I've come to Wilson Manor in Buckinghamshire on the trail of objects related to Miyata Annette.
She's not the first person you would think of when you get to Watson,
which is set in beautiful countryside and looks rather like a pastiche of different bits of French chateau stuck together with Pippa Shirley,
head of collections and Gardens. And I'm hoping she's going to be able to tell me a bit about the place.
Well, if you are in search of Marie Antoinette, you couldn't have come to a better place, really, because this is a Rothschild house.
It was built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild at the end of the 19th century as a place where
he could bring friends and family to entertain them on luxurious weekends out of London.
That is also the home for his spectacular and extraordinary collection, which is very much focussed on the 18th century.
And objects that were associated with Marie Antoinette were one of the things that really set his heart aflame.
When you arrive, you could be forgiven for thinking that you are in the French countryside,
because what we're looking at here is torn intensive purposes, a French renaissance chateau.
But it's a jigsaw French renaissance chateau because Ferdinand's French architect
detailer created Waldstein out of all sorts of fragments of other buildings.
You can see little elements from the Louvre, little elements from the sky.
The staircases are copied from the Chateau Blau in the till then inside the house.
So you are then transported into a completely different world,
because then you move very swiftly and firmly into the 18th century with rooms that are, in many cases, taken from 18th century Parisian townhouses.
The house is now owned by the National Trust, but managed by the Rothschild Foundation.
And we're open to the public. We have nearly 400000 visitors a year.
And in fact, we've just had a visit from a coach load of Chinese visitors who've come to learn about the Rothschild Cellars.
I'm in the white drawing room. Pipper we have in front of us the most extraordinary picture.
This is a state portrait of King Louis, the 16th of France looking slightly haughty.
He's standing in his ermine robes. He's got his silk bloomers on.
He's got his shoes with the red heels, which only members of the royal family were allowed to wear.
He's in a very magnificent interior with great swathes of silk velvet all around him and a throne in the background.
On the left of His Majesty's, something like the Boy Scouts on a sign on a Steve.
What did it mean, Pepper? It denoted the king's ability to dispense justice to his people.
So very important element of government.
He is wearing the magnificent collar from which is suspended, the Oort Cloud, the Sante Spleen, which is one of the orders of the French royal house.
The portrait was painted by the court artist Kelly,
who was commissioned to paint the series of portraits of the King, which was the official image of the monarch.
This particular portrait was painted in 1783 and it was commissioned for the French ambassador,
the Atama, to bring with him to London as he started his embassy.
And I think the thing to understand about these portraits is that they were not really portraits of the person.
This was the state image, rather, as you find portraits of Queen and Prince Philip and every embassy around the world.
Now, this painting performed exactly that function, so much so that it actually embodied the presence of the king.
So they were always displayed in very grand reception rooms in these embassy buildings.
And you would not turn your back on the portrait. It would be like turning your back on the king himself.
The frame is just as extraordinary or possibly more extraordinary even than the painting itself.
There are medallions in the corners, coats of arms on the top.
What's going on? Well, the frame is as full of political and royalist imagery as the portrait itself.
This frame was designed specifically to come with this portrait to London with a contour atmar.
And we know that partly because at the bottom there is a rather beautiful cartouche which explains that it was given to the ambassador.
The date that he was given and so on and so forth. But also, if we look up at the top, it's an immense painting.
It must be over two metres high.
This is very, very elaborate cartouche with the arms of France in the middle, surrounded by the very splendid colour of the order of the scientists.
On top of the cartouche is a cushion with the mons Eustace again with a crown surmounting everything,
and then to either side below the cushion and the arms of France is a wonderful assembly of banners,
trophies of war, and they are all laid aside in peace. And that's very important because this is a pacifist frame, if you like, Adama.
US Embassy was post the American War of Independence. England of France be completely at odds through that period.
And this frame is about rapprochement and it expresses it very clearly, much more so than the figure of the king, who is a very standardised image.
And how does this portrait end up in what's then?
The portrait came to London with the ambassador who displayed it in the residence,
which was on Piccadilly in London, for reasons that we don't completely understand when his embassy came to an end.
He sold the contents of the official residence. And this portrait was bought by old Devon and it was displayed apart from Castle.
