Romantic fictions and casualties

“I never should have sung as I do had I never seen you; I never should have composed at all. . . You then liv'd in my heart, in my head, in every idea…” 

 

The Art of Loving or The Pleasant Lesson, furnishing fabric,

Favre Petitpierre et Cie (possibly, maker), ca.1785-1790, detail © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

PART ONE

One autumn long ago, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, whose armies under Napoleon had conquered most of mainland Europe, and the people at home were rejoicing at Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile that saved the Middle East, while Irish rebels were fighting their English oppressors with the help of the French; while Jenner's findings on vaccination against the mass killer small-pox were being published; while a new kind of poetry was being read for the first time in Coleridge and Wordsworth's collection of Lyrical Ballads, while quietly in a village in Hampshire Jane Austen was writing Northanger Abbey, and a new kind of woman appeared in a novel called Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft; while the external world was spinning and bleeding and crying and laughing, the eldest daughter of the Tragic Muse renounced forever the man she loved. 

He was a charming young artist who painted everyone as if he was in love with them. His pencil, chalk and brush had the power of Cupid's arrows to pierce men and women with the flushed, breathless heat of desire. When he looked at someone, however dull they had felt the moment before, they saw the reflection of beauty in his eyes. 

François-André Vincent, Zeuxis Choosing his Models for the Image of Helen from among the Girls of Croton 1789. 

Oil on canvas. Private collection. Image source: WGA

He was....

Yellow and purple

Links are a lazy way of making a point, finding degrees of affinity or underlying meaning in coincidences are a substitute for profound originality. This shamelessly shallow post presents a colour-coded association between the excessive frivolity of the ancien regime and the socialist conscience of modern feminism, between Marie Antoinette’s favourite dress shop and the intellectual salon of Simone de Beauvoir, both in Paris, two centuries apart.

In the 1770s and 1780s, Rose Bertin’s shop on the rue Saint-Honoré was decorated in yellow and purple, including the painted imitation marble at the front entrance.

From the late 1950s to 1980s, Simone de Beauvoir furnished her Paris studio with yellow sofas and chairs on a purple carpet.

Detail of purple cardigan and yellow dress c 2014. Private collection. Image © 2014 MHP

This leap-frogging post might be silly, but it is not ironic. By serendipity, it has landed on a revelation of women’s history through colour association. Complementary yellow and purple have been fashionable in gardening, interior and clothes design many times before, of course, and continue to be; there’s a striking use of the combination in the bed hangings of the Yellow or Velory Room at Ham House, home of the Duchess of Lauderdale, one of the most  powerful operators at the heart of government and politics during the English Restoration.

The colours glowed in dingy old rooms like dappled sunlight; our ancestors brightened their interiors with hues that in electric light we recoil from as garish. The 18th century thought the same about the Baroque, throwing out all that brooding and blazing heaviness for enlightening, subtler tints and tones, not always pastel.

In any era, any tone, yellow and purple are an imperial choice. A hundred years later, Bertin’s Rococo yellow and lavender (not girlish pale pink or virginal white or fresh pea green or sky blue but majestic purple) declared her right to dictate fashion to rich consumers: I’m new, I’m self-made, I don’t care if you think I’m vulgar, I’m as good as you, you need me to tell you what to wear, I’m more powerful than any of you duchesses and princesses, I’m modern luxury retail, based on wealth and success, not birth and education, I’m the future.

Rose Bertin was the first successful female haute couturier, despised at the time as a pushy, business-woman, a jumped-up milliner challenging the social superiority of her clientele. Marie-Antoinette herself, the despised foreign queen hovering in the background, panniered and pomaded, a fashion victim in fantastically huge skirts overladen with lace and flowers, whose dignified death is regarded as the redeeming achievement of a wasted life; the Austrian bitch, the bored, stupid, rich wife, with her ridiculous hair-dos, seems to ask for re-evaluation......

Second Coming

Weak plotting, naff (native) British accents, His Smug Unctuousness cast as the PM, abetted by a panto villainess, cut off the frayed ends of our suspension of disbelief. Jack Bauer, the great malcontent of the early 2000s, the anti-hero of counter-everything, the TV construct that some of us cleaved to as our best friend and rescuer, is diminished, not revived. He knows it, because he is whispering more hoarsely than ever.

Wonderful, incomparable Sarah Lund, I love you, I miss you - don't come back.

THEY ARE ALL GONE INTO THE WORLD OF LIGHT

contrablog (2)

"You don't call yourself a writer because you have some free time and your heart is aching....Writing is a serious activity, a profession. Not a pastime." 
Simone de Beauvoir quoted by Claudine Monteil in The Beauvoir Sisters, English translation © 2004 by Marjolijn de Jager. 
The same is true of painting, photography and acting. 
It should mean the end of this blog....

