Perhaps her husband, King Louis XVI, got it right when he made an observation about what went wrong for Marie Antoinette: “She was young and had no one to guide her.” That sad reflection from the persective of one who had lost his kingdom and would soon lose his head has a certain truth to it. The story of the paintings of the two dresses above certainly indicates that she sometimes “read” the public wrong. While one painting caused a major outburst of anti-royalist sentiment, the one meant to correct the faux pas only added insult to injury.
Caroline Weber, a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, is also a fashion historian. Her book, Queen of Fashion, What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, goes into all the interesting details about the queen’s fashion journey through French history. Weber’s work is referenced here to discuss the incident represented by the paintings of these two dresses. This story not only involves the life of the queen but the life and career of another woman, the artist and Marie Antoinette’s favorite painter, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. And of course, the white muslin dress, called a chemise, plays its part in the drama.
One might reasonably assume that the queen was quite right to want to wear lighter, less formal, and easier garments when she relaxed at her private palace, Le Petit Trianon. In fact the queen had started wearing these lighter, less restrictive dresses a few years before this painting. Naturally, all of the ladies of the court, and after them the other women in French society, followed the queen’s lead and started wearing copies of her dresses. This radical change in fashion had two unwanted results. One was the democratization that came from a style which did not show any distinction in class or wealth, a shocking development in a society that once had sumptuary laws that forebade certain types of expensive clothing from being worn by any other than nobility. On the streets of Paris, it was said that one could not tell a countess from a courtesan. The other problem was the financial blow to the trade in fine cloth. The industry that provided the silks, satins, and lace that made up the elaborate gowns of the upper class, and those who aspired to be, was almost put out of business. As well, this muslin had to be imported, some of it coming from Austria, Marie Antoinette’s country of birth. That reminded many of the French that she was really a “foreigner,” whom many had never wanted as queen anyway.
The queen had already caused a disruption with her high powdered hair-do, the Pouf, that required lots of finely milled flour to hold it together. A group of poor women had even tried to storm the palace of Versailles during a severe shortage of flour, demanding that they be given the queen’s reserve of that precious commodity so they might make bread to feed their families. Obviously the queen was on thin ice. In 1783, with so many now wearing that simple white muslin dress, she decided she wanted to show her solidarity with the people. She had Vigée Le Brun paint her wearing one of those little white chemises and a straw hat, with an ostrich plume, of course.
For Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), the daughter of a painter and the wife of an art dealer, this was yet another golden opportunity, as this painting would be shown at the Royal Academy’s Salon in Paris for all the world to see. Vigée Le Brun had been painting since she was a teen and at that early age had a little studio where she painted portraits to help support her family. Her successful little studio business was seized when it was learned she did not have a license. So she joined the Guild of Saint Luke to gain her license and continued painting and building her clientele.
Vigée Le Brun came into the queen’s employ starting in 1776, one year after Antoinette came to the throne as Queen of France. Vigée Le Brun was to paint 30 paintings of Marie Antoinette, but perhaps the most famous is the one of the queen in her simple white muslin dress. The painting was shown, and it simply enflamed the public. It was commented that the queen looked as though she were wearing her undergarments. The outrage was so horrific that another painting was made right away to replace the one of the offending white muslin dress. However, that portrait of the queen in her usual silks and satins failed as well, since it was seen as another reminder of how much money the queen was known to spend, a trait that earned her the title, “Madame Deficit.”
Vigée Le Brun went on to paint other portraits of Marie Antoinette. Especially noted is one of the Queen and her family. It was commissioned in 1785 by King Louis XVI himself. It was meant to show the queen in her maternal role. Noticiable was an empty cradle, which referred to the death of one of their sons. The queen is dressed in appropriate royal clothing but nothing over the top. Again the idea was to assuage the rumbling anger of the French public, which it did not. Meanwhile Vigée Le Brun, who was one of only 15 women painters ever accepted by the Académie Royale, became the first woman to ever be appointed painter to the French king, a great advancement in her career.