Then a few years ago, it was on the market again.
It was deemed to be of national importance because of this very unusual combination of the portrait with its original frame.
And so an adult having an export stop placed on it.
And the rostral foundation stepped in at that point and acquired it for Waldstein, very largely because of the sitter,
because so much that we have here is associated with the osteo regime, with Louis, the 16th of Marie Antoinette.
It seemed a rather wonderful opportunity to secure one of the iconic depictions of the king.
And here he is in the white drawing room. I'm in the morning room at What's to Mama with Rachel Jacobs, the curator responsible for the books.
The Morning Room is a large room with high ceilings which are extremely or neatly decorated in stucco.
And on the walls is the original Damaske, which used to be green and has now faded to a rather pleasant gilt colour.
Rachel is going to be introducing some of the books which have associations with nothing Ultranet.
The room is lined with five bookcases. That's where these wonderful treasures live.
So this is a black quarto volume with a coat of arms on it, Rachel.
This is a manuscript of what appears to be the last will of friends, the first the father of Marie Antoinette.
It's instructions for his children and the whole is manuscript with a lovely black border on each page.
The binding is an Austrian binding, elegant but simple.
It's black leather with two lines forming a frame around each of the covers and each corner.
There's a simple flower with three flower heads in the middle.
Quite prominently are the arms of Melling Antoinette, according to our catalogue.
The arms had been updated once she became queen and her arms changed.
The Hapsburgs were control freaks when it came to educating their children.
Both Francis Steven or for swapped home turf hunts for first.
There are several titles by which he's known my opponent's father and, of course, the formidable Maria Teresa.
We're actually very interested in the upbringing of their children and both of them roots, sets of instructions.
So France, the emperor wrote this, asked quicksort, poor missile fall, don't pull over spiritual good laptop.
Bohle and Maria Teresa, whenever any of her children went off, would make sure they had a list reminding them of their royal duties.
A lot of which revolved around remembering her in their prayers.
This manuscript is dated the 14th of December 1750 to Vienna 19, it was born on the 2nd of November 1755, the 15th of 16 children.
This manuscript was actually written before her birth, but the instructions to any child of the emperor and empress,
and that's why a copy would have been made for muffing or to Annette. The manuscript is not in the emperor's own handwriting, but in his scribed.
It's a beautifully elegant, rounded cursive, very clear, very legible, with quite a lovely gapping between each line.
Fortunately, Miyata Annett didn't copy this out herself before leaving Vienna.
She was notorious for having appalling handwriting as a child and a lot of
her mother's early letters to her when she's arrived in VLSI say things like,
Oh, couldn't you be more careful with your letters? Couldn't you write better?
Almost all of the books in our collection, including this one, were collected by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, who built Waldstein.
We often don't have much information about how he acquired his collection.
He was quite secretive, although with his books he was slightly more forthcoming with the provenance of some of the collection.
I think partly because often books show their early provenance.
Previous owners love to write their names or put their X Libras in.
And here, when you open the cover, there's a lovely small card that says CLX.
So Taschner in Ferdinand's own writing, a reminder to himself as to where this came from.
So all we know of this one is that it was in the collection Teschner in the 19th century,
and then it's recorded in Ferdinand's own catalogue of books,
which is the only part of the collection that he catalogued officially, and that was published in 1897.
Taschner was a very significant bibliophile in the 19th century.
Ferdinand came at book collecting rather late in the last sort of 10 years of his life.
The middle to the late eighteen eighties, which is when he started building the space for his book collection.
And he said at one point in his memoirs that at that time there were no longer any good French paintings to collect on the market.
But there were a great number of good French books. And that's because there were some significant bibliophiles who died around that period.
We're looking at a beautifully bound almanac.
Why an almost entirely covered with Mica, which is a silicate mineral popular in the second half of the 18th century on bindings,
particularly prayer books or almanac's books that were produced annually and at speed.
This mineral can be cut into fine sheets and is transparent, is actually quite good at protecting against damage from light.
You often found it in the middle of a binding where there was a painted coat of arms and it was
covering that and the rest of the binding would be predominately decorated with leather tooled in gold.
Here we find painted arms. Coat of arms of Marie Antoinette.