Young Woman Drawing by Marie-Denise Villers, 1801. 

Metroplitan Museum, New York. Image source: Wikipedia

WELCOME

 PIPPA RATHBORNE

Actor & Writer

Inspired by her talented and courageous parents, Pippa Rathborne never thought of being anything but an actor. She has worked in theatre, TV and film since she was 22. She has a wide dramatic and light comedic range in both contemporary and classical texts. Born and based in London, she has toured the United Kingdom, and also worked in Europe and Hong Kong, in everything from modern English classics and Shakespeare to improvised comedy and murder mysteries. She is also an experienced role-player for legal and medical training courses.

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Hamburg 2010

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ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT MARTIN HUEBSCHER

Calico

Please don't ask me how I feel.
In the garden of how I feel
nothing grows
but tears and sighs and bitter aloes.
I cannot speak my sorrow:
it swells inside me, fungating tumour,
choking words and ulcerating thoughts.

In the garden of how I feel,
there is no light; sunken corner
of mind's eye
diseased, where knotted stems writhe and mould,
mandrakes scream, torn out of earth,
and the angry rustling of ivy leaves
sirens that rats are tunnelling through.

It’s their garden now; dead ones stink
where lily and rose used to be.
Memory
by violence of absence mutates,
past and present are displaced -
love severed, nothing looks nor feels the same
that once was seen and felt by her, too.

Please don’t tell me, then, to “move on”-
raw amputee crawling towards
a closed door.
Let me journey in catacombed mind
to resurrect the garden,
replant her flowers, released,
in sweet disorder, out of stone and clay,
ancient art of heartbreak colours mixed;

rare slender straight-backed gallantry,
supple as swaying summer stems;
make-believe
like her the most while having little -
her calico mystery -
I see her - quick - she’s climbed the tree again -
she stands, laughing in the dappled light.

Written after seeing a photograph of a woman in a garden

cutting edge of fashion

Nothing becomes a rich person so ill as telling a poor one that money can't buy happiness, but I sympathize with them that it doesn't always buy beauty or good taste.  Looking at the clothes in Harvey Nichols the other day, for the first time in seven years, I have never seen so much I didn't want.* It is consoling to know that you can dress just as sluttily or frumpily from the local mall as you can from Knightsbridge.

But where is exquisite wearable art to be found in London today if it's not in "premier luxury retail"? It doesn't matter that the prices are out of my reach - the famous department stores have the power to inspire us all by showcasing the best, not dumb fashion down. Capitalism is failing in its moral justification to broker beauty. Producing and buying expensive stuff for the sake of its cost alone is not enough; wealth is not its own reward.

 Jean-Francois Janinet, Marie Antoinette, a print after Jean-Baptiste-André Gautier-Dagoty

France, 1777. Mixed method colour print on two sheets of paper. © Trustees of the British Museum

Good taste and beauty are not always the same thing, of course. One implies reason, order, restraint - the other can be terrifying....

Faith in small things

Best acting on TV that I've seen for ages came in forms I thought I didn't believe in - British sit-com, chummy star names and god - all of them delivering in episode 5 of Rev. The heart of drama beats, after all.

Sarah Siddons and her brother John Philip Kemble as the Macbeths in the dagger scene.
Oil painting by Thomas Beach, 1786, in the Garrick Club collection.
Image source: Wikipedia

Spring holiday

INCONVENIENCE

Today, Good Friday, when Christians remember that Jesus was crucified, the shops are all open; on Sunday, when he rose again, and might have needed something, the shops will be closed.

Desperate Daffodils by MHPhotography

End of the fairy tale

 PART SIX of THEATRES OF POWER 1580-1780

There was a torture chamber hidden under the fairytale palaces, the vanishing flower-garlanded places where laughing, well-fed putti eternally play after the people, surfeited on Rococo, have died or fled.

Apollo with the Graces and Muses painted for the ceiling of the Théâtre de la reine, at Trianon,

 Versailles, by Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, 1779. Image source: Wikipedia

The restrained imagery of the later Stuart monarchy reflected the bloodless 1688 revolution in political realities. Baroque was sobered down, mannered. Its architecture was perceived as heavy and florid, and was already going out of fashion by the time its last great palace, Blenheim, was finished in 1716, to complaints from the owner, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, about the impracticalities of the design. The architect, John Vanbrugh, whose other most famous building is the fairy tale Castle Howard, a fantastical stage set on the Yorkshire moors, was....

