A visit to my local secondhand bookshop today paid off handsomely.  I found 2 ‘new’ Nancy Mitford biographies for my collection.

Attentive readers might remember from an early post that Mitford’s biography of Frederick the Great was the first Versailles Century book that I read as a youngster.

Frederick the Great by Nancy Mitford.

That book then led me to her Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King, which were my introduction to the world of Versailles.

Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King by Nancy Mitford.

The books in the photo above are my personal copies.  I’ve had them for decades.  I once had a copy of Frederick the Great, too, but some years ago I donated it to the Pride Library at the University of Western Ontario.  Actually, I’ve donated several hundred titles in various media to that fine institution.  You can read about my donations here: http://www.uwo.ca/pridelib/site/Collections/Donor%20Collections1/David%20Gemeinhardt%20Collection.html

Today we visit Madame Victoire’s apartment at Versailles.

Louis XV had 8 daughters, of whom 7 survived to adulthood, and of whom 2 lived long enough to see the Revolution.  Mme Victoire, born in 1733, was the younger of those two.  Like all but one of her sisters, she was sent away from Versailles to the abbey of Fontevrault for her education.  As a Daughter of France, i.e. the daughter of a reigning king, she was called Madame rather than Mademoiselle even though she never married.  This portrait of her was painted when she returned to live at Versailles at the end of her schooling in 1748.

Mme Victoire by Nattier.  Credit: Wikipedia

Curiously, only one of the sisters married.  This was the eldest, Mme Louise Elisabeth, known simply as Madame, later as Madame Infante when she was married at 13 to the Infante Philip of Spain, a younger son of Philip V.  He later inherited his mother’s sovereign duchy of Parma,* thus making him and Mme Louise Elisabeth the founders of the house of Bourbon-Parma,** whose descendants now include all the Catholic royalties of Europe.

By the time their nephew Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774, only 3 of the sisters were left at Versailles: Mme Adelaide, Mme Victoire, and Mme Sophie, who died in 1782.  Mesdames Adelaide and Victoire remained in the apartments that we see today until the royal family were forced to leave the Chateau in October of 1789.  The sisters withdrew to their estate at Bellevue, from which they fled in 1791 to seek refuge in Italy.  Mme Victoire died of breast cancer in Trieste in 1799, leaving Mme Adelaide the sole survivor of the sisterhood until her own death the following year.

In her final years at Versailles, Mme Victoire luxuriated in a suite of 6 principal rooms: an antechamber, a salon, a large drawing room, a bedchamber, a small drawing room, and a library.  Few people at Versailles had such spacious lodgings.  Even duchesses had to make do with a garret if they were not in favour, and anyone who could afford it kept a house in the town of Versailles as an escape from their cramped quarters in the Chateau.

Today we pay another visit to Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (MNAA)* to have a look at Fragonard’s ‘The Two Cousins.’  As I’ve said in a previous post, Portugal is actually a great place to see French fine and decorative art because the Portuguese aristocracy collected it with such enthusiasm.

Fragonard’s ‘The Two Cousins’ as seen in the MNAA.

I’m no longer a regular Architectural Digest reader, but I couldn’t resist the October issue.

The cover of the October, 2016, issue of Architectural Digest.

Why?  The cover story is the Chateau du Fresne near Tours, built in 1770.  The current owner is the Brussels gallery owner Flore de Brantes, who visits her ancestral home regularly with her husband and sons.

Hotel: Pestana Palacio do Freixo, also known as the Pousada do Porto.

Address: Estrada Nacional 108, 4300, Campanha, Porto, Porto e Norte, Portugal (about 4km from the centre of Porto).

Website: http://www.pestana.com/en/hotel/freixo-palace/

Rating: Excellent.

The most famous facade of the Palacio do Freixo.

I stayed at the Palacio for one night at the beginning of April, 2016.  Run by Pestana Hotels, the Palacio is classified as a national monument, and is also a member of Portugal’s national association of pousadas.

Reception: The check-in process was very smooth.  As soon as I entered the lobby, I was ushered to a comfortable chair in front of the reception desk in a chamber next to the Moorish lobby.  Although the formalities took only a few minutes, I was served a small glass of port.  The young man who had first greeted me at the door also showed me to my room.  This was a nice touch and probably necessary because the layout of the Palacio is complicated.

Flower arrangement in the Moorish lobby. Reception is to the left.

Today I’m pleased to bring you Versailles Century’s first house tour, except the house is now a hotel.  I’ll explain.

The most famous facade of the Palacio do Freixo.

The Palacio do Freixo was built around 1750 on the banks of the Douro river near Porto for one Dom Jeronimo de Tavora e Noronha.  Portuguese Wikipedia informs me that he was a wealthy gentleman with estates in the Douro valley.   He was also the heir of the Dean of the Porto Cathedral, and was instrumental in bringing Nicolau Nasoni (see the previous post), the Italian artist and architect who designed the Palacio, to Porto in 1725 to work on projects for the archdiocese.  Dom Geronimo left the Palacio to his younger brother, a knight in the Order of Malta, whose descendants sold it in the 19th century to a rich merchant, who built a soap factory next door.  It passed through several more hands and uses before finally being declared a national monument in 1910.  The Porto municipal administration acquired it 1986 and extensive restoration work was undertaken between 2000 and 2003.  Since 2009, the Pestana Group has operated it as a pousada, or heritage hotel.

