Oracle

Museum crushes n°2
Jean-Honoré Fragonard - Portrait présumé de Madame de Norinval
1775
Musée Cognacq-Jay

lapkinspiration:

Piat Joseph Sauvage (1744 - 1818)

Portrait of a man. (1765)

Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts. 

Okay the guy is ugly… But the detail of his coat… <3

HBICs of history » G e o r g i a n a, duchess of Devonshire

Georgiana was a celebrated beauty and socialite who gathered around her a large circle of literary and political figures. She was also an active political campaigner in an age when women’s suffrage was still over a century away. During the 1784 general election, the Duchess was rumoured to have traded kisses for votes in favour of Fox, and was satirised by Thomas Rowlandson in his print THE DEVONSHIRE, or Most Approved Method of Securing Votes.

Famously, when she was stepping out of her carriage one day, an Irish dustman exclaimed: “Love and bless you, my lady, let me light my pipe in your eyes!”, a compliment which she often recalled whenever others complimented her by retorting, “After the dustman’s compliment, all others are insipid.”

Georgiana married the Duke of Devonshire on her seventeenth birthday: 7 June 1774. She had a number of miscarriages before giving birth to four children: three with her husband, and an illegitimate daughter fathered by the second Earl Grey. She also raised the Duke’s illegitimate daughter, Charlotte, who was conceived with a maid. The Duchess introduced the Duke to her best friend, the Lady Elizabeth Foster (who later married the Duke), and lived in a ménage à trois with them for the next 25 years. Lady Elizabeth had two illegitimate children by the Duke, a son and a daughter.

Georgiana is famous not only for her marital arrangements, her catastrophic affairs, her beauty and sense of style and best clothes, and her political campaigning, but also for her love of gambling. Even though her own family, the Spencers, and her husband’s family, the Cavendishes, were immensely wealthy, she was reported to have died deeply in debt because they did not give her any money. She died in March,1806 (aged 48), from what was thought to be an abscess of the liver; At her death, she owed today’s equivalent of £3,720,000. She was so petrified of her husband discovering the extent of her debts that she kept them secret; the Duke only discovered the sum she owed after her death and remarked, “Is that all?

(via ashlynlily)

HBICs of history » M a d a m e  d e  P o m p a d o u r

Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour was a member of the French court, and was the official maîtresse-en-titre of Louis XV. She was intelligent, beautiful, and refined. She spent her younger childhood at the Ursuline convent in Poissy where she received a good education. At adolescence, her mother took personal charge of her education at home by hiring tutors who taught her to recite entire plays by heart, play the clavichord, dance, sing, paint and engrave. She became an accomplished actress and singer, and also attended Paris’s Club de l’Entresol. 

Jeanne Antoinette caught the king’s eye when she was a married woman, and her divorce soon followed. She could not be presented at court without a title, so Louis bought her  the marquisate of Pompadour. The marquise had many enemies among the royal courtiers who felt it a disgrace that the king would thus compromise himself with a commoner. However, her importance was such that she was even approached in 1755 by a prominent Austrian diplomat, asking her to intervene in the negotiations which led to the Treaty of Versailles. Madame de Pompadour suffered two miscarriages in 1746 and 1749, and she is said to have arranged lesser mistresses for the King’s pleasure to replace herself. Although they had ceased being lovers after 1750, they remained friends, and Louis was devoted to her until her death from tuberculosis in 1764. At the time of her death, many of her enemies were greatly relieved and she was publicly blamed for the Seven Years’ War. Looking at the rain during the departure of his mistress’ coffin from Versailles, the King reportedly said: “La marquise n’aura pas de beau temps pour son voyage.” (“The marquise won’t have good weather for her journey.”)

(via ashlynlily)

demodedamsel:

Attributed to Joseph Nickolls (British, 1713-1755). St James’s Park and The Mall, after 1745               

There is just so much to notice in this painting.Its full of fashionable people and less fashionable personages-

…and cows.Dont forget the cows.^^

(via 18thcenturylove)