Absolutism and Revolution

Part Five of THEATRES OF POWER

Engraving by Le Pautre of the performance of Lully's Alceste in the cour de marbre, the first of six fêtes, Les Divertissments de Versailles, held in 1674 to celebrate one of Louis XIV's military conquests. "I have loved war too much", confessed the dying king, forty two years later, when his mania for glory had bankrupted the state.

In the second half of the 17th century, court ballet, inspired by Louis XIV's example, continued to be a ritualized, exquisitely designed declaration of political agenda and ideology, occasions prickling with controversy, just as much as the Jacobean court masques and the dumb-show of Hamlet's play within the play. 

Contemporary princes were expected to use theatrical performance to make a political point, even if by nature they were not talented....

Wedding of the Gods

 PART FOUR of THEATRES OF POWER

Stefano della Bella (1610-1664) Scene Five, "Hell", of a set of stage designs 

for Le Nozze degli Dei, 1637. 

Image copyright The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

The origins of the theatrical spectaculars of the Baroque and our own time, and of classical ballet and opera, are usually traced by academics to the "magnifences" of Catherine de Medici, who, out of dire political necessity during the Wars of Religion, built on two traditions, the Valois court entertainments and the intermezzi of her own family’s court in Florence, to devise cultural showcases for dynastic policies. 

Dynasty: Catherine de Medici and her husband, Henri II, at the centre of family satellites 

in France and other European states. 

Miniatures by Clouet. Image source: WGA

Two engravings by Jacques Callot in the Courtauld exhibition gave an idea of the ambitious scale of the entertainments laid on by the Medici, including a mock water battle to celebrate the visit of the Prince of Urbino in 1619, which was watched by 30,000 people. In modern terms, these huge events were the equivalent of staging the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, and the intermezzi are comparable to.....

Enchanted Islands

PART THREE of THEATRES OF POWER

 

As proof that Louis XIV’s power was absolute, Nature itself was subservient to him in the water gardens of Versailles. The fountain jets of le bosquet du théâtre d’eau (replaced in the early 1770s by a plain grass covered grove, and recently excavated) were designed, according to the fontaineer Claude Denis, to perform “obeisance to the king of kings”.

 Le théâtre d’eau - vue de la scène, 

one of the views of les bosquets, or groves, of Versailles by Jean Cotelle the younger, 1693. 

Image source: Wikipedia

For over a hundred years, the official pretexts for the exquisite staged illusions in the chateau's grounds were usually celebrations of royal weddings and new-born heirs, as you would expect of a fairy tale, but also, on occasion, the birth of a son to the king's favourite mistress of the moment, and the acquisition of territories through war, ruinously expensive in money and lives. "I have loved war too much", confessed the dying king, forty years later, when he bequeathed toxic, bankrupt splendour to his five year old heir. 

Feu d'artifice: Firework display on the canal at Versailles, one of the divertissements held at Versailles to celebrate the reconquest of Franche-Comté in 1674. On previous days of the festival, Lully's ballet Alceste had been performed in front of the Marble Court and Moliere's Le Malade Imaginaire in front of the Grotto of Thetis. Engraving by Le Pautre, 1676. 

Image © RMN, Musée du Louvre/Photo Thierry de Mage

Advanced technology and artistic talent mythologized life at court, enabling the refulgent monarchy to divert the nobility into acquiescence during peacetime, and dazzle friends and enemies abroad, with ballets, plays, operas, tricks of the eye, dancing fountains, musical gardens and artificial fire. The population excluded from wealth and political power, the artisans and peasants, were invited to marvel at the pleasures of the elite from a safe distance, on the terrace behind the palace or in the branches of the garden trees.

Louis XIV had always intended Versailles should be a theatre...

The ministry of fashion

"Golden lads and girls....must come to dust."

Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart

Van Dyck, c. 1638. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Image source: WGA

Collateral damage of baroque absolutist illusion.

They were wrong but romantic; collateral damage of absolutism and revolution, teenage brothers, cousins of the king, transformed and immortalized by Van Dyck into an illusory image of English aristocracy that inspired fantasies still enjoyed today, including fictional upper-class heroes like the Scarlet Pimpernel and the 1930s gentleman detective, whose outward foppishness concealed brains and virility, and, more recently, re-invented as the modern meterosexual vampires of film and TV, whose lineage goes back beyond late Victorian Dracula, to Byronic heroes, Restoration libertines and doomed Cavalier youths.

The confident, sensual magnificence of Baroque male fashion boasted feminine attributes; in comparison, the presentation of ideal masculine sexuality of a hundred years earlier - Henry VIII in his straddling stance jutting out his codpiece - looks crudely insecure. 