I take these to be Dom Jeronimo de Tavora e Noronha’s arms.

We’ll take a tour of the Palacio as a historic house in this post, and in the next one I’ll review it as a hotel.

Porto, Portugal’s second city, was founded in Roman times, but came into its own during the Versailles Century.

Porto’s historic heart with the cathedral and archbishop’s palace on the hilltop.

Brazilian gold flowing across the Atlantic after the discovery of the precious yellow metal in Minas Gerais in the 1690s, combined with the boom in the port wine trade after the signing of the Methuen Treaty with Great Britain in 1703, made Porto rich.  Much of the loot was spent on spectacular churches.  Modern visitors to the city will find the built heritage of the northern Portuguese Baroque all around them.  The star exhibits are the buildings designed by the transplant Nicolau Nasoni (1691-1773), an all-around talent who arrived from Italy to execute some paintings for the archbishop and stayed for the rest of his life, undertaking not only paintings, but interior design and architecture.

We’re switching gears now.

The Versailles Century was led by France, but it played out all over Europe, indeed the world, as we’ll see in due course.  This post is the first of several inspired by my travels in Portugal in April of 2016, when I visited Porto and Lisbon after leaving Paris and Versailles.  I’m going to bring you words and images about all the Versailles Century art and architecture I found in Europe’s westernmost Latin country.  As it happens, Portugal is a great place to see French fine and decorative art because the Portuguese elite was so heavily influenced by French taste.  Versailles lovers, don’t despair — there will be many more posts about the Chateau in future!

I don’t know about you, but when I think of 18th century painting, a handful of artists spring immediately to mind.  Two that leap fastest are Canaletto (1697-1768) and Bellotto (1721-1780), probably the most famous uncle and nephew artists in history, both known best for their cityscapes.  It was my luck that when I visited the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (the National Museum of Ancient Art) in Lisbon, there was a special exhibition of a work by Bellotto.  The museum, which we’ll call MNAA for short, went all out to highlight it:

It’s true.  I dined in a duchess’s boudoir at the Chateau de Versailles.  Full confession: the duchess’s boudoir is nowadays known as Angelina’s, the Versailles outpost of the celebrated Parisian tea room.

Generally speaking, I don’t care to eat or drink at establishments that are inside tourist attractions, on the grounds that they are usually crowded and over-priced.  However, sometimes options are in short supply.  Such was the case on a very rainy day in late March (2016) during my visit to the Chateau.  Having just toured the Private Apartments (see the 2 previous posts) and the State Rooms, I was footsore, hungry, and slightly dehydrated.  My preference would have been to leave the Chateau and find a restaurant in the town, but one look out the window at people struggling to control their umbrellas in the gusting winds sent me in search of a restaurant inside the Chateau.  As far as I could make out, there was only one.  I followed the signs until I arrived here:

Sign at the entrance of Angelina’s tea room and restaurant in the Chateau de Versailles.

Naturally, I was not alone in having this notion and I was confronted by a long line of fellow visitors waiting for a table.  Angelina’s is known primarily known as a tea room, but it does offer a limited menu of light meals.  The line for the self-serve snackbar was shorter, but I wanted to have a hot meal.  So I waited.  And waited.  For 40 minutes.  The wait turned out to be worth it, though.

Versailles: A Visit to the King’s Private Apartments, Part 2

In the late afternoon of the first day of my visit to Versailles, I went along to the ticket office of the Chateau to buy my ticket for the next day, including a guided tour of the Private Apartments.  There were various tours in several languages, but the young woman behind the counter flatteringly recommended that I take the French language tour at 10:30, on the grounds that it was the most thorough one.  I duly purchased a ticket and wandered off in the rain — the weather was relentlessly wet throughout my visit — to find my dinner.

Semi-restored room in the ticket wing. My inner interior decorator sees some sleek Italian sofas and striking contemporary art in here.

All but skipping with excitement, I turned up the following morning at the designated entrance for the Private Apartments tour.  This entrance is on the north side of the Cour Royale (the Royal Court), the great courtyard that precedes the Cour de Marbre (the Marble Court) at the heart of the palace.  A uniformed man checked my ticket and waved me inside.  A young woman in a smart black pantsuit and a headset then asked me which tour I was there for, and directed me into an adjoining salon.  This turned out to be the holding tank for imminent tours.  It retained its 18th century boiserie, but was furnished with sleek contemporary furniture, which I’m tempted to say was by Philippe Starck, but I’m not sure.  Another pant-suited young lady appeared and gave me a pair of earphones.  I nearly protested that I hadn’t asked for an audio guide, but held my peace.  All became clear when the actual guide appeared, a brisk, middle-aged Frenchwoman.  She instructed us to put in our earbuds and see if we could hear her on the audio system that was connecting us.  A very sensible system, this.  Nothing is more annoying on a guided tour than straining, and failing, to hear what the guide is saying.  We were a group of about 15 or 20.  As far as I could tell, I was the only non-francophone apart from a young woman from Brazil who was studying art history in Paris, which I know because we had a chat after the tour.  In fact, it turned out that she was taking a course on museology and asked me if I would oblige her by taking a short survey about my Versailles experience.  I obliged, of course.