New Book | Patriots Before Revolution
From Yale UP:
Amy Watson, Patriots Before Revolution: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1714–1763 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 344 pages, ISBN: 978-0300263213, $65. Series: The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History
A new history of the Patriot movement before the American Revolution, tracing its origins to reform movements in British politics
The American revolutionaries—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams—called themselves Patriots. But what exactly did it mean to be a Patriot? Historian Amy Watson locates the origins of Patriotism in British politics of the early eighteenth century, showing that the label ‘Patriot’ was first adopted by a network of British politicians with radical ideas about the principles and purpose of the British Empire. The early Patriots’ ideological mission was not American independence but, rather, imperial reform: Patriots sought to create a British Empire that was militant, expansionist, confederal, and free.
Over the course of the next half century, these British reformers used print media and grassroots mobilization efforts to build an empire-wide political party with adherents in London, Edinburgh, New York City, and the new colony of Georgia. While building this party, the Patriots’ advocacy drew Britons into a series of violent political conflicts over taxes and civil liberty, as well as three expansive global wars, the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–48), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Patriot ideas and organizations came to divide Britons on increasingly sharp political lines, laying the groundwork for the revolutionary decades to come.
Amy Watson is assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
New Book | The Zorg
Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Marcus Rediker highlights successes—broadly describing it as “a model of sophisticated research, lucid writing and engaged conscience”—as well as moments of overreach. From Macmillan:
Siddharth Kara, The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1250348227, $30.
In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning ‘care’) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique. By the time its journey ends, the Zorg would become the first undeniable argument against slavery.
When a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the Zorg sailing off course and running low on supplies, the ship’s captain threw more than a hundred slaves overboard in order to save the crew and the most valuable slaves. The ship’s owners then claimed their loss on insurance, a first for slaves who had not been killed due to insurrection or died of natural causes.
The insurers refused to pay due to the higher than usual mortality rate of the slaves on board, leading to a trial which initially found in their favor, in which the Chief Justice compared the slaves to horses. Thanks to the outrage of one man present in court that day, a retrial was held. For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery in a courtroom case that boiled down to a simple yet profound question: Were the Africans on board people or cargo?
What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history―sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States. The Zorg is the astonishing yet little-known true story of the most consequential ship that ever crossed the Atlantic.
Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, and activist on modern slavery. Kara has written several books and reports on slavery and child labor, most recently the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Cobalt Red. Kara also won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He has lectured at Harvard University and held a professorship at the University of Nottingham. He divides his time between Los Angeles and London.
New Book | Republic and Empire
From Yale UP:
Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), ISBN: 978-0300280180, $35.
A fresh look at the American Revolution as a major global event
At the time of the American Revolution (1765–83), the British Empire had colonies in India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, Canada, Ireland, and Gibraltar. The thirteen rebellious American colonies accounted for half of the total number of provinces in the British world in 1776. What of the loyal half? Why did some of Britain’s subjects feel so aggrieved that they wanted to establish a new system of government, while others did not rebel? In this authoritative history, Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy show that understanding the long-term causes of the American Revolution requires a global view. As much as it was an event in the history of the United States, the American Revolution was an imperial event produced by the upheavals of managing a far-flung set of imperial possessions during a turbulent period of reform. By looking beyond the familiar borders of the Revolution and considering colonies that did not rebel—Quebec, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, India, the British Caribbean, Senegal, and Ireland—Burnard and O’Shaughnessy go beyond the republican, liberal, and democratic aspects of the emerging American nation, providing a broader history that transcends what we think we know about the Revolution.
Trevor Burnard (1960–2024) was Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and director of the Wilberforce Institute. He was the author of numerous books on Caribbean plantation history and imperial history and served as editor of the Oxford Bibliography Online in Atlantic History. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy is professor of history at the University of Virginia. His books include An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean and the prizewinning The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire.
Documentary | The American Revolution
The series premiers Sunday evening. Jill Lepore addresses it within the larger context of institutions celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Revolution, “Revolutionary Whiplash: Commemorating a Nation’s Founding in a Time of Fear and Foreboding,” The New Yorker (17 November 2025), pp. 14–18. . . . .
