Iridescence

 Natural pearl and diamond pendant, 18th century;
set with an oval diamond supporting a diamond bow motif
and a baroque drop-shaped natural pearl measuring approximately 16 × 18 × 26mm.

A natural pearl and diamond jewel of delicately wrought beauty once belonged to history's most glamorous scapegoats for the abuses and injustices of autocracy, the victim of nationalism and misogyny, reviled by women and men, the hated l'autrichienne, the Austrian bitch, Marie Antoinette, queen of France.

Political assassination is arguably justified, character assassination is not. Of all the offensive insults thrust at her, the most hurtful, far worse than all the salacious sexual slurs, the one that cut deepest, more humiliating than being deprived of shoes and false teeth in prison, more painful than beheading, was the Tribunal's allegation of incest with her son.

"If I have not replied it is because Nature itself refuses to answer such a charge laid against a mother. I appeal to all mothers here present – is it true?”

Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine, drawn by David, 16 October 1793. Image: Wikipedia.
She was 37 years old. Usually, press reports about celebrity women degrade them by mentioning their age, but in this case the vulgar habit of prejudging is justified by the shock of this woman's premature ageing due to suffering.

She, who was brought up to be a dynastic pawn, a bride and mother of kings, became the Eternal Feminine demonized. The modern perception of Marie Antoinette has shifted away from the inverted fairy story heroine, the romanticized narrative of an over-privileged but misunderstood star of the diamond-studded, blood-stained Versailles reality show, to the universal figure in women's history of wronged mother and foreigner.

 Marie-Antoinette and her children by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, 1787

While she was imprisoned, she was separated from her children. As she prepared for death, her chief anxiety was about their fate. An 18th century princess endured the kind of degradation and psychological torture that tyranny in the modern world still inflicts on female immigrants and their families.

And there's the jewel itself, the progeny of animals and human skill, that natural pearl of iridescence beyond price, a man-made thing lovely enough to be the symbol of our atonement for our sins against nature and each other, sold for silly money, £25 million that should be spent on environmental conservation and humanitarian missions to reunite migrant families and release political prisoners.

Gilded Dramas

Gilded Interiors: French Masterpieces of Gilt Bronze
exhibition at The Wallace Collection

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......

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....