel beside other family photographs and memorabilia. It is the only portrait of a slave the family displayed, she says. “It was kept in an esteemed place,” she says her grandmother told her, “because he became a very important person to the family.”

In fact, Webster’s importance to the Yanceys extended far beyond his wartime service, even though there is no evidence that he fought for the Confederacy and ample evidence that he risked his life to undermine it. One thing the portrait tells us is that Webster learned to manage conflicting loyalties while helping to liberate himself. From start to finish, his life reflected the complications that accrued from slavery and the precarious, contingent and dangerous position of slaves during the Civil War. (Read more.)

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In This Place

From Robert J. Stove:

Perhaps the most pernicious single delusion to have afflicted musical thought over the last two centuries is what might be called, for want of a comelier description, The Myth of Artistic Inevitability. The central teaching of this myth can be summarized in the slogan, “You can't keep a good man down.” More specifically, the myth maintains that musical genius, merely by virtue of being musical genius, will always find a mass public; that no agency for evil can ever thwart this process; and that if a particular musician of stature fails to find a mass public, it is fundamentally his own fault.

Belief in the myth presupposes what operated to a limited extent in the centuries before 1914 but manifestly could not be relied on after that date: a European civilization sufficiently filled with noblesse oblige to regard musical genius as worth rewarding, in and of itself. Yet even before 1914 such a civilization was provisional, dependent largely on the caprice of individual patrons' effort.

Take Wagner, whose monumental self-belief possibly brought him closer than any other great musician has ever come to giving the “inevitable” dogma a fighting chance.But Wagner owed—and he himself knew full well that he owed—his enduring world fame to, above all, a House of Wittelsbach accident. Without King Ludwig II's patronage, several of Wagner’s masterpieces would have been unperformed and in some instances unwritten. A Wagner without Ludwig II would have occupied something like the same niche in general culture now assigned to, say, Charles-Valentin Alkan: in short, renowned (rightly or wrongly) more for freakishness than for actual lasting merit.

Moreover, the Myth of Artistic Inevitability cannot even begin to explain how so many musical giants were forgotten, for generations on end, once they had died. Monteverdi and Heinrich Schütz in the seventeenth century, Telemann in the eighteenth, Johann Nepomuk Hummel in the nineteenth: all these men—who had substantial, and deserved, reputations in their lifetimes—fell so completely out of favor within a few years of their respective deaths, that it was almost as if they had never breathed.

Still, the main reason the myth is absurd is that it utterly fails to take totalitarian cultures, or even ordinary modern Western leveling,into account. Suppose that there had emerged in the twentieth entury a composer who combined the gifts of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in his own person. Those gifts, far from guaranteeing him popular acclaim and a berth in Grove’s, would not have done him a blind bit of good if he had been stuck amid the Holodomor, or amid Khmer Rouge Cambodia, or amid Maoist China’s Cultural Revolution, or (if he had possessed Jewish ancestors) amid Nazi-occupied Poland. Indeed, his exceptional abilities would have increased the likelihood of his being hunted down like a rat.

All this serves as a prelude to noting several facts: first, that there flourishes in America a composer named Frank La Rocca; second, that his creative talent for religious music is remarkable; third, that one can have been a professional musician—indeed a professional church musician—for decades without having encountered his name, let alone his output; and fourth, that those in that ignoramus category had included myself, until his CD In This Place, was recently brought to my attention—and by a non-musician! According to the Myth of Artistic Inevitability, such neglect could never have happened. I would, for certain, have discovered La Rocca’s work in the quotidian course of events; every decent-sized musical reference book would have alerted me to that work; it would be needless to accord him wider fame by writing the present article; and pigs would fly. (Read more.)

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A Cameo and Diamond Ring

From Tiny-Librarian:

The carved oval agate centre depicting King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in profile, to a rose-cut diamond line frame and similarly-set crown surmount, with ruby and emerald detailing, raised on trifurcated chased foliate shoulders and a plain hoop....

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Stay-at-Home Wives

Interesting. I love to be in my home and was happy to be able to stay home when I could. Housework is real work. So are cooking and gardening. Too bad womanly work is looked down upon. Being a housewife was one of the most creative and challenging things I ever did. From the American Enterprise Institute:

I’ll cut President Obama some slack. When he said that women staying at home with the kids is “not a choice we want Americans to make,” I assume he meant that it shouldn’t be a choice that women are forced to make. Even so, I have a beef with the tunnel vision that accompanies the conversation about women staying at home, as if it’s a balancing act between income and child care.

“What’s your schedule today?” I asked my wife a few minutes ago. Today, it starts with a trip into the nearby small city to do volunteer work for the local Literacy Council, which provides free English instruction for immigrants. That’s today. Tomorrow, it will be one of a half-dozen other civic obligations she has chosen to take on. She’s not unusual. In that crucially important reality—she’s not unusual—is something that needs to be front and center when we talk about women who “stay at home.” Better parental care is one of the benefits, but I think the effects on America’s social capital are even more important.

“Social capital” is the academicians’ term for the resource that makes American civil society work. It is organized things like teaching English to immigrants or serving on the town council. It is also the guy who shovels snow from the sidewalk of the old lady who lives alone across the street. It is parents at PTA meetings, church-goers organizing Christmas plays, candy stripers at the local hospital, and neighbors keeping an eye on each other’s houses when no one is home.

The point is that many of the important forms of social capital take more time than a person holding a full-time job can afford. Who has been the primary engine for creating America’s social capital throughout its history, making our civil society one of the sociological wonders of the world? People without full-time jobs. The overwhelming majority of those people have been wives.

Every aspect of family and community life gets an infusion of vitality and depth from wives who are not working full time. If you live in a place that you cherish because “it’s a great community,” think of the things you have in mind that make it a great community (scenery and restaurants don’t count), and then think about who bears the brunt of the load in making those things happen. If you live in a place that is not a community—it’s just a collection of unrelated people, living anonymously, without social capital—think of the reasons why it is not a community. One of the answers will be that no one has spare time for that kind of thing.

I’m not knocking the importance of stay-at-home moms for raising children. I just want us to realize that stay-at-home wives are one of the resources that have made America America. It is entirely understandable that some wives work full time, either for the fulfillment of a vocation or to make money–the same reasons men work full time. But when either partner in a marriage—and it will usually be the wife—chooses to devote full time to being a parent and neighbor instead, that choice should not just be accepted, but celebrated. (Read more.)

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