This time it is not a failed movie adaptation, but an exhibition of 200 works at the Prado. From portraits of children, like Goya's grandson Mariano, to nightmarish visions and the all too real horrors of war, an exploration of the artist's astonishing range.

This exhibition was organized for the bicentennial of the Spanish War of Independence.

Unfortunately I won't be able to see it, and will be content to watch this slide show with you. If you are lucky enough to be in Madrid, hurry: it will be closing on July 13.

        

Over twenty years later, Gabrielle reminisces about the lifestyle enjoyed by the nobility in the years that immediately preceded the Revolution:

The Duchess took me to parties given by her friends. Some were regular dinners, some informal suppers after the play, the ballet or the opera, and others musical gatherings, where both professional and amateur performers displayed their talents. I was often pressed to sing, which, out of shyness, I avoided as much as I could without appearing affected or ungracious. Impromptu dances often concluded the pleasures of the evening. The Bishop of Autun, Monsieur de Talleyrand, who has since achieved such fame as a diplomat, once said: “Who has not known that time has not known the sweetness of living.” It was indeed sweet, although that sweetness was not to last.

Manners in good society were very modest. It would have been the height of insolence for a gentleman to touch, even briefly, any part of a sofa occupied by a lady, let alone to sit next to her, or to offer her his arm for a walk. Only husbands or brothers were allowed those familiarities. Lovers avoided them at all costs. The English custom of shaking hands, especially between persons of different sexes, was considered so vulgar as to be ridiculous. Conversations, however, were freer than anything I had heard before in company.

Gabrielle, who is not yet twenty, enjoys all of this. She goes riding in Villers's country estate of Vaucelles, she meets him at the outdoors parties given by their friends, she dances with him.

I was a Baroness, albeit a penniless one. I only associated with aristocrats. Not all were wealthy, but all lived in a world of luxury, of idleness, of parties, of pleasure, which was becoming mine.

For how long? The poor are starving, the people of Paris are restless. The days of the sweetness of living are numbered.



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Prior posts in the series:

Return to Fontfreyde
Cottage life
Arriving in Paris
Dressing for Court
Discovering Versailles
The presentation to Marie-Antoinette
The Royal Chapel
The Queen's Bedchamber
Paris Fashions

        

I am going to visit my Mom at her place in Arcachon, in southwestern France. I will post about this lovely seaside resort and its extraordinary history when I come back.

In the meantime I am sending you these postcards . You can also download these wallpapers. Yes, the place is really as beautiful as in the pictures.

See you on Tuesday!

        

I was tagged with a Blog Award of Excellence by two separate blogs: World of Royalty and Sofia's Royal Sweden. My heartfelt thanks to both. This is such an honor, especially when I only began blogging five months ago! And it entails the obligation of nominating 10 blogs. If you look at my blogroll, you will realize that it was a difficult decision. But it had to be made. So here are my choices, in alphabetical order:

A Striped Armchair: for the extraordinary range and diversity of Eva's reading.

A Work in Progress: Dani's love of books shines through.

DearAuthor.com: for the insights into the business of publishing and the ethics of writing (and the book reviews, of course.)

History Buff: the name says it all.

Reading the Past: Sarah is the reference on historical fiction. She wrote the book, in fact.

Reading, Raving and Ranting: those Plantagenets are fascinating.

Tea at Trianon: Elena amazes me by the quality, quantity and visual appeal of her output, and her knowledge of French history.

Unusual Historicals: they boldly go beyond Tudor England.

Van Gogh's Chair: Sheramy knows and loves art, and it shows.

Writing the Renaissance: Julianne brings the French Renaissance to life.

        

On Tuesday I went to Charles-De-Gaulle Airport and noticed painted sunflowers everywhere. I reflected on how great an idea that was to cheer up an otherwise dreary place, and was reminded of Sheramy and her novel.

And the next day I visited her (beautiful) blog and read this:

I am thrilled to announce that my novel inspired by the art and life of Vincent van Gogh, The Sunflowers, will be published with Avon A—the trade-paperback imprint of Avon/HarperCollins—in Fall 2009... (more)

I am so happy for you, Sheramy! Selfishly, I am thrilled as a reader as well. New art-themed, French-themed historical fiction...

Congratulations again!

        

The theme is the great painter Goya, the director is Academy Award winner Miloš Forman (Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), the stars are Natalie Portman and Javier Bardem, the film was shot on location in Spain. I had read middling reviews, but my expectations were high when I saw it last summer in a Paris theater. It is now available in DVD in the US and this seems like a good time to share my impressions.

The setting is 1792 Spain, and the French Revolution is already well under way north of the Pyrenees. To fight the spread of the new subversive ideas, the Spanish Inquisition, now a derelict and toothless institution, realizes that it needs to launch a public relations campaign. In order to restore its image and remind people of the good ole days, it decides to burn at the stake a number of heretics and Marranos, those Jews who, though ostensibly converted to Catholicism, continue to secretly practice Judaism.