The American Revolution: A Film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, 12 hours, PBS, 2025. With Claire Danes, Hugh Dancy, Josh Brolin, Kenneth Branagh, and Liev Schreiber.
The American Revolution examines how America’s founding turned the world upside-down. Thirteen British colonies on the Atlantic Coast rose in rebellion, won their independence, and established a new form of government that radically reshaped the continent and inspired centuries of democratic movements around the globe.
An expansive look at the virtues and contradictions of the war and the birth of the United States of America, the film follows dozens of figures from a wide variety of backgrounds. Through their individual stories, viewers experience the war through the memories of the men and women who experienced it: the rank-and-file Continental soldiers and American militiamen (some of them teenagers), Patriot political and military leaders, British Army officers, American Loyalists, Native soldiers and civilians, enslaved and free African Americans, German soldiers in the British service, French and Spanish allies, and various civilians living in North America, Loyalist as well as Patriot, including many made refugees by the war.
The Revolution began a movement for people around the world to imagine new and better futures for themselves, their nations, and for humanity. It declared American independence with promises that we continue to strive for. The American Revolution opened the door to advance civil liberties and human rights, and it asked questions that we are still trying to answer today.
Each episode is two hours.
1 | In Order to Be Free (May 1754 – May 1775)
2| An Asylum for Mankind (May 1775 – July 1776)
3 | The Times That Try Men’s Souls (July 1776 – January 1777)
4 | Conquer by a Drawn Game (January 1777 – February 1778)
5 | The Soul of All America (December 1777 – May 1780)
6 | The Most Sacred Thing (May 1780 – Onward)
Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns, The American Revolution: An Intimate History (New York: Knopf, 2025), 608 pages, ISBN: 978-0525658672, $80.
Call for Papers | The Local and the Global in New England
Punch bowl, made in China, 1788–89, hard paste porcelain, overglaze polychrome enamels, gilding
(Historic Deerfield, HD 2772)
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From Historic Deerfield:
The Local and the Global in New England
Historic Deerfield, 7 March 2026
Proposals due by 9 January 2026
A one-day symposium sponsored by Historic Deerfield, Inc. and the Grace Slack McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College.
New England has always been a place characterized by movement, exchange, and connectivity. People, animals, objects, and ideas traversed the land and waterways long before European colonization, which in turn transformed trade, technology, migration, and warfare in the region. This one-day symposium aims to gather scholars and researchers who explore the nature of local, regional, and global networks in New England from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. By bringing together a diverse range of scholars from multiple disciplines, we hope to elucidate how objects—from fine and decorative arts, to buildings, to everyday pieces of material culture—linked New England localities to far-flung makers and markets.
We are interested in a broad range of papers that address how material things complicate our sense of what was local and what was global about the region now called New England, including:
• How do objects, from tools to trade goods, reveal patterns of circulation within and beyond this region?
• How can material things challenge our understanding of distance and proximity?
• How did the creation and exchange of objects both useful and decorative shape the creation of particular New England identities?
• How was the trade of objects local and global entwined with concepts of refinement, social class, and exclusion?
• What methods can scholars and Native knowledge keepers offer to better understand items as they moved in and out of Indigenous and settler communities over time?
• How can objects reveal histories of cultural plurality, transculturation, and survivance?
• How does the movement of objects suggest ways that urban makers and markets mutually constituted those objects’ meanings with their rural counterparts?
• Did New Englanders’ gendering of particular objects, and consumption generally, reflect or diverge from related notions held elsewhere?
• How do networks of exchange crystallize into unique hybrid forms?
• How can we find all these narratives in not only form and function, but also the material substance of these objects?
• And how do responses to these questions complicate the very definition of ‘New England’?
We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations. Speakers invited to present will receive overnight accommodation and dinner on Friday, March 6 and lunch on Saturday, March 7. We can also offer some reimbursement of travel expenses (with receipts) and a modest honorarium. Presenters will be expected to participate fully in the in-person symposium program on site in Deerfield, MA. Please email, as one document, a 250-word proposal and a CV (not longer than two pages) to Erika Gasser at egasser@historic-deerfield.org. Proposals should include the title of the paper and the presenter’s name and title/affiliations, if any. The deadline for submissions is 9 January 2026; the selection committee will respond to submitters in February.
