Friday 30 March 2012

Adornment and Concealment: fashioning a neoclassical queen

Queen Louise of Prussia 
Louise of Prussia, when Crown Princess, 1796, by Tischbein. Image source: damals.de
When she began her public career at the age of seventeen as wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, just at the moment when European women's fashion was being revolutionized in the mid-1790s, Louise enthusiastically adopted the new simplified and informal style of dress that rejected the sometimes grotesque constrictions of the ancien regime.

Tischbein's meltingly lovely evocations of Louise between 1794 and 1796 show off the legendary nymph-like beauty which made her a leader of German neoclassical fashion. She loved clothes, their colours and textures, and the make-believe powers of dressing-up. When she was young, she wore daringly modern, almost transparent, dresses, cut low in front and at the back, far more avant-garde than royal ladies are allowed to wear on public duty nowadays.

Thursday 29 March 2012

Comments are Disabled

THE WAY WE DIE NOW
Maybe it was an Intervention, kindly meant....

Saturday 24 March 2012

The husband who loved uniforms

MARRIAGE OF THE WEAK AND THE STRONG

It was easy to make fun of the warrior queen and her feeble husband, emasculated by indecision, both of them dressed up in military uniforms while the once invincible Prussian army ignominiously lost half the country to the enemy, but the evidence suggests that the marriage was based on mutual trust and respect, a sympathetic friendship at its heart.....

Wednesday 21 March 2012

straight from the horse's mouth

Detail of a horse by Delacroix
If oats in red wine were good enough for the hero's horse in The Horseman on the Roof, they're good enough for me....

Thursday 8 March 2012

CONTRADICTED


Not only an adopted child adopts a self....


Sunday 4 March 2012

Come back, Downton, you are (almost) forgiven...

REVIVE BBC DRAMA OR DIE OF BOREDOM
because I've seen the ghastly spectre that is Upstairs, Downstairs....
IF DOWNTON ABBEY WAS MCDONALDS