Be warned that the vision of the Spanish Inquisition presented here is reminiscent of Mel Brooks’s The History of the World, Part I. There is one major difference, though: in this film the caricature is not funny.

The Inquisition’s efforts are spearheaded by Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) whose portrait is being painted by Goya (Stellan Skarsgård.) Now if you found Mr. Bardem’s character creepy in No Country For Old Men, you have seen nothing. Brother Lorenzo is utterly vile, conniving, depraved, cruel, hypocritical, cowardly, sanctimonious, lecherous.

Goya comes across as a fairly decent man, in a mousy sort of way. He is mildly repelled by Lorenzo, and mildly attracted to young Inés Bilbatua (Natalie Portman) whose portrait he is also painting.

Inés is the daughter of a wealthy family, but she makes a life-altering mistake: she declines to eat pork in the common room of an inn. The film goes to great lengths to emphasize that she is no Marrana. Her dislike of pork has no religious connotation, it is merely a gastro-intestinal issue. If only she had been lactose-intolerant instead!

But such is Inés's fate: she is promptly arrested on charges of crypto-Judaism, stripped naked, tortured by the minions of the Inquisition, and raped by Brother Lorenzo. What's a girl to do? She falls in love with the man. But then, just when Lorenzo might do something for her to further their sado-masochistic relationship, he is disgraced by an ill-conceived attempt by her family to free her. He has to flee Spain and exit the story.

Fifteen years pass, and suddenly the French armies appear to install Bonaparte’s brother onto the Spanish throne in lieu of the legitimate Bourbon King Carlos IV (an excellent Randy Quaid, the sole bright spot in the film.) And who is the French commissar in charge of the operation? You guessed it: none other than our old friend Lorenzo, now defrocked, married and converted to the Revolution’s ideals of liberty and equality. Never mind that those ideals were not a hot commodity at all under Bonaparte’s reign. The film never lets inconvenient historical facts stand in the way of a bad story.

The French troops free the prisoners languishing in the dungeons of the Inquisition, including poor Inés. So are the French the good guys, the promoters of liberty, or the bad guys, the foreign invaders? The film obviously tries very hard to make a point. Fine, but the problem is that we don't quite grasp what that point is. Two screenwriters, Mr. Forman himself and Frenchman Jean-Claude Carrière, are credited and, judging by the result, their collaboration didn't go smoothly. At times I caught myself missing the ideological clarity of The Scarlet Pimpernel. I will nonetheless risk a guess as to the message: French Revolution = Napoleonic regime = Spanish Inquisition = Catholicism = bad. No guarantees, though.

Before long English troops also show up and proceed to defeat the French, thus providing some action scenes. By now it has become clear that the French, whatever they stand for, are the bad guys. This is the time Inés chooses to disclose the existence of her daughter by Lorenzo, Alicia (also played by Natalie Portman.) Alicia, we are told, is a tigress: she eloped from her convent school to become a prostitute. Lorenzo thinks of a way to rid himself of this  offspring, and of Inés, who is now prematurely senile but, after all these years, still consumed with love and devotion for him.

What does this have to do with Goya? Well, once in a while the screenplay yanks him from his easel to send him on some errand or other on behalf of the protagonists. He is the plot's jack-of-all-trades, and Stellan Skarsgård gives such a shadowy performance (maybe the title should have been Goya's Ghost) that the character never stands a chance. Apparently he got himself half-erased from the film's European poster (above) and disappeared completely from the US DVD cover (right.) No spoilers here, but I will reveal this much: you get to see some of the real Goya's etchings with the credits.

This film fails at every possible level, cinematic, artistic and historical. What I found deeply disturbing was the depiction of women. Inés is a mass of jelly, in thrall to the man who raped her. Their daughter Alicia manifests her "strength" by becoming a prostitute. Apparently it never occurred to the makers of this film that prostitution is most often a position of total subservience.

Still more offensive was to drag an artist of Goya's caliber into this mess.

        

Lucy had mentioned on her blog that she had purchased Mistress of the Revolution, and now she posted her review.

"It’s not the story of the revolution," she writes, "but rather the story of the minor noble Gabrielle de Montserrat, and it is her experiences and reactions that remain paramount. I think this is a huge strength. Delors’ Gabrielle experiences the cataclysmic events of her time the way most of do our own, as spectators and as victims, without the power to change the turbulence around her but with the strength to endure its effects..."

Indeed! I was reflecting the other day that there are two kinds of historical fiction. One focuses on the lives of famous characters, like Marie-Antoinette, Van Gogh or the omnipresent Tudors. The other subgenre tells the stories of ordinary people, especially when they are caught up in extraordinary events (War and Peace, The Princess de Cleves, The Three Musketeers...) Historical characters often appear, but the protagonists are fictional.