Colonial Williamsburg’s Antiques Forum, 2026
Left: Robert Brackman, Portrait of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller), 1941, oil on canvas·(Gift of the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund through the generosity of John D. Rockefeller 3rd, his wife Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller, and their four children, 2019-82, A&B). Center: David Hayes, Governors Palace North and South Elevations, Drawing #5, 30 October 1931. Right: Upholstery Conservator Leroy Graves Examines an Easy Chair in the Conservation Lab RIG.
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In 2026 the US will turn 250 and Colonial Williamsburg 100. From the Antiques Forum press release:
78th Annual Antiques Forum at Colonial Williamsburg
Online and in-person, Williamsburg, Virginia 19–25 February 2026
Scholarship applications for students and emerging scholars due by 16 December 2025
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation will host its 78th Annual Antiques Forum February 19–25, 2026. Offered both virtually and in-person, this year’s conference is organized around the Foundation’s mission statement, “That the future may learn from the past.” To commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence and the 100th anniversary of Colonial Williamsburg’s founding, the 2026 forum will explore past inspiration and future influence through the lens of material culture and the decorative arts. Forum attendees will also have an exclusive opportunity to preview Colonial Williamsburg: The First 100 Years, a new exhibition at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg opening February 28.
Mourning Ring with Print of George Washington, possibly by the Philadelphia jeweler Jean-Simon Chaudron with a print by Charles Balthazar Julien Fevret de Saint-Memin, ca. 1800, copper/gold/silver alloys, enamel, paper, glass (Colonial Williamsburg, Gift of Mike and Carolyn McNamara, 2025–26). The ring descended through the family of the Marquis de Lafayette who may have acquired it during his tour of the United States in 1824–25.
Curators and scholars from Colonial Williamsburg will be joined by leading experts and collectors from across the nation to present on historic preservation, decorative arts, antiques, architecture, historic costume and more. President and CEO of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, Dr. R. Scott Stephenson, will open the conference with a keynote address that expands upon their recent exhibition, Banners of Liberty: Flags that Witnessed the American Revolution. Additional guest presenters include Jeff Evans, decorative arts specialist; Calder Loth, senior architectural historian, Virginia Department of Historic Resources; Amanda Keller, executive director, Wilton House Museum; Elyse Werling, director of interpretation and collections, Preservation Virginia; Samantha Dorsey, independent consultant; Matthew Wood, curator, Castle Howard; William L. Coleman, director of the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Student Center, Brandywine Museum of Art; Janine Skerry, independent consultant; and emerging scholars presenting new scholarship as part of the Carolyn and Michael McNamara Young Scholars Series sponsored by the Decorative Arts Trust.
The majority of conference activities will take place in the Virginia Room of the Williamsburg Lodge, located at 310 S. England Street. A variety of exclusive pre- and post-conference activities are available for in-person registrants, as are special room rates at Colonial Williamsburg hotel properties. A limited number of in-person and virtual attendance scholarships are available to students and emerging professionals in relevant positions or programs; scholarship applications are due by December 16. In-person registration is $660 per person through January 4 and includes a welcome reception, continental breakfasts, coffee and refreshment breaks, conference reception and dinner, and presentations as well as access to the conference streaming platform. Virtual-only registration is $150 per person and includes access to all general session presentations through the conference streaming platform. Both in-person and virtual-only registrations include a seven-day ticket voucher to Colonial Williamsburg’s Art Museums and Historic Area, valid for redemption through December 31, 2026. Registration and payment in full are required by Sunday, February 8.
Details are available here»
Antiques Forum is sponsored by Roger & Ann Hall and Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections, Mark & Loretta Roman, Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates, Brunk Auctions, The Decorative Arts Trust, Doyle Auctions, Americana Insights, Winterthur Museum, Jamestown Yorktown Foundation, Bayou Bend, and The National Institute of American History & Democracy.
