Foreshades of Grey (11)

 or, Behind the Rococo Clock Face

detail of Boucher’s 1756 portrait of Madame de Pompadour

Among the learned books in Madame de Pompadour’s library, there was a unique volume about the rivers of France which had been written, and some of it printed, many years before by a diligent and inquisitive eight year old boy, based on his lessons in geography and typography.

Louis XV’s Cours des principaux fleuves et rivières de l’Europe (Courses of the Principal Rivers and Streams of Europe), written in 1718, which the adult man gave to his mistress as a token of the conscientious king that the playboy of Versailles had once wanted to be, survives in the Bibliothèque nationale.

The little print shop, which was built for Louis XV in the Tuileries nearly sixty-five years before Marie Antoinette’s fantasy-farm was installed at Le Petit Trianon, had a serious educative purpose to instill appreciation of crafts and machinery in a cultured king whose interests and personal accomplishments should reflect the nation’s glorious achievements.

Louis ‘the well-beloved’ grew up to enjoy his cultural responsibilities as king and patron of the arts and sciences. He enjoyed music, ballet and theatre; he supported scientific and botanical expeditions. He was fascinated by scientific invention and experiments, including some of the earliest in electricity. He collected timepieces, filling Versailles with all sorts of clocks and astronomical and navigational precision instruments.

Fashionable society followed his lead and the manufacture of technically advanced and high end luxury products in France boomed as a result. They included an exquisite and ingenious wind-up ring-watch, with a white face against a blue and gold background, set in diamonds, made in 1755 by Caron for Madame de Pompadour, which nowadays might operate as a cellphone and computer as well as tell the time, a smart-ring for people who have everything.

Stop the clock. The pendulum has swung so far to the right, that if one’s not careful, one might be seduced. This was the same middle-aged roué who neglected to reform the government and economy, whose foreign policy brought shameful defeat on the European battlefield, lost France her colonial empire, and nearly bankrupted the State, who died hated by the impoverished people for betraying them to famine and aristocratic oppression.

He died in agony, his once handsome face covered in black smallpox scabs, from a virulent strain of the disease which made his corpse decompose so quickly that it could not be embalmed, and its stench came through the coffin. This is the horror that always lay behind the pink and gold, the scalloped ormolu and arch pastoral, the self-mocking prettiness and smiling insouciance, the high comedy of Rococo.

It was the ancien régime’s stage-set breakwater against the tidal wave, which the king and Madame de Pompadour and anybody of sense knew was coming, at a time which no-one could rewind or stop.

Astronomical clock designed by the engineer Passemant in Louis XV’s clock room at Versailles, presented to the king in 1750. Image: Wikipedia.
A king’s obsession with devices measuring time and space compensates for inability to rule his country; the ornate gilded decoration successfully disguises serious technological invention and precision.

His grandson, Louis XVI, had ten scientific laboratories at Versailles as well as his locksmith’s forge and carpentry workshop. He was like any other man in his home, doing DIY, relaxing by mending things, solving practical problems with his tools as therapy for being unable to control the vast, insoluble world outside his cave.

If Louis XVI had been politically adept, and time hadn’t run out for the Bourbon brand of absolutism founded by the terrifying despot Louis XIV, his wholesome hobbies would have endeared him to the people, instead of demonstrating how unfit he was to be king during economic austerity and social revolution.

Louis XVI had a library of 8000 books, so wins the Versailles bibliophiles’ contest for sheer quantity.

Madame de Pompadour enjoyed reading comedies and novels. She died in 1764, so the popular plays and the novel that define sex and power in 18th century French society most vividly for posterity were not in her collection. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, was published in 1782; Beaumarchais’ satirical comedy Le Barbier de Séville was first performed in 1775; the first public reading at Versailles of Le Mariage de Figaro was in 1781.

Her library included historical romances written by women. Much as she enjoyed a laugh, there is no record that she read vapid fantasies of sexual obsession and female degradation. She had quite enough trouble avoiding that at home with Louis XV.

Foreshades of Grey (10)

or, Fashioning a Library of One’s Own

Boucher, Marquise de Pompadour 1758, Oil on canvas Victoria and Albert Museum. Image source: WGA
Is this escapism or fashionable accountability? Is she trivial, or transcendental?

In this charmingly informal publicity portrait, the most powerful woman in France during the reign of her lover and friend Louis XV is momentarily distracted from the pages of an edifying book by the beauties of nature.

It is the characteristic pose of 18th century sensibility and reason, but the gentle, almost elegiac, romanticism of the painting is unusual for Boucher, who peddled decorative erotica to the French court. He wasn’t interested in real trees, but in the silky texture of cloth and flesh, the translucence of pearls, rose petals and female skin. Here, he restrains pinkiness, he creates a contemplative mood, of private communion, of an innocent wistfulness foreign to Versailles.