I like, or love, depending on the author's talent, both kinds of historical fiction, but my first two books belong to the second category, and Lucy describes it beautifully. Thank you, Lucy!

        

This new exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London is titled Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners. It came to my attention thanks to an article by Waldemar Januszczak, a noted British art critic, in The Times. I found Mr. Januszczak's pronouncements on both Boucher and Chardin rather startling.

Here is what he writes of Boucher: "Sly, sycophantic, corrupt and giggly, this bouncy peddler of soft porn was Madame de Pompadour’s favourite artist. Anyone wishing to understand why the French Revolution had to happen need only examine a handful of Bouchers. The stink of French 18th-century corruption wafts up from his art."

A sweeping statement. Now Madame de Pompadour, the best known of Louis XV's mistresses, was a cultured woman. She used her position in Versailles to patronize the best writers, musicians and painters of her time. Being one of her favorite artists is not in my eyes a claim to shame.

So what do I think of Boucher? True, I find him often shallow, his nudes are sometimes lewd, but there is far more to him than "soft porn."

I have always loved his Le Petit Déjeuner (Breakfast) to the left. True, it speaks of privilege and refinement. This aristocratic family is enjoying chocolate, a luxury at the time. Look at the exotic objects surrounding them: the buddha on the shelves, the blue-and-white chinese jar, set in gilded bronze, the lavish toys of the elder child, in particular the doll.

The attention of two of the adults is focused on this little girl, a reflection of the changing attitudes of the time. The second woman, in a dark blue smock, spoon feeds another, younger child sitting on her lap. Does any of this reek of corruption, or make the French Revolution a foregone conclusion?

Now how about Chardin? Well, according to Mr. Januszczak, Chardin miraculously escaped the noxious miasma of French 18th century. "Surrounded by fops and fools, in a century that specialised in frippery, he managed somehow to create a body of work that impresses us with its solemnity and its weight."

Indeed this meal scene by Chardin, painted around the same time as the Boucher, reflects a totally different atmosphere. It is called the Benedicite, the blessing of the food. Here too there is an interaction between a child and an adult, but the hands of the little girl are joined in prayer . No luxury, the setting is a well-to-do bourgeois household. I agree that this scene is impressive in its unsentimental solemnity.

But soon Mr. Januszczak loses me again: "There is something so unFrench about Chardin: so modest and Protestant and plain." Mr. Januszczak is obviously a man who embraces ethnic and religious stereotypes.

I believe it behooves an art critic, if he is to opine on French 18th century paintings, to acquire an understanding of the time and place. The Chardin is actually just as French as the Boucher, maybe more so.

Most French people before the Revolution would have identified far more easily with Chardin than with Boucher, whose art reflected the luxurious, libertine lifestyle of a tiny minority.

If you follow Mr. Januszczak's article to the end, you will see that he tones down his assessments (we would say in French that il met de l'eau dans son vin, he waters down his wine). Maybe after all Boucher is not that bad, nor Chardin that good. Whatever.

I will spend some time in London this July, and take advantage of it to visit the exhibition. The Wallace Collection also happens to house what may be Fragonard's most famous painting: Les heureux hasards de l'escarpolette (The Swing.) Another piece of French "soft porn?" It will post on it shortly.

        

By now you know all about the proper attire required from the ladies of the Court. But the same women, hampered by their cumbersome paniers in Versailles, dressed quite differently, and in my opinion more elegantly, in Paris.

Let us listen to Gabrielle:

In the capital, the new fashion for ladies was to forego hair powder and to wear straw bonnets and simple dresses of white muslin during the day. This suited my finances very well. Instead of the blue sashes favoured by other women, I would choose bright pink ones, while decorating my hats with matching ribbons to highlight the colour of my hair.

My source here was the Memoirs of Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (below, in the black hat) who painted numerous portraits of Marie-Antoinette, and many society ladies.

In particular Madame Lebrun is the author of this beautiful portrait of Louise-Marie de Bourbon-Penthièvre, great-granddaughter of Louis XIV. She was married to the Duke d'Orléans, future Philippe-Egalité.

See how this portrait shows the natural color of the model's hair, instead of the dusty grey of powder.

These white muslin dresses were appropriate as a lady's informal attire. For more formal occasions in Paris, ladies would have dressed like Madame Necker, wife of the Comptroller General of Finances, in the portrait to your right, or as the young woman in the Fragonard painting featured on the cover of Mistress of the Revolution.

Various colors went in and out of fashion (see below the portrait of the Marquises de Pezay and Rougé, also by Madame Lebrun) but white remained a favorite for women of the upper classes.

So what was the reason for this trend towards simpler female fashions, which would become ever more pronounced during the Revolution?