Working Wood in the 18th C. Conference at Colonial Williamsburg
From the press release for the 2026 Working Wood in the 18th Century Conference:
Working Wood in the 18th Century Conference at Colonial Williamsburg
Online and in-person, Williamsburg, Virginia 22–25 January 2026
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation will host its annual Working Wood in the 18th Century Conference January 22–25, 2026. Offered both virtually and in-person, this year’s conference, United We Sit: Exploring Early American Chairs, will center around six different chairs that spotlight a multitude of topics and techniques drawn from early America’s rich woodworking traditions. A limited number of in-person and virtual attendance scholarships are available to students and emerging professionals in relevant positions or programs.
Conference highlights include a presentation by esteemed chairmakers Elia Bizzarri and Curtis Buchanan on Windsor chairmaking techniques with a focus on hand-powered production rates and Elia’s research into early 19th-century Massachusetts chairmaker Samuel Wing. Celebrated cabinetmaker and carver Ray Journigan will demystify and recreate one of pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia’s rococo masterpieces, a heavily carved side chair made in Benjamin Randolph’s shop for the Cadwallader family. Historical interpreter and woodworker Jerome Bias will take us into the antebellum world of Thomas Day’s North Carolina shop where complex race relations intertwine with the collision of the handwork tradition and the coming machine age as he explores a curvaceous and veneered mahogany side chair. Scholar Daniel Ackermann, director of Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, will deliver an opening keynote on a group of mid-18th-century Annapolis chairs.
From Colonial Williamsburg, master cabinetmaker Bill Pavlak will demonstrate the design and structure of Campeche chairs, a form with ancient roots that became fashionable on the east coast in the early 19th century by way of Mexico, New Orleans, and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Master joiner Brian Weldy will explore a Boston baroque armchair with complex turnings, sculpted arms, and Russia leather upholstery. Conservator of upholstery Sarah Towers will walk attendees through the fundamentals of making a traditional slip seat. Apprentice joiner Laura Hollowood will demonstrate weaving a rush seat with traditional materials and senior curator of furniture Tara Chicirda will provide an overview of different period approaches to seats by showing off several examples from the Colonial Williamsburg collection. Journeyman cabinetmaker John Peeler will explore some of the planes and planecraft required for period chairmaking. Director of Historic Trades and Skills Ted Boscana will offer a banquet talk that pulls back the curtain on nine decades of Trades at Colonial Williamsburg to glimpse where we’ve been and where we’re headed.
The majority of conference activities will take place at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, located at 301 South Nassau Street. A variety of exclusive pre-conference activities are available for in-person registrants, as are special room rates at Colonial Williamsburg hotel properties. In-person registration is $400 per person through December 1 and includes presentations, opening reception, continental breakfasts on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, coffee and refreshment breaks, and a conference reception and dinner Saturday evening. Virtual-only registration is $150 per person and includes access to all presentations through the conference streaming platform. Both in-person and virtual-only registration include a seven-day ticket voucher to Colonial Williamsburg’s Art Museums and Historic Area, valid for redemption through December 31, 2026. Registration and payment in full are required by January 2 for in-person attendance and by January 22 for virtual attendance.
Details are available here»
Working Wood is sponsored by the Society of American Period Furniture Makers, Early American Industries Association, and Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, Inc.
Conference | Mapping Fashion Savoir Faire, 16th–21st Centuries
From the conference website:
Mapping Fashion Savoir Faire: Craft, Space, and Scale, 16th–21st Centuries
Paris, 11–13 December 2025
Organized by Ariane Fennetaux and Emilie Hammen
A typically French and even somewhat untranslatable expression, the notion of ‘savoir-faire’ in France seems to refer to the traditional sets of specialist technical skills and know-how underpinning the fashion trades. This narrative however is predicated upon what is commonly understood as ‘the fashion system’, itself a cultural, social and economic construction invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often in relation to the great Parisian fashion houses.
