FPS Online Lecture | Angiviller, Rambouillet, and ‘Etruscan’ Taste
From The French Porcelain Society:
Gabriel Wick and John Whitehead | Angiviller, Rambouillet, and ‘Etruscan’ Taste
Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue Memorial Lecture
FPS, Online, Sunday, 11 July 2021, 18.00 (BST)
The French Porcelain Society is delighted to host the Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue Memorial Lecture with Gabriel Wick, curator of the exhibition Vivre à l’Antique, who will explore the fascinating history of Rambouillet, a château associated with the avant-garde ‘Etruscan’ taste championed by the comte d’Angiviller. John Whitehead will discuss the Sèvres-porcelain service created for its dairy. We hope you can join us!
FPS members will receive an email invitation with instructions on how to join the online lecture. If you want to join, please contact us for more details on FPSenquiries@gmail.com. This will be the last Living Room Lecture until Sunday, 5 September 2021.
Rambouillet, 30-miles southwest of Paris, is the most recent and the least-known of France’s royal palaces. Acquired by Louis XVI as a domaine privé only six-years before the Revolution, it served successive sovereigns and presidents as a hunting lodge and rustic retreat until 2009, when it was entrusted to the care of the Centre des Monuments Nationaux and opened to the public. In the second half of the 1780s, the king’s de facto minister of the arts, the comte d’Angiviller, developed a number of remarkable projects for the domain—a proposal for the reconstruction of the château à l’antique, a model farm, extensive plantations of American trees, and the menagerie and dairy. The last of these, conceived as a theatrical evocation of the arts and rituals of the Etruscans, benefitted from contributions by Hubert Robert, Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, Georges Jacob, and the Sèvres manufacture (which Angiviller directed since 1783).
Exhibition | Vivre à l’antique: From Marie-Antoinette to Napoléon
The catalogue for the exhibition is published by Éditions Monelle Hayot:
Vivre à l’antique: de Marie-Antoinette à Napoléon 1er
Château de Rambouillet, 19 June — 9 August 2021
Curated by Gabriel Wick
In the last three decades of the 18th century, the elites of Europe were enthralled by the constant flow of discoveries issuing forth from the excavations of buried cities, Etruscan tombs, and imperial villas in Italy. The distant past suddenly surged into the present, and architecture, furniture, and the accessories of daily life were re-imagined in its image. Nowhere in France could recount this aesthetic and cultural revolution more aptly than Rambouillet, the hunting estate and intimate retreat of the courts of Louis XVI and Napoléon I. Over the course of three months, the staterooms, intimate apartments, and dairy of Rambouillet will once again be filled with artifacts, models, and drawings from the Grand Tour and the Italian excavations, paintings by Hubert Robert, 18th– and 19th-century furnishings and decors by Jacob and Percier, and precious ceramics by Sèvres and Wedgwood. Through loans from the château of Versailles, the cité de la céramique de Sèvres, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, and a number of private collections, the exhibition will explore how and why at the threshold of the modern era, distant antiquity so completely captured the imagination of the sovereigns and their courts.
Renaud Serrette and Gabriel Wick, eds., Vivre à l’antique, de Marie-Antoinette à Napoléon 1er (Saint-Remy-en-l’Eau: Éditions d’art Monelle Hayot, 2021), 200 pages, ISBN: 979-1096561315, 39€.
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