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Combat de deux cavaliers, faubourg Saint Antoine sous les murs de la contre-escarpe de la Bastille.
Even though the painting is anonymous, the fight it depicts was famous during the Fronde. Since 1648, Cardinal Mazarin, with the support of the Queen Anne d’Autriche, is facing the hostility of the Parlement de Paris which tries to extend its prerogatives and the Princes, who considered themseves fit to participate to the government of the Kingdom.
The Fronde in some aspects look like a civil war. In 1652, the Parlement de Paris is a decisive stake. The Prince of Condé tries to unify the different groups opposed to Mazarin. His army is getting close to Paris, but the Parlement, despite its dislike of Mazarin, refuses to open the city to him. Condé’s armies were nearby the city walls when the Royal army led by Turenne and La Ferté attacked him on the 2nd of July. A disproportionned fight arrised near the Porte Saint Antoine and Condé’s army found a way out thanks to the courage of its leader and the actions of the Grande Mademoiselle, cousin of the King, which managed to open the door of Paris and made the Bastille canon shoot the royal army.
That’s the fight the anonymous author decided to represent as a fight between two cavalries. We can suppose it was ordered by someone close to the Royal power celebrating the last important battle of the Fronde.
Indeed, on the 4th of July of the same year, the Princes tried a coup againt the Hôtel de Ville but only managed to arise the defiance of the Parisian population. As the ralliement to the King grew, Condé left Paris on the 14th of October, and Louis XIV entered the city on the 21st.
Madame de Montespan.
Born into one of the oldest noble families of France, the House of Rochechouart, Madame de Montespan was called by some the true Queen of France during her romantic relationship with Louis XIV due to the pervasiveness of her influence at court during that time.
Her so-called “reign” lasted from around 1667, when she first danced with Louis XIV at a ball hosted by the king’s younger brother, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, at the Louvre Palace, until her alleged involvement in the notorious Affaire des Poisons in the late 1670s to 1680s.
Her immediate contemporary was Barbara Villiers, mistress of King Charles II of England. She is an ancestress of several royal houses in Europe, including those of Spain, Italy, Bulgaria and Portugal.
Testament de Jeanne Mance, le recto
Jeanne Mance (November 12, 1606 – June 18, 1673) was a French nurse and settler of New France. She arrived in New France two years after the Ursuline Nuns came to Quebec. Among the founders of Montreal, Canada in 1642, she established its first hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, in 1645. She returned twice to France to seek financial support for the hospital. After providing most of the care directly for years, in 1657 she recruited three sisters of the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph, and continued to direct operations of the hospital.
Photo d’une page des manuscrits de N.-C. Peiresc réalisée et retaillée par Malburet
Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, often known simply as Peiresc, or by the Latin form of his name Peirescius, was a French astronomer, antiquary and savant, who maintained a wide correspondence with scientists, and was a successful organizer of scientific inquiry. His research included a determination of the difference in longitude of various locations in Europe, around the Mediterranean, and in North Africa.
Peiresc was also an astronomer. In 1610 du Vair purchased a telescope, which Peiresc and Joseph Gaultier used for observing the skies, including Jupiter’s moons; his courtly suggestion that individual names from the Medici family be applied to these “Medicean stars” was not taken up. Peiresc discovered the Orion Nebula in 1610; Gaultier became the second person to see it in the telescope. To determine longitude with greater precision, he coordinated the observation of the lunar eclipses of 28 August 1635 right across the Mediterranean; this allowed him to work out that the Mediterranean sea was in fact 1,000 km shorter than had previously been thought. Peiresc also wrote letters to Galileo, Pierre Gassendi and Tommaso Campanella, whom he defended when they were arrested by the Inquisition.
Woman nursing an infant, faïence d’Avon, 17th c. Musée de la Renaissance d’Écouen © RMN / Gérard Blot
There were several stages in the progression from fifteen million inhabitants at the end of the 15th century to eighteen million by 1610, the year of Henri IV’s death. There was strong growth in the first half of the 16th century, no doubt due to the fact that people were better fed and had better resistance to diseases. By 1560, the population had more or less reached the level attained in 1347. Growth then slowed, and even stagnated, in the second half of the century, when the violence and chaos that characterised the Wars of Religion brought with them crises of subsistence and increased vulnerability to illness. The return of peace to the kingdom brought about a renewed upswing.
Entrevue de Louis XIV et de Philippe IV dans l’Ile des Faisans, le 7 juin 1660- Charles le Brun
The Treaty of the Pyrenees (Spanish: Tratado de los Pirineos, French: Traité des Pyrénées, Catalan: Tractat dels Pirineus) was signed to end the 1635 to 1659 war between France and Spain, a war that was initially a part of the wider Thirty Years’ War. It was signed on Pheasant Island, a river island on the border between the two countries. The kings Louis XIV of France and Philip IV of Spain were represented by their chief ministers, Cardinal Mazarin and Don Luis de Haro, respectively.
Rock-crystal mirror
C. 1630
Paris
Frame: sard, agate, sard cameos, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, garnets, enamelled gold
H. 40 cm; W. 28.30 cm; D. 5 cm
Purchased by Louis XIV in 1684 to the marchand Le Brun
MR 252
The mirror was purchased by Louis XIV in 1684 from the dealer Le Brun at the same time as the sconce MR 251. It comprises several pieces of sard and cameos. The stones are set off by a metalwork mount in the style of Pierre Delabarre, a 17th-century goldsmith. This work reflects the interest of 17th-century collectors in hard stone and the richness of Louis XIV’s collection of precious and semiprecious stones.