However, the Painter to the King was to run into her own problems with the public. Vigée Le Brun perhaps had given in a bit too much to showing women in natural poses, enjoying life and the simple pleasures of, for instance, motherhood. In the painting below, we see the artist’s self-portrait holding her baby daughter. She has a smile on her face that reveals – oh heavens – her teeth! This was widely condemned as something without precedent. Actually there was precedent, for even in the 14th century there are paintings of singing angels that show teeth, as well as the people in those rollicking 17th century scenes of domestic disorder by Dutch painter Jan Steen. However, Vigée Le Brun’s tendency to promote naturalism and the lush beauty of the happy women she painted seemed to really innervate the critics. Yet, that did not stop her from painting other pictures of lovely smiling women and their children. (See artsy.net article on how she scandalized 18th century Paris.)
However, those beaux jours came to an end, for in 1789, the Revolution began in all its fury, and those who had close associations with the royals, or in fact any nobility, were on the list of those who should be gotten rid of. Vigée Le Brun took her daughter and fled. When the various revolutionary committees came looking for her, her husband, who had stayed in Paris, simply said she had been called away to paint portraits in Italy. And so she did, taking on more royal patrons including Marie Antoinette’s sister, Queen Maria Caroline of Naples. She went on to other countries including to Austria and then to Russia, where she had great success and even found the Russian women wearing, of all things, the chemise. Her husband and several hundred other artists petitioned to allow her to return to France, but it was denied in 1793. The husband, in fact, had to divorce her in 1794 for his own safety, as her relationship to the former queen put his life in jeopardy.
As revolutionary times proceeded, Vigée Le Brun became something of a revolutionary herself, claiming a professional role for herself as a woman, as well as her role as a mother. This she states very clearly in the self-portrait painted in 1790, showing herself at the easel painting (portrait now in the Metropolitan New York metmuseum.org). Jean Jacques Rousseau, philosopher of the Revolution, claimed that men had certain natural rights, and Vigée Le Brun had logically claimed those for women too.
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun went right on painting and receiving accolades. She did finally return to Paris in 1800, but found the court around what would become the Empire to be uncomfortable. She went off to England and found success in London, even taking on a criticism of her work by an English artist. She refuted his discourse point by point. Vigée Le Brun continued painting into the latest part of her life, even publishing her memoires (Mémoires Secrets) in 1837. Her work fell out of favor for a long time, but since 1980 it has been the subject of study, as she is one of the few women painters well-recognized in her own time. There is even a French film about her, now also in English Subtitles, The Fabulous Life of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
As for the queen, her end at the guillotine is well known. However, she used clothing to communicate to the very last. During her “trial” she, as a widow, wore all black including a black bonnet to cover that once pouffed hair. It garnered her so much sympathy that the outfit was confiscated.
Yet, the queen managed somehow to go to her death in an all white dress, emblematic of the Bourbon lilies. As she rode through the crowds, this display of loyalty to the Bourbons of France began to gather sympathy with the mob. However, it was too late; she was executed.
So let this be a cautionary tale for us. Sometimes, whether for good or for ill, it is not who you know or even who you are; it’s what you wear.
Sources used for this post are “Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun Scandalized 18th Century Paris with a Smile” artsy.net Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun Life and Legacy theartstory.org The Pouf Hairstyle – Marie Antoinette’s Lasting Legacy to Hairdressing myhairdressers.com Queen of Fashion, What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber
The paintings are in public domain with attributions given to museums and websites when the information is available.
Marjorie Vernelle is an artist, writer, college professor, and traveler. For more see the Pages at ofartandwine.com. Her author page is at amazon.com and her art at Vernelle Art Boutique vernellestudio.com.
Champagne, mon amour!
They say that Louis XVI drank 200 bottles of the stuff when he was doing his prison sentence in the months before his execution. And why not, after all France is the home of champagne, isn’t it? Well actually it may have been discovered (quite by accident, of course) in England! It seems that the English had been putting a bit of fizz into their wine some years before the French found out how to do this. (See bbc.com “Did the English Invent Bubbly before Dom Perignon?”) That fact was officially discovered and documented by a British scientist. English bubbly came into existence some 30 years before Dom Perignon made his “I’m tasting the stars!” comment about the wonderful drink he had just created.
Well, if the Brits “discovered” it, the French figured out what to do with it. Part of that meant developing a tasty blend of grapes, normally Pinot Noir, Meunier, and Chardonnay, grown in the region known as Champagne in eastern France. (A note: the little beauties in the picture here are champagne grapes, but lovely and sweet as they are, they are not what is put into the drink, champagne.) Then France claimed champagne as their own and publicized it. (Who says America invented marketing?) They also laid claim to the name, eponymous with the region where the grapes were grown, Champagne.