Then the rest of the binding is almost entirely covered in Mica.
And underneath this type of early plastic is a foil, silver foil and red foil that's been tooled and decorated with wonderful leaves and foliage.
What's holding the mica down is a lovely strap.
Work of leather also tooled in gold decoration and those former border and corner pieces as well.
In the 18th century when you went and bought a book, it would not be bound.
There would be leaves of paper which had been sewn together into what the French would call Kagi or quires.
You would then, if you wanted to keep the book and protect it, have a binding made for it.
This means that bindings range and quality. You could have a very simple board binding where you could have a very elaborate binding.
The more elaborate the binding, of course, the more expensive and the finer the materials used.
Can we presume that this binding was made specifically for money or Toinette?
Yes, we can.
In her account books, we know that her household was purchasing large numbers of almanacs, which would have been used by members of her household.
These books were extremely useful.
They were your sort of equivalent of the Yellow Pages, but also provided every bit of information you needed to live within that regime.
You had all of the members of each royal household, each of the ministers, the members of the military.
You had information about when the post and certain travel information where you would bring petitions for each household.
All of this information, as well as a calendar with the Saints days,
the calendar with the Saints days is particularly important because at the time, you don't generally wish someone a happy birthday.
That's not the most important day in their year. It's the Saints Day of the Saint to whom they owe their name,
the day on which all their friends will be writing to them, sending the presence or bringing them bouquets of flowers.
Binder's at this time were very, very clever in trying to maximise effect, but also minimise cost.
What's interesting about this finding is despite the fact that it looks quite spectacular because of the silver foil,
it catches the light and it would sort of glisten as you were holding it and flicking through it at the same time.
MICA And the limited amount of leather used is quite a cost effective way of making something that looks quite luxurious.
And this is evident here, the text block, which is the pages.
The edges are gilt, which is lovely. So that adds to the overall shimmer effect.
It's also quite a good method of protecting the pages from mould.
And so the pace down when you opened the binding,
the back of the board and the first piece of paper there is stuck down a beautiful blue watered silk,
extremely expensive as textiles were at that time on the title page.
It says Aluminium, Hawai'ian and Knee Mills sits sort Swiss on DVD.
So 1778 present day as Her Majesty put a Pommier for Officer Gallivant is enough.
So this is something which comes out every year absolutely vital to have in any household, let alone the royal household.
There's a long tradition of Almanac's and originally within their agricultural setting,
would hope to tell you what the year ahead would hold and give you advice as to when to set about your crops and so on,
and also give you advice in terms of medical needs. What time of year would be best for such and such treatments?
By this point, they had moved on from that. But they came from this tradition.
So on page 168, we have the mayors on the left in all of the members of her household.
And it covers a good three pages amongst the people who would be listed in the misdialled at a home.
There is, of course, the shohat dot dot who ruled over everything, at least in theory.
There would also be, for instance, members of her chapel staff, the chaplain to the queen had Docteur.
Her equerry is the people who looked after her wardrobe.
If you look through lists like these, you come across a number of people who are important in marking Antoinette's life.
So since 1775, the process the noble has been shot at dot, dot, dot Aherne, if we look a little bit further along.
One of the Chevallier dinner is should called the Pudding Jack Osteotomy Vos, the husband,
the woman whom we know as the duchess, the pulling jack amongst the other people is her Lecter,
the Abbey, the of a really important character in Miyata in its life since he was sent to Vienna
before her arrival in France to help tutor her in French history and the French language.
But also Mohle. The Eastaugh you have to force who also held the position as Bibliotheque Air or librarian to the Queen.
These are albums, essentially modern scrapbooks, the beginning of these albums tend to be more the official royal image making.
And then as we go through the album, we'll get some of the revolutionary images and counter revolutionary images as well.
The volume opens with a portrait of Louis the 16th.
And then right afterwards, we have Murray onto Annette, described as my Antoinette Doltish.
Then the force, the Navar or maybe the crew heirloom model.
Why Yan? So this is very obviously a state portrait representation of my Antoinette.
Marie Antoinette is dressed in court style. The sort of cape which hangs down from her shoulders is blue, trimmed with ermine and covered in gold.
