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During the reigns of Louis XV (1723–74) and Louis XVI (1774–92) fashion and furniture merged ideals of beauty and pleasure through their forms and embellishments. With their fragile surfaces and delicate proportions, tables, chairs, and other pieces of furniture enhanced the elite's indulgence in leisurely pursuits, fostering highly complex standards of etiquette and performance. Men and women restated the splendor of the Rococo and Neoclassical interiors of the period in their opulent costumes. For the eighteenth-century libertine and femme du monde, a refined elegance and delicate voluptuousness infused their world with a mood of amorous delight.
Dangerous Liaisons takes its theme from this era, when trifling in love propelled the energies of elite men and women, providing almost daily stimulating encounters, and when, as has been written, "morality lost but society gained." In Choderlos de Laclos's novel of the same name, Cécile, a young girl, is praised by her tutor in the worldly arts: "She is really delightful! She has neither character nor principles ... everything about her indicates the keenest sensations." Valmont, her seducer, notes the following morning, "Nothing could have been more amusing." Valmont has won a game in the contest of lovemaking.
The beautifully photographed and handsomely reproduced images on the following pages bring these amorous adventures to life. The vignettes, staged for the widely praised exhibition "Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century," held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004, feature eighteenth-century costumes in the Museum's spectacular French period rooms, The Wrightsman Galleries. The artfully composed scenes include: a woman sitting for her portrait while her husband flirts with her friend; a man being granted an audience with a woman in a peignoir who is having her hair dressed; a vendor embracing the wife of an old man, his back turned, examining a table for sale; a girl receiving more than a harp lesson from her teacher, while her oblivious chaperone reads an erotic novel; a woman giving up her garter as a memento of a very private dinner. The entertaining and knowledgeable texts set the scenes perfectly.
Sponsor's Statement
ForewordPhilippe de Montebello
Preface
Interior Motives: Seduction by Decoration in Eighteenth-Century FranceMimi Hellman
The Portrait: An Unexpected Entanglement
The Levée: The Assiduous Admirer
The Music Lesson: A Window of Opportunity
The Withdrawing Room: A Helpful Valet
The Masked Beauty
The Favorite
The Broken Vase: A Consoling Merchant
The Card Game: Cheating at Cavagnole
The Late Supper: The Memento
Catalogue
IllustrationsSelect BibliographyAcknowledgments
Harold Koda is Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Andrew Bolton is Associate Curator of The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mimi Hellman is Assistant Professor of Art History at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.
Baetjer, Katharine. "Portrait Painting in England, 1600–1800." Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–.
This exhibition focuses on dress and its aesthetic interplay with art, furniture, and the broader decorative arts between 1750 and 1789. Presented in the dramatic setting of The Wrightsman Galleries, the Museum's French period rooms, the exhibition explores the dressed body's spatial negotiation of the eighteenth-century interior as a choreography of seduction and erotic play. The coquettish Polonaise dress with its hem raised to reveal the ankle is juxtaposed with a side table that transforms into a dressing table through mechanisms similar to the gown's hidden ties. The arch of the foot introduced by shoes with a Louis-style heel is seen with the scrolling legs of tables and chairs from the period shod in ormolu sabots. Lavish banyans, the "undress" of eighteenth-century rakes, and fans, an accessory that could be wielded with both decorous and flirtatious intent, are presented as the favored modes of beguilement of the eighteenth-century man about town and his femme du monde counterpart.
Date: 1774–93Accession Number: 32.40a–c
Date: 1770–90Accession Number: C.I.64.33a–c
Date: 1784–87Accession Number: 1991.204a, b
Jean-Baptiste II Lelarge (1711–1771)
Date: 1770Accession Number: 1987.188a, b
Date: ca. 1760Accession Number: 1976.149.1
Jean Henri Riesener (French, Gladebeck, near Hessen 1734–1806 Paris)
Date: 1778Accession Number: 33.12
Date: 1785–87Accession Number: C.I.66.39a, b
made by Nicolas Huyot (1700–1791)
Date: ca. 1768–72, with later additionsAccession Number: 42.203.1
Date: third quarter 18th centuryAccession Number: 1983.213.4