Obviously from the sad tale of how the British lost out on claiming this wonderful drink, once you get a good product, with a good story about a monk who (accidentally, of course) wound up tasting stars, you run with it, and the French did. They even took this so far that they made the other European countries sign a treaty that allows only the drink produced in Champagne, the region, to bare that name. All others are types of sparkling wines, Asti Spumante in Italy, Sekt in Germany, and Cava in Spain, and so on. The name became so precious that even different regions of France that produce sparkling wines cannot use champagne, but refer to their products as Crémant or by a method of production like Ancestrale. Now you might ask why do we here in the U.S. call our bubbly champagne? Well, contrarians to the end, we just didn’t sign the treaty.
When it comes to controversy, the one over the use of champagne only for wines from that region is only the beginning. Quite a few tales exist about how the most celebrated form of the champagne glass, la coupe, came into being. Most stories center around the shape of the breast of one of the two women above. Most say that it was modeled on the left breast of Marie Antoinette, who adored the drink, claiming it to be her favorite (goes nicely with cake). However, the maitresse en titre (official mistress) of Louis XV, Mme. de Pompadour, has also been rumored to have lent her body part to the creation of the glass. There are even those who say that it goes all the way back to one of the most legendary beauties of ancient times, Helen of Troy!
While no one knows about Helen of Troy’s input, in terms of the two 18th century ladies above, sorry to say it, but the coupe was invented in England around the mid-17th century. When the aristocrates there began drinking sparkling wines, they wanted a different glass from what they used for beer and ale, so they created the open bowl glass. The French, however, had the name for it, la coupe. Oddly before the British aristocracy took up drinking champagne, it was a favorite drink of prostitutes, so breasts may still have been involved (see the article on The Useless Information Junkie site theuijunkie.com).
Needless to say with a history like that of champagne, there is bound to be more than one type of glass to serve the bubbly in. Take a more in-depth look at the types of glasses that can be used and what they do for the drink inside of them. Pay attention: there is a quiz at the end. Just click the link below.
Naturally since champagne was Marie Antoinette’s favorite drink, there must have been one that she favored. As it turns out the founder of one champagne winery had a goal of becoming the queen’s favorite maker of champagne. Florens-Louis Heidsieck had that goal in mind when he started making champagne in 1785. By 1788 he had achieved his goal as Heidsieck’s champagne had become Marie Antoinette’s favorite. The Revolution came and went, but Heidsieck, which eventually became the Piper-Heidsieck brand we know today, is still tops. (See swsspotlight.com for the article “Tracing a Champagne to Marie Antoinette.”)
Of course, since the fame of Marie Antoinette seems everlasting, there have been a number of cocktails invented over the years in her honor. Some have cherries, and some are made with blood oranges (just Google Marie Antoinette Cocktails). I think the one that best fits Antoinette, who lightened French decor and loved her breezy chemise-style dresses, is the Sparkling Elderflower Cocktail. It is glamorous, elegant, sophisticated, and delicately sweet. In addition, it is made with a liqueur named for the famous Count de St. Germain, who was close enough to Marie Antoinette to tell her that a revolution was coming and that she would die in it. Quite the story that. For the recipe, see the article at shekeepsalovelyhome.com, “The Enchanting Sparkling Elderflower Cocktail,” by Genevieve Morrison.
So with elderflowers dancing in our heads and curiosity about what St. Germain liqueur tastes like, we leave the tale of the unfortunate queen and her white chemise dress, and that of her official portraitist, a woman artist who led her own rather fabulous life. Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, a toast to you!
Photo of the Elderflower Cocktail from the website given above.
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©marjorie vernelle 2021
COMING SOON: The Delirious Domestic Disorder of Jan Steen and the Wine Trade.
Well, the title pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? One thinks of the 17th century Dutch as pretty strict protestants and maybe not much fun, except when trading up tulip bulbs to ridiculous prices. However, in what historian Simon Schama calls “an embarrassment of riches,” they really enjoyed their wealth by trading many luxury items, including fine wines.