Floated is the symbol of French royalty, which was used in the decorative arts and in fashion extensively.
But there's also, I think in this picture, a lot to note.
The fact that she was interested in fashion and trying to make even the traditional court garments into something quite original.
And what gives it away more than anything else is the extraordinary confection she
has on her head for large white ostrich feathers with a black one downturned,
which seem to be sitting on top of a very high wig,
which has ringlets to the side going down her neck,
but pulled back into this great confection with a sort of cap and jewels and silks on the top of this very tall head of hair.
My Ultranet was famous in her time not only for having reformed dresses, but also initially for what she did to women's heads.
Male Toinette created fashions which were followed not only through art court circles, but widely beyond, including in foreign countries.
One of the fashions she launched with great success was what was known as the Poof, essentially back combed hair and a wig,
surmounting it with a cap, feathers, jewels and all sorts of extravagant things which were meant to tell you what was happening.
Was there a naval victory? Then you would have a miniature ship with all its rigging on the top of your hair.
There were all sorts of extraordinary creations which made getting in and out of carriages, particularly trying.
But they were the talk of the town. The birth of a longed for daughter, Mahadev as Charlotte.
Not as good as a son, of course, changed mouthing off to Annetts place in French court circles.
Last she had shown that she could produce an heir. My alternate was interested in her own children.
She played with them. She'd played with other children, even when an adult.
This was quite unusual. And it was deplored by people like the Austrian ambassador who said that was never really
possible for him to see her without her daughter being around and messing up papers and so on.
We have a very charming print here, which purports to be of manyatta, Annette Darkish firm.
And we said, what did he say, Madam Hawai'ian Fee Jawa.
None of it looks particularly like either my Internet or her daughter.
But what it does show is the importance of portraying the queen and the royal princess.
It looks quite a lot like the many series of fashion prints that were produced at the time in terms of its small scale, its framing.
So without that inscription below, it could just be any lovely fashionable lady with her child.
And she's holding a wonderful fan as well.
At a time when many people couldn't read caricatures were extraordinarily good ways of getting across a message,
particularly when it was a politically subversive message.
The French Revolution saw the development of a series of caricatures which would often turn members of the royal family,
particularly the queen, who had a very bad press at the time, into animals.
It was a way not only of showing that a king or queen was a human being like another, but actually they were no better than beasts.
One of the caricatures, which was much reproduced during the revolution, showed Muffie or Toinette as an ostrich y an ostrich.
You might ask. Well, it is a punning depiction because an ostrich in French is an touche.
And Austria, the country of my Antoinette's birth, is uppish.
So manyatta Annett became less popular. Do touche all pull do perish.
On the one hand, the ostrich.
But on the other, the kept woman of Austria and the kept woman of Austria or the ostrich is supposed to be saying in the caption to this print.
JDF love a larger IVC facility, but a constitutional and a loverly.
I can digest gold and silver with ease, but I cannot swallow the Constitution.
This was the Constitution which was intended to reform the French monarchy and which
indeed was something both the king and queen found very difficult to swallow.
Well, this print is also saying is that Miyata Annett is someone who had got her hands on or in this case,
her greasy beak on the gold with silver of France and that she had been responsible for bankrupting France.
We, of course, know that this is a myth,
but it's a myth which gained great currency during the revolution and prints like this would have been used to propagate it.
The French Revolution sent shockwaves throughout Europe.
One of the places where the French Revolution was watched in some circles with interest and enthusiasm and in others with great wariness,
was, of course, the United Kingdom.
On the one hand, the idea that Republican ideals might flourish was an extremely attractive one to a number of intellectuals.
On the other, the traditional forces of the church and the aristocracy were extremely worried about the consequences.
A number of British cartoonists made their fortune,
or at least part of their fortune on prints and caricatures which related to the French Revolution.
So we're looking here at a print called Lab Work Up Door Pandora's Box.
There are a group of people, one of whom in the centre is carrying a box out of which is popping a sort of jack in the box,
except the jack is mailed to Annette and it says on the box of all ills.
I am quite the worst. In a medallion, we can see the king, the queen and the little dive.
But what sets this print apart from some of the other earlier ones showing the royal family is that clearly it's a very late one.