The notion of space invites us to recalibrate our gaze and ask new questions about fashion, its actors, its sites and its dynamics—in space and time. Looking beyond the twentieth century, and beyond the European-centric prism that often dominates thinking about fashion and dress, the conference aims to question the traditional vision of fashion as a Western invention. By looking at clothing practices, textile crafts and the materials and resources specific to other regions of the world, the conference borrows from global history and examines the links and spatial dynamics between various centres and peripheries.
t h u r s d a y , 1 1 d e c e m b e r
Institut Français de la Mode, Auditorium
9.00 Registration and coffee
9.30 Keynote
• Mei Mei Rado (Bard Graduate Center), Cross-cultural Savoir-faire and Remaking: Transformations of Chinese Skirts into Western Fashion
10.30 Tea and coffee break
10.45 Colonial and Post Colonial Crafts
• Pierre Jean Desemerie (Bard Graduate Center/ Musée des Arts Décoratifs), ‘Moderniser’ la Chebka (dentelle algérienne) en période coloniale
• Pragya Sharma (University of Brighton), ‘Everyone will praise you’: Fashioning the Knitted Self in 20th-Century India
11.45 Lunch break
13.00 Interlocking Networks and Scales
• Miriam Fleck-Vidal (McGill University), French Silk, Global Networks: Negotiating National Identity through Silk Production in Early Modern France
• Tristan Dot (Universitéy of Cambridge), 19th-Century Textile Design Studios as Nodes of Visual Circulation
• Victoria De Lorenzo (London College of Fashion, University of London), Crafting a Culturally-Situated Demand: A Microhistory of Market Sub-Segmentation in Chile and Peru, 1845–1855
14.30 Tea and coffee break
14.45 Transnational Circulations
• Kirsty Hassard (V&A, Dundee), Tartan: Mapping Craft, Space, and Scale in Scotland and Beyond
• Antonia Behan (Queen’s University), The Texture of Nationalism and Transnational Handweaving Revival
• Elena Kanagy Loux (Bard Graduate Center), Interlacing the Globe: Mapping the Magdalena Nuttall Lace Collection
16.15 Tea and coffee break
16.30 Workshop #1
19.00 Opening of the Savoir Faire exhibition at the Galliera Museum (for conference speakers only)
f r i d a y , 1 2 d e c e m b e r
Institut Français de la Mode, Auditorium
8.45 Coffee
9.00 Keynote
• Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge University), The Triumph of Fashion
10.15 Coffee break
10.30 Resources and Techniques: From Local to Global
• Marie Colas des Francs (EPHE), Le voyage des plumes: Provenance des matériaux et des techniques de la plumasserie parisienne autour de 1600
• Jean-Alexandre Perras (IZEA, Martin-Luther Universität, Halle-Wittenberg), Technial Expertise in 18th-Century Women’s Hairstyling: The Case of Rouen
11.30 Tea and coffee break
11.45 Colonial Couture
• Khemais Ben Lakhdar (Université Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne), Une jubla parsie devenue dernier cri de la mode à Paris: Itinéraire d’une tunique brodée entre la Chine, l’Inde et la maison Paul Poiret dans un contexte colonial
• Tokiko Sumida (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès), L’art du Savoir-Faire du Kimono et la Résistance Spatiale: Du japonisme aux Innovations Contemporaines en France
• Chiara Faggella (The Daniel and Gayle D’Aniello Syracuse University Program in Florence), Beyond the Tourist Gaze: Colonial Legacies and Spatial Entanglements in the Making of Italian Fashion
13.15 Lunch break
14.30 Géographies du réemploi / The Geographies of Reuse
• Miki Sugiura (Hosei University, Tokyo – University of Antwerp), Mapping Savoir-Faire in the Circulation of Second-Hand Kimono in Early Modern Japan
• Estelle Dupuis (Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne- IFM), Vraie et fausse usure dans la mode: Circulations esthétiques paradoxales à l’heure de la crise environnementale
15.30 Tea and coffee break
16.00 Workshop #2
20.00 Conference Dinner – Le Bougainville
s a t u r d a y , 1 3 d e c e m b e r
INHA, Galerie Colbert, salle Vasari
9.30 Keynote
• Malick N’Diaye (Cheik Antia Diop/ IFAN, Dakar), Le Musée sur le fil
10.30 Coffee Break
10.45 Museums and Decentered Narratives
• Pierre-Antoine Vettorello (Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts), Decentering the Fashion Museum: Colonial Legacies and Indigenous Voices in French Fashion History
• Chiara Tuani (École du Louvre), Tositea Moala Hoatau Broutin et le Tapa: Transmission des Savoir-Faire d’Uvéa et de Futuna en Nouvelle-Calédonie
12.15 Workshop #3
New Book | Versailles Mirrored
From Bloomsbury:
Robert Wellington, Versailles Mirrored: The Power of Luxury, Louis XIV to Donald Trump (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1350451315 (hardback), $100 / ISBN: 978-1350451353 (paperback), $35.
