It is a late gothic confection made of gilded copper, glass and semi-precious stone, complete with turrets and flying buttresses at each corner. Description: This Chinese-style interior belongs to a quintessentially Romantic piece of architecture, the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, designed and redesigned over the course of some 30 years to the specifications of the Prince of Wales, afterwards Prince Regent and eventually King George IV —; reigned — Description: Paul et Virginie , the novella by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, published in and a best-seller throughout the nineteenth century, was particularly celebrated by the decorative arts.
Hence fans, plates, screens, magic lanterns, armchairs and sofas covered in toile de Jouy , and wallpapers were decorated with episodes from the novel. From the period of the Directoire, through the Empire and the Restoration, one ornamental object was particularly fashionable: the clock, decorated with characters in the story. This remarkable clock was ordered by Napoleon Bonaparte in with a view to gifting it to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre himself.
Description: At a glance, this looks like a standard early nineteenth-century playbill. Description: This object, a commonplace book, speaks to a number of questions: What did a European female ruler from the Romantic period read? And how did she respond to the works?
There she transcribed longer and shorter extracts from the books she read, as well as her own observations and reflections. This commonplace book in our exhibition is the most significant and representative of them. This kind of artefact was in fact a relatively common phenomenon among women and men of the middle and upper classes all around Europe; yet, this specific example offers insights into a woman whose life blended public and private aspects, officialdom and intimacy, in peculiar and significant ways.
The bloody battle We all know the dramatic outcome. But why does a rural farmhouse in the Netherlands carry this name? The colours of the painted shutters point to the answer. The watch thus suffered radical repurposing by a roundabout way, becoming a virtual war trophy. Its story points to the relevance of tracing the transit of objects to understanding the social and material culture of the Romantic period.