Even a realistic artist and social observer like Frans

Theatres of Power

PART TWO

 It was not the artist's fault that the real king rode into the picture of himself and never came out.

 

Charles I with M. de St Antoine by Van Dyck, 1633, Royal Collection. 

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Baroque imagery, even when superbly executed by artistic geniuses, did not always succeed as political message in the patron's favour or keep the King or Queen's head on during a revolution, but it still works as art. Over three and a half centuries later, the first impression of Charles I that grabs most of us is Van Dyck's interpretation of a refined and chivalric paternalistic figure, not "that man of blood", the "tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good of this nation" called to account for all the lives that had been lost in civil war.

 

Van Dyck's portraits, etherealising Charles I and his court, are as much of a theatrical device as Inigo Jones' fantastical masque designs, creating an ineradicable illusion of aristocratic grace and virtue in parallel with the historic reality of an unpopular and flawed regime. It was not the artist's fault that the real king walked into the picture and never came out. A sophisticated public relations initiative presented Stuart hereditary monarchy as an ideal nuclear family, affectionate and impeccably dressed, complete with pet dog and aspirational home.....

The tyranny of fantasy

THEATRES OF POWER 1580-1780
Part One

You climbed the stairs to see the interior of an opulent palace, where you half expected to find Sleeping Beauty, reminding you of the toy theatre you played with when you were a child, its painted flats arranged layer behind layer giving you the illusion of depth and space, over which you had dominion, one of your first tastes of the enchantment of power.

Giuseppi Valeriani: Set of designs for a stage set, 17th Century. 

The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London 

This pretty and delicate model was designed in the early eighteenth century as a seven piece set by the Italian Russian artist Giuseppe Valeriani with pen and brown ink, watercolour and judicious use of gold leaf on paper.

It was the starting point of the exhibition Stages and Scenes: Creating Architectural Illusion at the Courtauld Gallery in 2008. The eight students on the Curating the Art Museum MA programme chose the piece before they had decided on a theme for their exhibition. Like a true fairy tale talisman, the object had powers of suggestion to open a door....

Broken hopes

Hafen Hamburg Eis by Martin Hübscher © 2010

reblogged with kind permission from Martin Hübscher Photography

Extract from a memoir by Sarah Vernon

Few people’s childhood impressions are recalled with as much honesty and poignant detail as Sarah's. She conjures the enormity of the smallest things, and the intensity of the desire to own every emotion, every moment.

With many thanks to Sarah, the first part of COMFORT IN A COTTON FROCK is reblogged from First Night Design

I wish Anne would come. Wednesday Anne. I want to help her today: I want to use the dustpan and brush. She’s broken her arm again so she can’t do any cleaning without me. I love her. How pretty you are, she says. I couldn’t do any of this without your help, she says. How I love her. She’s been around for ages and is even older than Mummy and Daddy. She used to clean for Ellen Terry and Ellen Terry was very famous and from very, very long ago. Charles-Who-Had-His-Head-Chopped-Off was around then. I think. I want to be Ellen Terry.....

Liberation and Self ownership

 THE LAUREL TROPHY

part six

 Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth 

sculpted in marble by Canova, 1796-1817, Canova Museum, Possagno

Instead of carrying off the charming but vacillating Madame Récamier to his Berlin palace as his bride in 1808, Prince Augustus of Prussia took the famous portrait by Gérard, perhaps sensing that owning an archetype of the eternal feminine was a more prestigious investment than a legal bond with the living woman.

The real Madame Récamier was unfazed by the incorruptible beauty of her painted alter ego, while her own fortunes, looks and health faded, and continued to pursue her career as a salonnière. It is a relief to know that her vitality, charming conversation and good taste were resilient to time and poverty. The cultural power generated by her reputation, that we would call her brand, was unassailable.

But something changed in her. At the age of forty she freed a hidden self when....

Pictures within pictures - which one is true and who owns the truth?

THE LAUREL TROPHY, part five

Detail of La Chambre de Madame Récamier à l'Abbaye-aux-Bois 

by François-Louis Dejuinne, 1827, showing Gérard's painting of Madame de Staël in the character of her literary heroine, Corinne, at top right.

After Madame de Staël's death in 1817, Prince August of Prusia commissioned a painting of her in the character of her most famous heroine, Corinne, as a gift for Madame Récamier. Among de Staël's most treasured possessions at Coppet had been a portrait and bust of Juliette.

These were not mere sentimental souvenirs of idealized female friendship. Public relations, mutual admiration and ideological statement all contributed to the self-created cult of two very different women who recognized their complementary attributes. One was a brainy, brilliant, pushy, sexually liberated published author, the Sappho of her times, and the other....