Why has Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, defining symbol of hedonistic opulence in 17th-century France and synonymous with the notion of the divine right of kings, continued to shape the aesthetics of cultural capital in the centuries since his death?
In Versailles Mirrored, Robert Wellington tracks this enduring fascination with the Sun King’s palace through eight case studies spanning the 17th to 21st centuries. The book demonstrates how the extravagant palace style began as a symbol of the state in the 17th century; how it was adopted by the nouveau riche to show off their financial success in the 19th century; and, remarkably, how that palace look returned to play a role in statecraft in the hands of US President Donald Trump. Wellington links the aristocratic architectural traditions of France, England, and Germany to North America through the lens of Versailles, French architecture, and the decorative arts. Following a brief overview of the history of Versailles and the political and cultural motivations of its creation, chapters address aristocratic buildings in France and Germany built by the Sun King’s contemporaries; historicism in the 19th century in Britain, Germany, and America; and the present day, with Trump’s buildings and Château Louis XIV, known as the ‘world’s most expensive home’, purchased by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. In uncovering the motivations of those patrons, the book ultimately reveals why Versailles remains a powerful point of reference for those who wish to flaunt their social, cultural, and political capital.
Robert Wellington is Associate Professor of Art History in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory, The Australian National University, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London, and co-editor of The Versailles Effect (2021).
c o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction – World’s End
Part I | The Old Regime
1 Making Versailles: Louis XIV
2 The Inveterate Francophile: Ralph Montagu
3 Reflections of the Sun: John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough
Part II | The Age of Historicism
4 Sun King to Moon King: Ludwig II of Bavaria
5 Gilded Age Ambitions: Alva Vanderbilt
6 Frenchified Blenheim: Sunny, 9th Duke of Marlborough
Part III | Generation Wealth
7 Tanned by the Sun King: Donald J. Trump
8 Return to Historicism: Emad Khashoggi
Postscript – A Hermès Scarf
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Exhibition | Enlightenment Princess: Marie Catherine de Brignole-Sale
Now on view at Chantilly:
From Monaco to Chantilly, A Princess of the Enlightenment in Search of Freedom
Château de Chantilly, 18 October 2025 — 4 January 2026
Curated by Mathieu Deldicque and Thomas Fouilleron
Claude Dejoux, The Princess of Monaco (Marie Catherine de Brignole-Sale), 1783, terracotta (Paris: Musée du Louvre).
Following the 2024 exhibition on the romantic destiny of Louise d’Orléans, the first Queen of the Belgians, the Musée Condé now turns its attention to another little-known yet remarkable woman who left a lasting mark on its history: Marie Catherine de Brignole-Sale, Princess of Monaco and later Princess of Condé (1739–1813). Thanks to an ambitious partnership with the Princely Palace of Monaco, this landmark exhibition, a collaborative research project involving the archives of the palace and those of the Condé Museum, sheds new light on the romantic life and artistic patronage of an extraordinary figure whose influence spanned the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
The Princess from the Sea
Born in Genoa on 16 September 1738, the only daughter of the Marquis of Brignole-Sale and a doge’s niece, Marie Catherine came from one of the most powerful families in this influential Mediterranean republic. Raised in Paris, she was celebrated as “the prettiest woman in France” and soon caught the attention of Prince Honoré III of Monaco (1720–1795). Though significantly older and initially hoping for a more prestigious match within the French nobility, the Prince ultimately opted for a less exalted but more financially advantageous alliance. After the sumptuous wedding on 15 June 1757, which was fraught with formal tensions, the new, young Princess of Monaco lived up to expectations by giving birth to two little princes. She is a regular at Parisian salons and confidently navigates the Hôtel de Matignon, the royal couple’s Parisian residence. The collections from the Prince’s Palace of Monaco will allow visitors to relive the splendour of Monaco and admire, among other treasures, dynastic portraits exceptionally leaving the palace walls to be exhibited at Chantilly.