I believe it had to do with the prevalent taste for simplicity and everything "natural," along the lines of the Queen's hamlet and dairy farm at Trianon.

There might also be another, more prosaic but equally important, reason for the sudden popularity of white fabrics: the discovery in the 1770s by the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet of l'eau de Javel, chlorine bleach.

The natural bleaching of muslin in sunlight had been an expensive and costly process, but now it could be done quickly and easily thanks to l'eau de Javel.


____________________

Prior posts in the series:

Return to Fontfreyde
Cottage life
Arriving in Paris
Dressing for Court
Discovering Versailles
The presentation to Marie-Antoinette in the Salon of the Nobles
The Royal Chapel
The Queen's Bedchamber

        

I have not seen the PBS film, and can't comment on it, but the site is worth a visit. It is lavishly illustrated, and I found the parts on Versailles particularly interesting.

The site also includes interviews of British historians Simon Schama and Lady Antonia Fraser. No French scholars? Not even Simone Bertiere, who is, in my opinion, THE biographer of Marie-Antoinette? Chantal Thomas? Sorry, apparently not.

Don't get me wrong: I don't deny Britons, or people of any other nationality, the right to study and discuss that era and its characters, but it is called the French Revolution for a reason. What if PBS featured the American Revolution without interviewing a single American historian?

Now that I got my French peeve out of the way, let's talk about the tone used to describe the "famous faces" of the Revolution. Marie-Antoinette is The Teen Queen. For the record, she was 33 at the beginning of the Revolution. But wait, there is more: Necker, the Comptroller General of Finances, as Monsieur Moneybags? Robespierre as Mad Max? Is this appropriate for what purports to be a serious work?

In addition, be warned that the same Famous Faces part contains significant errors, in particular with regard to the crucial issue of the drive to war. I haven't combed through the entire site for similar inaccuracies, but they may be found elsewhere.

So enjoy the pictures, they are gorgeous, and take the rest with a grain of salt.

        

Cinderella at World of Royalty posts two trailers of the film The Duchess, to be released in September. The more recent one rather shamelessly attempts to exploit the enduring popularity of Princess Diana by drawing a parallel between her and the Duchess of Devonshire, née Lady Georgiana Spencer (the two women were indeed related.)

Both trailers seem to focus on the Duchess's marital troubles and her notorious ménage à trois with the Duke and her friend Lady Elizabeth Foster. Georgiana's involvement in politics, and her considerable influence in that regard, do not seem to be mentioned. She was also a writer and a beloved public figure. I hope the film does justice to these aspects of her life.

And what do you think of Keira Knightley in the title role? Does she resemble the real Duchess, painted here by Gainsborough?

The famous painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun met the Duchess in 1802, and describes her in her remarkable Memoirs, available online in English translation. Georgiana was then middle-aged and in failing health (she would die four years later.)

Here goes Madame Lebrun:

The most fashionable woman in London at this time was the Duchess of Devonshire. I had often heard of her beauty and her influence in politics, and when I called upon her she greeted me in the most affable style. She might then have been about forty-five years old. Her features were very regular, but I was not struck by her beauty. Her complexion was too high, and ill-fortune had ordained that one of her eyes should be blind. As at this period the hair was worn over the forehead, she concealed the eye under a bunch of curls, but that was insufficient to hide such a serious defect. The Duchess of Devonshire was of fair size, her degree of stoutness being exactly appropriate to her age, and her unconstrained manner became her exceedingly well.

        

This should be another interesting exhibition (Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, until October 5, 2008.) See the slide show for a preview.

I have already mentioned Bonaparte's deft handling of his own public image. He was also a micro-manager. No subject, however trivial, escaped his attention. He set out to reform not only the legal system, but also furniture design and female clothing (he found the prior fashions immodest.)

The result? Decorative arts as propaganda. A heavy, pompous neoclassical style dedicated to the celebration of the glory of the new ruler.  None of of the grace and refinement that had characterized the last years of the Old Regime, as exemplified by Marie-Antoinette's taste.

I will report shortly on this one as well.

        

We saw Gabrielle readying herself for her first visit to Versailles. Especially for a young woman who was going to be presented to the Queen, it was a momentous experience. Let us listen to Gabrielle:

The Duchess and I left early on a fine Sunday morning for Versailles. I was attired in all of my new finery. She wore a black Court gown and the rest of her diamonds. Aimée, much to her chagrin, had to remain in Paris. Children, except those of the royal family, were not seen at Court. I dried her tears and assured her that I would be back very soon.

After the carriage had made its way through an army of street vendors peddling cheap mementos in front of the Palace, we passed two successive sets of gates and alighted in the courtyard reserved for Duchesses. I was awed by the size of the palace. Its wings seemed to extend forever on each side of the central building.

“I never imagined anything so gigantic,” I exclaimed.

“What you see is nothing,” replied the Duc