Cravat end or rabat

The quality of workmanship in this cravat end is consistent with its presumed exalted provenance. It is said to have been made for the Austrian empress Maria Theresa; given to her daughter the French queen Marie Antoinette; and then passed to the marquis de Chabert, a French admiral and astronomer, after which it descended in his family. The possibility of this association is supported by the crown at center resembling the Austrian archducal crown, though no further proof of the connection has been discovered. Illustrated are the royal pursuit of hunting on horseback and the eighteenth century interest in exoticism, as personified by the bare-breasted female riders wearing feathered headdresses at the center of the piece and the turbaned men reclining toward the bottom. Brussels bobbin lace, often called point d’Angleterre, is worked in parts and joined with a plaited hexagonal mesh called drochel.