Cameos and sard to frame a mirror
The rectangular rock-crystal mirror is set in a frame decorated with pieces of sard, probably reused stones. The shape of the frame is evocative of a window recess or frame. It comprises a discontinuous arched pediment supported by two small columns, and a base. The two molded elements forming the pediment may have come from ancient vases; the gray agate columns were possibly produced as part of the decoration of a cabinet; and the two small vases at the top corners were probably carved from reused agate eggs. The cameos date from the Renaissance. The agate cameos on the frieze depict the twelve Caesars facing each other two by two; the cameo at the center of the base shows Diana’s head in profile; and the cameo in the center of the pediment represents a woman’s head, also in profile. At the foot of the columns set against a metal strip are two busts in garnet that are similar to a garnet and gold bust of a warrior kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
A mount in enameled gold and precious stones
The mount has the same characteristics as the sconce MR 251. It features small openwork leaves and enameled gold seeds. The enamel is both opaque (white, light green, light blue, mauve) and translucent (dark blue, green, orange, red, black). The enamel decoration is located at the base and runs around the mirror itself and the precious stones. The pea-pod motif -common in goldwork in the first half of the 17th century - is also present, especially on either side of the Diana cameo. The capitals and the bases of the columns also feature painted white enamel decorated with polychrome palmettes and seeds. The decoration is similar to that surrounding the base of the ewer MR 445.
A mount in the style of Delabarre
Collectors of hard stones liked to enhance them with metalwork mounts. Two styles of mount were favored in 17th-century France: the “Delabarre” style, after the goldsmith Pierre Delabarre, and a more classical style. The mirror in the Louvre is representative of the “Delabarre” style. At the time, there existed collections of model bouquets made up of small cutout leaves with trefoil, pointed, or rounded shapes, often hollowed out. Inside the bouquets were strings of seeds and pea pods. One of the ornamentalists who created such bouquets was Pierre Delabarre, who was appointed master goldsmith in Paris in 1625 and granted lodgings at the Louvre. The bouquets were reworked in precious metals by goldsmiths. The pieces of sard and the cameos are assembled on gilded brass plaques and joined up with small enameled gold leaves in the style of Delabarre - some of them hollowed out - in opaque or translucent enamel. This mount is also dotted with white seeds. This decoration is very similar to that of the sconce purchased by Louis XIV at the same time.
Contract between Jeanne Mance, residing on the Island of Montréal, and Jacques Mousnier, merchant of La Rochelle, for the transport to Québec, aboard the ship Saint-André, of 31 persons, including women and children, May 5, 1659
FR AD17 3E 316 fol. 83
To ensure the colony’s growth, labourers, carpenters, masons and domestic servants were regularly recruited in France. They were generally employed under contract or indentured for a period of three years. In exchange for their work for a set period of time, the recruiter paid the cost of passage and provided wages, lodging and food. Even if, in some cases, employers promised to pay for return passage at the end of the contract or provide the indentured workers with the means of subsistence and establishing themselves in the colony, the difficult living conditions sometimes induced people to return to France. Indentured workers made up a large number of the emigrants.
Louis le Nain, Famille de paysans dans un intérieur, 113*159 cm, Louvre
A peasant family
Nine members of a peasant family are shown grouped by the fire. Some of them are sitting aroung a little table, looking outwards at the viewer as if he has disturbed them in their routine. Four of the children are absorbed in their own activities: in the center a boy accompanies the crackling of the fire with a tune on the flute, while two other children warm themselves at the hearth. Here the painter transcends a stark - but in no way cruel - reality by investing it with a moral, not to say religious dignity his clients doubtless found most appealing. The work’s relative chromatic restraint is an opportunity for the painter to demonstrate his considerable talent for handling light, whether coming from inside (the fire) or outside: there may be a window to the left. The fullness and presence of the figures, the size of the picture - as big as a history painting - and the nobly poetic gravity of the scene make this one of the Le Nains’ greatest masterpieces.
Genre painting in the 17th century
Genre painting - portraits of everyday life - came to the fore in the 17th century, especially in Holland, where it became a national specialty. Originated in the second half of the 16th century by painters like Lucas van Leyden, the style swept through Europe under the impetus of dealers in the works of the Northern school, and found ready buyers at events like the Saint-Germain art fair in Paris. Much prized and frequently vectors for contemporary religious values and concepts of virtue, these small canvases soon gained a following among artists in both Italy and France. In the second quarter of the 17th century the manner found its leading French representatives in the Le Nain brothers, especially Antoine and Louis, whose works still pose problems of individual identification. What we see in this painting is not so much a meal as an evocation of food - bread, wine, salt - uniting three generations of a family.
Covered dish (porringer)
Écuelle emblazoned with the arms of the Grand Dauphin, son of Louis XIV
© 1988 RMN / Daniel Arnaudet
Upon rising, members of the royal family would drink broth for breakfast from two-handled bowls such as these. This silver-gilt bowl is the work of the Parisian goldsmith Sébastien Leblond. It was made in 1690-2 for the Louis XIV’s son, the Grand Dauphin, and is decorated accordingly: the pairs of dolphins forming the handles are, of course, the symbols of the Grand Dauphin. The chased ornamentation on the lid also incorporates dolphins either side of the intertwined letters “L” for Louis. The foliated scrollwork covering the center of the lid is characteristic of designs used by goldsmiths in the reign of Louis XIV.