A Resounding Split
The marriage did not last. Marie Catherine’s growing boredom, persistent rumours of an affair with the Prince of Condé, her refusal to move to Monaco, and the jealous nature of Honoré III, along with accounts of his mistreatment, gradually led to a deepening crisis. This culminated in the princess petitioning the Parliament of Paris for a legal separation of property and person. Swayed by the influence of the Prince of Condé, the court ruled in her favour on 31 December 1770.
Love and Friendship: The Princess of Monaco and the Prince of Condé
From then on, the Princess of Monaco was emancipated. As a reader of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, she existed in her own right and was free to live out her passions alongside her dear friend, Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de Condé (1736–1818), whom she never left. In Paris, near the Palais Bourbon, which the Prince had expanded at great cost as a reflection of his love for the princess, architect Alexandre Brongniart designed the Hôtel de Monaco for the Princess in the 1770s. Though the residence was destroyed during the Revolution, it was later rebuilt and has housed the Polish Embassy since 1937. Brongniart’s monumental architectural plans reflect the ambition of a princess who was both builder and patron, offering a glimpse into the refined interiors she envisioned.
The Betz Refuge of a Woman of the Enlightenment
Not far from Chantilly, but still at somewhat of a distance, Marie Catherine chose the Château de Betz (now Crépy-en-Valois in the Oise department) as the ultimate refuge and expression of her personal preferences. There, echoing what the Prince of Condé envisioned at the Palais Bourbon and at Chantilly, she championed a new Rousseau-inspired taste: a return to nature and the rise of English-style gardens. At the same time, she embraced the latest Asian exotic trends and supported the early stirrings of a neo-medieval aesthetic destined for a brilliant future. They were surrounded by some of the most innovative and gifted architects, sculptors, landscape designers, painters, and draughtsmen of the final years of the Ancien Régime. From one Temple of Friendship to another, the emotions shared by this aesthetically minded couple were immortalised in stone, marble, and plaster by artists such as Jean-Baptiste Pigalle and Claude Dejoux. Hubert Robert— the great stylist, painter, and garden designer—worked for the princess. Superb leaves from his work illustrate the innovative aesthetic that Marie Catherine deploys in her gardens at Betz: the neo-Gothic style.
The Monaco Migrant in the Revolution
The French Revolution hit the Princess of Monaco and the Prince of Condé hard. The ruthless prince of the blood quickly took command of one of the main armies of the counter-revolution, and the Princess of Monaco followed him on the roads of emigration throughout Europe, from Italy to Russia. The exhibition traces the romantic journey of a couple caught in the upheaval of revolution, torn between despair and a deep sense of honour.
Princess of Condé, at Last
Her hardships only really came to an end during her final years in England (1801–1813), when the now widowed Princess of Monaco was finally able to marry her eternal lover and become, at last, the Princess of Condé, before breathing her last in 1813 at Wimbledon, without ever having had the chance to return to France. The touching marriage contract of a couple over 70 years old, far from their homeland, brings this first monographic exhibition dedicated to the Princess of Monaco to a close. Its aim is to restore this great patron to her rightful place, to better understand her role in the arts, and to bring her hotels, parks, and châteaux back to life through previously unseen sculptures, paintings, drawings, engravings, and archival documents.
Curators
Thomas Fouilleron, Director of the Archives and Library of the Prince’s Palace of Monaco
Mathieu Deldicque, Lead Heritage Conservator, Director of the Condé Museum
Mathieu Deldicque and Thomas Fouilleron, eds., De Monaco à Chantilly, une princesse des Lumières en quête de liberté (Paris: In Fine éditions d’art, 2025), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-2382032336, €35.
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