Exhibition | Marie-Antoinette: A Queen in Versailles
Press release from the Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon:
Marie-Antoinette: A Queen in Versailles / Une Reine à Versailles
Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo, 25 October 2016 — 26 February 2017
Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, Marie-Antoinette in Amazon Dress, 1788 (RMN-Grand Palais / Château de Versailles).
Japan is most certainly the country, outside France, where the figure of Marie-Antoinette is most popular, notably thanks to the character imagined by Riyoko Ikeda in her manga The Rose of Versailles. The Palace of Versailles and Nippon Television have joined forces to mount an exhibition dedicated to this iconic figure in French history.
Through a large number of works of art from the Versailles collections—paintings furnishings, objets d’art, drawings, and engravings—as well as loans from other public and private collections in France and abroad, the exhibition will provide, for the very first time in Japan, a wide-ranging evocation of the life of Marie-Antoinette, from her youth in Vienna to her tragic end.
Portraits of the queen and members of the royal family by the court’s finest portrait artists—in particular François-Hubert Drouais, Louis Michel Vanloo, and Joseph Siffred Duplessis—will familiarise visitors with the people among whom Marie-Antoinette lived in France [including] King Louis XV (the grand-father of Louis XVI) and her brothers-in-law, the Counts of Provence and Artois, along with the artist Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, who captured the queen’s essence in her works, won her trust, and left us some of the finest (official and more intimate) portraits of Marie-Antoinette.
‘Pearls and Cornflower’ (perles et barbeaux) Plate, Manufacture Royale de Sèvres (RMN- Grand Palais / Château de Versailles).
The queen’s own tastes will also feature prominently in the exhibition. Assisted by the royal administration of the Crown Furniture Inventory, Marie-Antoinette gathered some of the finest craftsmen around her, such as cabinet-maker Jean Henri Riesener, joiner Georges Jacob, and bronze-maker Pierre-Philippe Thomire, to design the precious furnishings or objects for the sumptuous, refined decor she liked to surround herself with. The variety of tableware designed by the Sèvres Royal Porcelain Works are featured, and more particularly the ‘Japan’ service inspired by Imari porcelain or the famous ‘Pearls and Cornflower’ dinner service made for Trianon. The most original and spectacular feature of the exhibition will be its presentation of the Queen’s Private Apartment, laid out from 1782 onwards on the ground floor on the Marble Courtyard. The bedroom and bathroom will be fitted out with a large part of their furnishings, while the stucco library which has now disappeared will be reproduced in 3D. This exhibition of almost 150 works provides an insight, for the first time in Japan on such a scale, into the riches and innovation that marked the creations inspired by Marie-Antoinette.
New Book | Prints in Translation, 1450–1750
From Routledge:
Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward Wouk, eds., Prints in Translation, 1450–1750: Image, Materiality, Space (New York: Routledge, 2016), 252 pages, ISBN: 978-1472480125, $150.
Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original ‘meanings’ may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna’s 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium—a painting, sculpture, or drawing—to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.
Suzanne Karr Schmidt is Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Edward H. Wouk is Lecturer in European Art, 1400–1800, at The University of Manchester.
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C O N T E N T S
List of Figures
Preface
Notes on Contributors
Abbreviations
1 Edward Wouk, Toward an Anthropology of Print
2 Alexandra Onuf, From Print to Paint and Back Again: Painting Practices and Print Culture in Early Modern Antwerp
3 Lelia Packer, Prints as Paintings: Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611–1693) and Dutch Pen Painting, circa 1650–65
4 Freyda Spira, Between Paper and Sword: Daniel Hopfer and the Translation of Etching in Reformation Augsburg
5 Jonathan Tavares, Hunting Erotica: Print Culture and a Seventeenth-Century Rifle in the Collection of the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt
6 Patricia Simons, Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Gods: The Material and Thematic Interaction of Print and Sculpture
7 Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Making Time and Space: Collecting Early Modern Printed Instruments
8 David Pullins, The State of the Fashion Plate, circa 1727: Historicizing Fashion Between ‘Dressed Prints’ and Dezallier’s Recueils
9 Arthur J. DiFuria, The Concettismo of Triumph: Maerten van Heemskerck’s Victories of Charles V and Remembering Spanish Omnipotence in a Late Sixteenth-Century Writing Cabinet
10 Stephanie Porras, St. Michael the Archangel: Spiritual, Visual, and Material Translations from Antwerp to Lima
11 Yael Rice, Lines of Perception: European Prints and the Mughal Kitābkhāna
Bibliography
Index
Enfilade 
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