The relative unfussiness, and high necked modesty, of her dress is significant, too; Madame de Pompadour understood fashion language, and not a nuance or ruffle is without profound meaning.

Within the confines of etiquette and politesse, she is ahead of the Romantic trend, anticipating the graceful simplicity of dress of pre-Revolutionary Europe adopted in the 178os. Rather as Napoleon admitted that he could not have conquered Prussia if Frederick the Great had been alive, it is impossible that the gross excesses of the high hairstyles and enormous paniered skirts of the 1770s would ever have taken hold if Madame de Pompadour had still been around.

They are fun for us, as fantastical art exhibits, fashion for fairy tales, powdered beehives carrying ships and mice, but in the real wearing they mocked good taste, hygiene and the deprivation of the rest of humanity.

Madame de Pompadour was an actress who knew the difference between escapism and accountability; she could tell a metaphor from haute couture.

As is evident from the detail of the book and the woodland setting – well, Boucher’s idea of a woodland setting – she was a patroness of Rousseau and embraced the new sensibility to feelings and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

She read his books attentively, as well as the works of Voltaire and other philosophes, and kept in touch with their progressive thinking even after twenty years of living at Versailles. She lived in the moment, but she was not in denial of national crises, or of the disastrous consequences of royal policy. The king’s problems became her problems.

Towards the end of her life, she was heard quoting from Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762): “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man who thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are”.  In her compassion for Louis the man, she was trying to give the king a moral get-out clause, an excuse for his lethargy towards reforming the French State.

Foreshades of Grey (8)

or, Perversion of Innocence

Boucher, The Toilet of Venus 1751 Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
“commissioned by Madame de Pompadour as part of the decoration for her cabinet de toilette at the Château de Bellevue, one of the residences she shared with Louis XV”. Text and image source: Web Gallery of Art

Whipping up salacious fantasies of royal sexual perversion became a key part of revolutionary propaganda, but the worst accusations of depravity were always reserved for women.

Even the rumour that Louis XV had fathered a child on one of his own daughters, Marie-Adelaide, seems to have been aimed more at crushing her limited influence at court than attacking the king’s depravity.

The chief victim of misogyny was the king’s granddaughter-in-law, Marie Antoinette, who was accused at her trial of sexually abusing her own son.

Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, Marie Antoinette and her two eldest children walking in the park of Trianon (1785) oil on canvas, Nationalmuseum Sweden. Image source: Wikipedia.
Like any conscientious mother trapped in a rigid class system, the queen was doing her best to bring up her children with enlightened modern values, in this case the Rousseauian ideals of lots of fresh air and simple clothes.

The new ideas about upper-class women being allowed free expression of maternal emotion were extolled in fashionable portraiture, and were then perverted by Marie Antoinette’s political opponents in the most inhumane way conceivable to discredit her, the mother turned into whore, the ultimate degradation of the “Austrian bitch”.

Vigée-Lebrun, Self-portrait with her daughter Julie, c. 1789 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image source: WGA.
Marie Antoinette promoted the careers of many women artists through her patronage. She used Vigée-Lebrun frequently to try and improve her public image as an enlightened, not spoilt and despotic, queen, whose sensibility was the same as any other devoted mother’s of her time.

For years before the Revolution, Marie Antoinette had featured in pornographic prints of lesbianism, a subject of fascination and confusion to 18th century erotic sub-culture for men and Romantic idealism of both sexes. The Ladies of Llangollen were admired for living virtuously together in rural retreat because of their refusal to submit to marriages of convenience; Queen Charlotte’s intercession to get them a pension wasn’t based on the possibility that women might be happier having physical relationships with one another rather than with men.

Boucher, Diana Resting after her Bath 1742 Oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image source: WGA
Here, in the most intimate picture of a podiatrist and her client ever presented, Boucher celebrates feminine sensuality with more subtlety than in the flagrant eroticism of his odalisques.

The playful sensuality of Rococo imagery, of Venus tenderly embracing her son Eros, of happy cherubs dive-bombing naked nymphs, the suggestiveness of Boucher’s pastoral idylls, of nymphs and goddesses delighting in their own and each other’s nakedness, his version of the Rousseauian ideal of female sensibility which had inspired so many fashionable women to be candid about their feelings for one another, all this varnished innocence was inverted and made dirty.

Guérin Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with Lady Elizabeth Foster c. 1791
Miniature on ivory, Wallace Collection, London. Image source: WGA.
Female friendship and the benign influence of feminine sensitivity and refinement on culture and society as a whole was valued and celebrated.