There is a panel underneath which shows the moment when the family was separated.
We're in the top prison. They are captives. They cannot leave.
The Trinity was a palace in which the royal family was held under house arrest.
But once they got to the top, there was no going out. You can see the absolute despair of some of the members of the family.
We can see the queen with her daughter and her sister in law and then the little dulfer hanging
onto his father's coattails as his father is being marched away during the last part of his life.
Louis the 16th was indeed kept apart from the rest of the family.
So we go upstairs. We've just stopped in what's called the West Hole to look at a beautiful painting by visual empire of the famous dishes,
the pulling back, which was collected by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild and has been at Winston since his time.
The dishes were put in the back. Who was one of my Antoinette's closest friends is wearing one of the famous white
muslin dresses which my Ultranet made fashionable after she'd had her children.
It's gathered loosely at the waist with a pink silk sash. She has a broad blue hat on with a feather.
So to us, she looks very elegant. And yet, for the 18th century onlooker, this is very much her relaxed style, its natural elegance, its grace.
It's the sort of thing my Ultranet was promoting visual. Abha was the most famous woman painter of her time.
She was made a member of the prestigious academy while back to school two at the king's specific request.
She enjoyed royal patronage. And this, on the one hand, meant that she had a list of clients longer than anyone else at the time.
And on the other, there were a lot of painters who were very jealous of her.
My Ultranet was painted a number of times by visual beha on her own in simple white muslin with flowers,
but also in court dress and indeed in a very famous portrait of her,
with her children looking very regal in a red dress which echoes the Rafale Madonnas and which shows in the background.
One of the important pieces of furniture she had commissioned, the set of Beautiful.
That is to say, her jewellery chest. It's in the background. Why?
Because in the foreground of the royal children, this echoes a famous classical exemplar,
erm that of the mother of the great guy who showed her children saying My children are my jewels in the portrait,
the dishes, the pudding yak is holding a piece of sheet music.
She looks as though she's just picked it up to start singing possibly or to suggest a duet.
And you could understand looking at a painting like this, why visit Abha was so popular amongst muffing Antoinette and her contemporaries?
There's a very natural heir to the portrait. My AlterNet was trained as a musician.
She was in particular very good at playing the harp. She enjoyed singing.
She put on a lot of amateur operas with her friends, including the Duchess to Berlin, Jack and her family.
My husband was also a patron of the arts. She can be credited to a large extent with making German music fashionable in France.
Glueck was her protege. He'd been a protege of her brother and produced if the second the court in Vienna.
She enjoyed opera particularly as a job. My Internet as a child had met Mozart when he came to perform for her mother, Maria Teresa.
She was very much someone who practised music and enjoyed it and who saw music as a social occupation which could bring people together.
Whether this was in the form of intimate gatherings where people would sing duets from a recent opera,
for instance, or going to public performances which she attended regularly throughout her life.
Josef, the second Holy Roman emperor, was the elder brother of my Ultranet, Joseph.
Not only was the big brother she'd looked up to when she was a child in Vienna.
He was someone who came to visit her whilst in France. My aunt Annette felt the absence of her family very cruelly.
She left Vienna when she was a teenager to go and marry the Dulfer France, whom she'd never met.
When Joseph was sent to see her by their mother, Maria Teresa, he came semi incognito, as was often the rule during princely visits using a pseudonym.
He was the call to De Fleckenstein and as called the Fleckenstein, he could attend on his sister at leisure.
Without the whole formal protocol, the would have been for a state visit of a monarch from a foreign country.
Joseph got on well with my Ultranet and acted as an adviser to her in many ways.
On his first visit to see her in VSI,
he was entrusted by their mother with the mission of finding out why an heir to the French throne had not yet been produced.
Miyata, Annett and the Dulfer,
who since then had become King Louis says had been married for a number of years and not produced an heir during her lifetime.
Maria Teresa sent countless letters to my Ultranet,
urging her to get on with the business of producing an heir because not having an heir meant that money Annetts position was not secure.
Marie Antoinette and Louis the Sixteenth had four children, a daughter first, who, like all first granddaughters of Maria Teresa,
was called Maid Affairs Money that has Charlotte, who was known formally as Madame Hawai'ian, but who to her mother was mousseline or Mossel.