Foreshades of Grey (6)

or, The Royal Stag

The king’s promiscuity was an affair of state. It made government vulnerable to abuse from the wrong kind of woman pushed on him by a court faction, with domestic or foreign policy agendas, a scenario as familiar to modern republics as autocracies of any time. He was very lucky to find the rational, loyal and responsible Madame de Pompadour, or rather, that she introduced herself to him.

Nattier, Portrait of Louis XV of France, 1745. Oil on canvas The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
He was known as the handsomest man at Versailles; he was also the most libidinous and depressed. Here, portrayed in the year he moved his new mistress Madame d’Étioles, into Versailles, he looks disconcertingly like a chubby Dan Stevens, but Ryan Gosling would be better casting to convey his enigmatic emotional isolation.

Details of his sexual proclivities, especially his liking for young girls, later provided propaganda for the Revolutionaries in his grandson’s reign. He needed but was not obsessed with sex; he spent far more time gambling and hunting, anything to distract him from l’acédie. Unlike a lot of world leaders in the modern era, and the Marquis de Sade in Louis XV’s own time, there was no open suggestion during his reign even from his greatest enemies that the king abused or assaulted women, or that his tastes were perverted or paedophiliac; but there’s no doubt that he slept with a lot of young teenage girls.

How young is still disputed; the ones history is sure about were aged about fifteen or sixteen. This was considered just old enough for aristocratic and wealthy virgins to start sexual activity in arranged marriages with often much older men, but very early by the contemporary standards of poorer, working class girls, unless they were already prostitutes. The average age of marriage among peasant or working class women in the mid 18th century was as surprisingly, and sensibly, late as 26, suggesting they had much more power of choice than their more pampered upper class counterparts, pawns in mummies and daddies’ powergames.

Madame de Pompadour was essential to the king’s happiness, and she lived to make him happy. After their relationship became platonic, neither she nor the king, let alone his wife and daughters who preferred the Marquise as his official mistress to anyone else, wanted their harmonious ménage disrupted by some arrogant aristocrat or pushy parvenue whose abuse of patronage and mindless extravagance would cause national scandal. Flash-forward to the sad years after La Pompadour’s death, and cue slutty Madame du Barry moving in to Versailles.

Foreshades of Grey (5 and a half)

or, To understand all is to forgive all

Hyacinthe Rigaud, State Portrait of Louis XV, 1715, Musée National du Château, Versailles. Image source: WGA
An hereditary absolute monarch plays with his toys.

Louis XV’s contemporary Rousseau (1712 -1774) was the first educationalist of the modern era to impress upon parents who could afford to educate their children in the first place, that they should not be treated and dressed as miniature adults.

Forming habits early on was bad for personality development. In a natural education, parents and guardians should provide “well-regulated liberty” for the child to play and follow his or her natural instincts. Before reaching the age of reason, the child learns through sensation, not through having ideas of right and wrong, and certainly not of entitlement, forced on him.

There was nothing remotely natural about Louis XV’s childhood.

“Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner” is a French proverb of disputed origin. Madame de Staël wrote in her novel Corinne (1807): “Car tout comprendre rend très indulgent, et sentir profondément inspire une grande bontée” .
“To understand everything makes one tolerant, and to feel deeply inspires great kindness”.
With grateful acknowledgments to Fake Buddha Quotes

Foreshades of Grey (5)

or Erotica and the Rational Woman

Boucher The Setting of the Sun 1752 Oil on canvas Wallace Collection, London. Image source: WGA Mythologically disguised, Madame de Pompadour is welcoming Louis XV to bed.
In real life their sexual relationship had ended a couple of years previously. When this huge painting of mutual sexual fulfillment was first exhibited, men thought it was too shocking for their wives and daughters to see, always a good sign in the past that art was being effective.

The king’s apparent dependency on the bourgeois Madame de Pompadour made her hated by the aristocracy, who wanted complete control over the monarchy, and by the public, who wanted an infallible father figure, not one emasculated under female domination.

Her indirect influence on foreign policy was unfairly held responsible for the disasters of the Seven Years War and the suffering it brought to the nation at home – because it was easier to blame a meddling woman than incompetent men – but her direct influence on French culture and manufacturing of luxury goods was benign. She was a joy-giver who brought good taste into the soulless gambling palace of Versailles before the deluge.

This blogger defends the escapism of Madame de Pompadour and Boucher. They understood the importance of being frivolous.