She's the only member of my Ultranet, and we've sixteen's immediate family to have survived the revolution.
Two boys followed the Pommier too far who died in 1789, probably of a form of tuberculosis.
He was a very sickly child from the start. The child who then was to become the far and who had been known as the Duke, the normal D.
Detained with his parents in the title prison in Paris, along with his sister Mahi to Charlotte.
He died in mysterious circumstances during the revolution.
He was mistreated by his jailer. He was called upon to make false accusations against his mother during her trial.
He has remained a mythical figure in French history under the name of Laffont Daytop, the child of the top prison.
The fourth child of my Internet and lawyer, 16th Safieh l.n. bare clicks.
A little girl died before her first birthday and was a very sickly infant from the start.
So here we have one of our printed board games. It's quite a large sheet of paper.
Almost a metre long made to be played by a group of people sitting around it.
It's based on the game of the goose, a luck sort of game similar to snakes and ladders.
Now where you have a serpentine track around the board with numbers one, two, sixty three.
The players roll dice and either win tokens or money in some instances and also have a series of forfeits.
The aim of the game is to land on the last square number.
Sixty three. But you have to land exactly on that square. If you roll too many, you have to then move backwards.
Games like this were extremely popular in the 18th century as educational tools because each square could hold quite a lot of information.
A big print like this could teach you all about geography, about history, about language, all sorts of things.
So here we have the new Vaugirard. The mud, of course, was the new game of French fashions in the middle of the board.
Gives you the rules, but also a short introduction.
And it's quite fun, this one, because it says here we've tried to show you the French fashions in the last three years,
but there are so many that it would have taken out many, many more squares than just 63.
So we've tried to make a selection.
There is a bit of tongue in cheek here and making fun of how quickly fashions, especially in France, were changing at the time.
Each square is a combination of either the bust of a woman down to her waist or full length view of the woman with wonderful, fanciful hairstyles.
They're all named, so no one's burning home round Bonnett.
Number three is left. Frivolity, frivolity.
The final square led them on ground robe, as you see, referring to a print of Malhi on Toinette that exists in other formats.
Here she is, beautifully dressed, also holding a fan in a landscape with a balcony, looking onto the trees in the background.
On the surface, it looks like a simple array of the wonderful French fashions of the day.
But I think that there was possibly also a masculine audience intended for this game,
because number 59 is a lovely woman with ostrich feathers in her hair.
But she's showing her legs. She's lifted up her dress over her knee and her foot is resting on a stone.
When you read the rules, it says when you get to number 59 and you get to contemplate LaBelle's arm.
Junior, you having the pleasure of seeing this beautiful leg, you have to pay for tokens for the pleasure of doing so.
So it's a forfeit, but it's possibly an enjoyable forfeit. Lots of the squares show headdresses or Kofu.
Some of them have references to individuals, to cultural events and so on.
One of the ones we can see shows like if you allow a whole crew in number 43.
Man, was it cool. Was a famous thespian of the time.
So she was obviously setting trends. Number ten is like, poof, piece of poof.
Is a very elaborate headdress where your hair and quite often artificial hair on top of it is back combed.
You have a sort of cap on top and then there's something special on the cap.
In this case, the something special is a truce or an insect.
Something like a tick. So why is a puce important? Well, puce is what gave us the name for the colour.
Puce. The whole of the garment trade in Paris in the late 18th century witnessed the development of a whole series of new colours.
There were colours which referred to the CHIVA that I had said the queen's hair.
There were other colours which purported to be representations of feelings, soupy size or soupy, as it were, food stifled.
Sighs There were also other colours, one of which was get gout too far.
The Crown Prince is pooh and puce. So how did Puce get its name?
One day my aunt, when it is said to have come along with a new dress and her husband have said to her, Well, Madame, what colour is that?
It looks like the colour of a piece and its stock at the time it distinguished J puce old tick.
They had vaults could pews the prince's belly or do the puce abuses back.
We have stock with puce. Next time you see somebody went puce.
Think about the fact that my art, when it was there, when the colour was first christened,
everything on this game is in French, the fashions of French.