Boucher’s interpretation of Rococo was meant to be a sophisticated play on lost innocence, an alternative from ghastly reality, but it came over to many contemporary artists, art critics and intellectuals as decadent and irrelevant. They were as disgusted by his cheesiness as a lot of people are today. By the 1750s he was old hat, but still employed by Madame de Pompadour, a loyal friend and patron.

Boucher was a brilliant decorator, with none of the poetic truth of Watteau a generation before, or of his own pupil Fragonard, but, seated as she was at the centre of an artifice, Versailles and the monarchy itself, Madame de Pompadour was too worldly-wise to be consoled by either ethereal visions of the ancien regime, which she was more than intelligent enough to know was destined for catastrophe, or of a neoclassical revolution in perceptions and principles.

Foreshades of Grey (4)

Reinette/Putain/Marquise

Portrait by Boucher painted 1756, oil on canvas, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Image source: WGA

She is the quintessence of 18th century Taste and Elegance. Her pose is often the same in her portraits, presenting her left three-quarters profile, faintly smiling, vitality sparkling, but not too much; her legs crossed casually, showing off petite feet slipped into chic mules, peeping out like shells under an ocean of embroidered silk; she pauses from reading a book – she is nearly always reading a book.

The same roses are cast down at her feet, next to one of her attentive spaniels, and tokens of her cultural pursuits are strewn around her – paint brushes, music sheets, writing materials, yet more books – her dress alone is a work of art – and yet there is always a subtle difference in each version of her, containing a subliminal message in the most seductive of advertizing campaigns.

Here she is enthroned in an opulent interior. She is relaxed about ownership of such splendour; she doesn’t mind you seeing – she wants you to see – the open drawer of her cabriole legged side-table. If she wasn’t so good at playing herself, you would almost suspect she was an actress in a divine drawing-room comedy.

She is more nonchalant than a nouveau riche wanting to show off would be, but, and here she proves her diplomatic brilliance, she is humbler than a queen, she is looking away from us, not seeking dominion over us. She is not completely abstracted, she is a sociable creature who would invite us in and be interested to talk to us, and say something witty to put us at ease.

This is the perfect hostess, the perfect leader of fashion and culture, not the most beautiful woman you have ever seen, it’s true, but the one who cultivates the most beauty around her. This is Madame de Pompadour.

She is the king’s mistress, and he needs her, more than anyone else, but they have not had sex with one another for years. She doesn’t mind you knowing that. It’s not the only way a woman can have power and show love.

The only thing she doesn’t want you to know is that the decorative and devoted dog is, as Nancy Mitford pointed out in her biography of Madame de Pompadour, her emotional substitute for her dead daughter.

the cutting edge of fashion

Jean-Francois Janinet, Marie Antoinette, a print after Jean-Baptiste-André Gautier-Dagoty France, 1777 © The Trustees of the British Museum

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.

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

End of the Fairy Tale

There was a torture chamber hidden under the fairytale palaces, those vanishing flower-garlanded places where laughing, well-fed putti carry on playing long 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 also a dramatist, author of two of the greatest English comedies of manners.

William and Mary Presenting the Cap of Liberty to Europe, sketch by James Thornhill for his design of the painted ceiling of the Great Hall, Greenwich Hospital, 1708-1712, the last great public illusionist interior of English Baroque.
Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The idea of putting William and Mary’s apotheosis on a painted ceiling never occurred in their lifetime; after the queen died to almost universal lamentation in England and the Netherlands, the completion of the project for a Hospital for wounded and disabled seamen was chosen as the most fitting memorial to her charitable character, a sign of a new, recognizably modern, kind of monarchy.

Thornhill’s grandiose commission for the interior of the Great Hall of Greenwich Hospital celebrating the Protestant Succession was issued in the next reign, under Queen Anne, and completed under George I, in justification of the Hanoverian right to rule.

By 1690, even the fashion in clothes had become architectural, the cut

Absolutism and Revolution

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 and devastated large swathes of the European mainland.

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 dancers or actors. A serious vocational soldier-statesman like the young William of Orange, who preferred architecture and gardening to any of the performing arts, appeared in a ballet at his court in 1668 as a codified message to the Dutch Republic and the foreign states that he intended to restore the authority of his family as a major European power, just as King Louis had done in France.

Le Roi-Soleil: Louis XIV dancing in La Ballet de la Nuit, 1653. Image source: Wikipedia

Like today’s royal family, there were plenty of monarchs by the 18th century who restricted their performance art to official ceremonial functions, weddings and funerals, reviewing the troops and dining in state, but earlier there had been natural actors and star personalities like Elizabeth I and Louis XIV (who made his debut as a ballet dancer in 1651 and first appeared as le Roi Soleil two years later) or queen consorts…..