The scenes are French. But if you look at the bottom, it says London printed for Robert Sair, number 53,
Fleet Street and John Smith, number 35, Cheapside French fashions were loved by people throughout Europe.
French was also spoken by a lot of people throughout Europe.
And in that respect, it's not surprising to find printers in London who can print texts or games in French.
This is true, but in the case of this game, this is actually a ruse by the French publisher Kappy,
who is actually in quite a bit of trouble over this particular game because the publisher of a series of fashion prints
took him to court because headdresses and the squares were taken after prints that this other publisher had published.
We know from the records that Kelpies workshop was raided and they found some few
hundred copies of this game and the plates which were then ordered to be destroyed.
And his defence was that they had actually been published in England and he'd imported them and was selling them as such.
Questions of literary copyright and questions of censorship are very important to understand how prints and books circulate in Austria.
Jim, France, if you want to have a book published, you're supposed to submit your manuscript to the censor,
who will then decide whether there are passages to be struck out or whether it can be allowed at all.
One of the ways of getting round the censor is to pretend that you have published something overseas.
There are lots of French books which have totally spurious addresses, as they're called, which will indicate, for instance,
that a book has been published in Constantinople in the Seraglio or that they were ordered by the Great Mufti.
There are libertine novels which are supposed to have been printed in Agra, for instance, where there was no publishing press at the time.
There's a lot of invention and there's also something of a game going on.
There is some tolerance when things are not considered to be dangerous of such false addresses for books.
Dr. Mia Jackson, curator of decorative arts here, I believe, were in Ferdinando Roshan's.
Bathroom. We are indeed. And there are still remnants of tiles behind these cases.
The cases don't hold very much, which relates to bathrooms. This is part of our collection of safe porcelain Waldstein.
This room displays a number of services, whether for dessert or dinner.
And the one that we're here to talk about today is the one ordered by Marie Antoinette in 1781 from the Serve Porcelain Manufactory.
Serve is a royal manufactory from its inception.
It has strong links with the royal family throughout the Arsenault regime.
And one of the things which happens is that my Internet orders not only objects for her own consumption, but gifts from save much of serve.
Her porcelain is famous for its turquoise blue, the blue to serve her rather like the colour you're wearing today.
Mia Malhotra. Annette didn't go in for that sort of serve, did she?
Well, it's more to do with how the serve manufactory developed over the 18th century.
What Marie Antoinette is ordering is the sort of thing that Sav were producing at that time.
So with the white of the porcelain in the centre against a white ground,
rather than having ground colours throughout the 17 60s, there was more of an emphasis on ground colours.
But by the 17th 80s, says, porcelain had become more likely to be on a paler background.
If we take one of the plates, an example in the centre,
we have a bouquet of flowers with pink as a dominant colour, then a garland around the flowers.
A large amount of white and a border, which is actually quite a complicated border,
which uses the same flowers as in the central nosegay swags Rehm's which were painted medallions containing flowers.
So it's quite a complicated decorative programme.
And the commission of this service actually used a third of the painting, a tele, and they were all flower painters.
We have 106 pieces of the service, which is only part of the original delivery for the queen.
It also contains some objects which we wouldn't expect nowadays as a soup tureen, for instance, with extraordinary feet and handles.
There are some very beautiful large serving dishes, round ones and oval ones, often with good borders.
But there are also things which look like gigantic egg cups.
Those are wine coolers. The larger ones would be used for cooling bottles of wine.
You would surround the wine with ice and the smaller ones would be used for either smaller bottles or for cooling glasses.
In terms of other unusual pieces, pretty exceptional.
Other large serving plates called plates for roasts are exceptionally big.
And what makes this service interesting is that it's produced in a mixture of soft and hard paste porcelain.
So for the most part, they serve. Manufactory was producing in soft paste porcelain until the discovery of Kailin nearly merge in 1768.
This service, most of the smaller plates are made in soft paste porcelain, even though it's from the 70s 80s.
But the large plates, because soft paste porcelain is much more likely to fail in the kill, are made of hard paste.
So it's incredibly skilful of the serve manufactory to be able to replicate the
same type of decoration on both soft and hard paste on the different pieces.
There are several types of flaws Pansy's and roses and so on, with the rose paint to paint all the roses on all the pieces.
Or would one person paint all the flowers on a single piece?
I think one person would be more likely to paint all of the flowers on a single piece,
although maybe in some cases somebody might paint the bouquet and somebody else might paint the individual flowers.
What it does mean, though, is that there was a sort of template for representing the flowers because we can't set the plates apart.
Yes and no. So particularly well-trained self specialists can distinguish between different flower painted.
Is there any trace, for instance, on the plates themselves of who painted them?
Does it indicate when they were ordered and by who? On the items themselves?
Yes. Each plate has a painter's mark. It tends not to be manuscript, but some sort of symbol.
And most of those painter's marks have been identified by matching up extant pieces of saids
porcelain with the kiln records and the painter's records that are still at the manufactory.
It doesn't say on them who the client was.
Again, that comes from the Killam and sales ledgers.
So this is a luxury service which any wealthy person could have bought at the same time.
Catherine the Great, who loves everything French, is ordering a service for herself in Russia and she puts her monogram on.
I suspect that these services for Americans were net worth more for private use.
They don't shout their patron in the way that Catherine the great service does.
We know that Myoclonic got very bored during court receptions.
She very much disliked the public taking of meals, which was expected of the French royal couple.
And there are reports of her toying with her food. She didn't like wine.
She liked water, but not water from actually anywhere.
So she had it brought to her, especially one of the things she really missed about Vienna was Viennese bread, which may surprise us.
Considering that we always think of French bread as being much nicer than most other kinds of bread.
Including Austrian bread. But she obviously spent a lot of time choosing her services for her own receptions.
Does this tend to indicate that she was somebody who wanted to show that she had a beautiful set of everything?
You have to bear in mind that it become Derica for the royal family to purchase safe porcelain.
Every New Year's Day, there was a sale at VSI of, say, porcelain,
where the factory would bring its latest wares and arrange them around the room for all of the courtiers to come and purchase.
And so purchasing them almost became an act of loyalty to the monarchy.
So you would expect her to have served porcelain. In many ways, this is similar to some of the furniture my Ultranet is ordering.
We've got the swags. We've got the flowers. We've got this extraordinary mixture of simplicity and great artifice.
And we see that in a lot of the furniture. I think noble materials, strong colours and a desire to have the best of everything.
And it's also the development of the neoclassical style, according to Mario Antoinette's own taste.
So this very refined and delicate mixture of floral motifs and architectural motifs,
French meals at the time weren't quite like meals we have nowadays.
And one of the aspects which survives in the expression service, he says, was the meat and the vegetables weren't served together.
You would often have different cuts of meat and you would then have vegetables.
And the meal would be started by a kind of meaty broth that was served in these large two regions.
And then you would follow it with roasts, then vegetables and salads and then dessert.
And this service has elements for all of those courses.
So, for example, the service that you see behind me, which was made for Cam rather Baffsky,
that's just a dessert service, whereas this service was a full service.
And do we know if my alternate would, for instance, have used this service or one like it, a piano?
We don't know exactly where this service was used, but it's relatively portable.
So we can assume that it could have been used in the triangle.
It seems particularly appropriate for the Trianon.
Well, certainly the decorative programme ties in so well with what we know of how the piano was decorated in Miles when its time.
And despite the number of pieces, there are a lot of pieces.
There is some elements which we don't have, which we know from the records were delivered.
For example, there were only 12 egg cups delivered. So is it a service for only twelve diners?
And if it is, then obviously it's going to be a lavish meal, but relatively.
Intimate. Not these grand suppers that took place in their counterparts.
And certainly the choice of iconographic programme with the flowers and the swags,
the relative simplicity would indeed plead in favour of this being a service chosen
for more intimate meals and therefore potentially for a more intimate setting,
for instance. Yes. And it speaks of the bucolic rather than the grand formality.
You've been listening to In the Footsteps of My Ultranet.
With me, Katrina Seth Marshall Forche, professor of French literature at the University of Oxford.
I hope you'll join us next time when we visit the cool cells of you in Paris where nothing else.
I spent her final days before being executed on the 16th of October 1793 at the age of 37.
You may also like to catch up with our first podcast from the Wallace Connexion.