Bling, opulence and luxury provoke powerful responses in an age of austerity, from wistful envy to righteous disgust. Working girls flocked to see lamé gowns on the silver screen in the hungry 1930s, but Marie Antoinette is still scorned for frivolous excess with her diamond necklaces, miniature farm and alleged remark "let them eat cake".
"Luxury" sounds so old fashioned, but the word still flourishes in marketing. The 21st-century "luxury goods market" embraces everything from jewels and luggage to private jets. In yoking a brand to luxury, advertisers draw on a vintage notion of refined taste – harking back to a world of connoisseurs, exquisite workmanship and, above all, sophistication.
It is this mélange of consumerism and lifestyle that the Getty exhibition Paris: Life and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century seeks to evoke. It is built round the outstanding collection of French decorative art that Jean Paul Getty, oil tycoon and once America's richest man, left to his museum at his death.
Ancien Regime Paris was the epicentre of European style. "Fashion is to France what the gold mines of Peru are to Spain," concluded Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's minister in 1665. French manufacturing was geared to the carriage trade. Demolish the Paris luxury industry, the Baroness d'Oberkirch concluded, and French international supremacy would wither overnight.
Across the channel the British were grinding their teeth. France was Britain's only real economic and diplomatic rival – the two countries went to war seven times between 1688 and 1815. France was everything the new Protestant parliamentary state abhorred – Catholic, authoritarian, pleasure loving and effervescent. Yet still those thrifty Anglo Saxon Protestants could not contain their desire for French silks, tapestry, porcelain, mirrors, clocks and cabinetwork. "We are the whipped cream of Europe," sighed Voltaire in 1735.
The exhibition regards Paris as the world headquarters of taste. "Paris is the world," crowed Marivaux in 1734, "the rest of the earth is nothing but its suburbs."
Two chic new faubourgs are centre stage – St Germain and St Honoré, where a new breed of financier built their hôtels particulier. These stand- alone mansions set in their own gardens were designed to accommodate a new style of life, an elegant "vie privée". Lofty rooms for formal receptions, the "appartements de parade", were supplemented by intimate rooms for informal relaxation, "appartements de commodité". "Those of the highest rank live in the smallest rooms," noticed leading periodical Mercure de France at mid-century. The new interior architecture even spawned a matching wardrobe – fashionable loungewear for both him (banyans) and her (peignoirs). Even dressing gowns had je ne sais quoi.
A day in the life of the 18th-century city mansion is recreated at the Getty, which stages the ritualised activities – from dressing and writing, to collecting, eating and partying – through which the rich exercised their politesse and turned their savoir vivre into a performance art.
Time is the driving theme. Dawn, high noon and sunset roughly divided the day for millennia, but the 18th-century spread of public clocks, domestic timepieces and watches hastened the rise of clock-time, beating a mechanical rhythm to work and play.
The prevalence of clocks instituted more demanding ideas of punctuality and time accounting. The grand bourgeoisie liked to be painted at their tasks with their timepieces demonstrating their conscientiousness. The noblesse was above petty quotidian regulations, but time waits for no man, even those in pink silk breeches.
The ubiquity of clocks was a sombre reminder of mortality, complained the painter Phillipe Mercier. "People put a pendulum clock on every mantelpiece; they are wrong; what a lugubrious fashion. There is nothing so sad as to contemplate a pendulum. You see your life slipping away and the movement warns you of all the moments which will never return." But what are luxury goods for if not to sooth the torments of the super-rich? Designers such as André Charles Boulle made a specialty of gilded clock cases topped with Cupid triumphing over a recumbent Father Time.
As the sun rose over rococo Paris, the chic awoke in stylish single beds in niche bedrooms, leaving ballustraded beds in drafty state bedrooms unoccupied. Compare the Getty's imposing "lit à la duchesse" with its new-fashion "lit a la turque". The duchess-style bed is dressed to impress with a 14ft headboard hung with gold satin. The upholstered Turkish bed of gilded and gessoed beech and walnut is no less exquisite but could pass for a sofa. Court cases reveal that courtesans installed classy formal beds in their appartements d'amour, but invariably got down to business on a couch.
The first public performance of the polite Parisian day was the toilette – a ritual public dressing instituted by Louis XIV (1638-1715) and his mother Anne of Austria (1601-1666). The nobility and haute bourgeoisie imitated the royal routine, but in so doing transformed a piece of court ceremonial into a flamboyant exercise in taste and sociability. Rich men and women alike invited visitors to attend their levees, but it was the lady's toilette that appealed as a titillating subject for art – a modern Venus exhibiting her charms.
However most women had dressed and prettified themselves before the guests were admitted. "The second toilette is nothing but a game invented by coquetry," observed Louis-Sébastien Mercier. The toilette was a staged and artificial glimpse of secrecy and intimacy complete with charming props – the dressing table clothed in lace, the all important mirror, the gold or silver (later porcelain) toilette set, the perfumes, cosmetics and accessories. The fabrication of femininity was the story.
"The role of a pretty woman in much more serious than one might suppose," Montesquieu observed in 1721. "There is nothing more important than what happens each morning at her toilette, surrounded by her servants; a general of an army pays no less attention to placing his right flanks or his reserves than she does to the placement of a patch . . ."
Next came business – exemplified here by Maurice-Quentin de la Tour's pastel portrait of Gabriel Bernard de Rieux (1687-1745), a prominent member of the Paris parliament in his home office. He is depicted with books, papers, globe, pen and inkstand in a sumptuous domestic bureau.
After work came a little intellectual refreshment in one's own galerie. For the French as for the British, luxury was potentially corrupting, so it needed to be purified. How could virtue be reconciled with the accumulation of unnecessary objects? One answer was to disinfect your shopping with taste. An art collection confirmed erudition, but also could be read as a self-portrait, revealing cultural range and chosen models of virtue.
Enlightened taste extended to experimental science. No pretentious mansion was complete without the odd telescope, barometer and globe. The Getty exhibits a planisphere clock, demonstrating mean time and solar time in cities around the globe, as well as the timing of the tides in northern ports. The oddest exhibit is a "mechanical picture" owned by dilettante scientist Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson. Hidden clockwork brings the people and animals in the painting to life. The picture frame boasts three clocks: one a basic model, one telling the month and day, and another marking years and centuries. It epitomises the peculiarities of the age of science.
By the 1750s the dinner hour was noon. Gastronomic success rested not only on the best ingredients, but also on the service, the convivial atmosphere, the vivacity of the conversation and the visual interest of the table and eating room. The best tables groaned with a prince's ransom of rococo silverware: a still-life centre piece or a branching epergne holding flowers and fruit surrounded by a flotilla of tureens, condiment sets and candelabra, edged with cutlery.
Silversmiths aimed to exhibit their wit and virtuosity, not just the raw value of white metal. Thomas Germain's tureen is crowned with a silver cauliflower flanked by crayfish. Even serving dishes were designed to delight.
The excitement of life after sunset depended entirely on wealth before electric and gas lighting rolled back the darkness. The lights are dimmed in the last gallery to recreate an era when only firelight and candlelight illuminated a room. In the exhibition book, Mimi Hellman evokes "limited circles of flickering brightness surrounded by encroaching gloom". Glittering enchantment was created by precious metals, gilding on furniture and china, iridescent threads on clothes and jewels on the body. Brilliant cut gemstones came to life in candlelight, spot-lighting the face of the wearer, accentuating what one commentator called "the sparkling fire of the eyes".
Our day in the life of the posh culminates with a section devoted to private prayer – inevitably supported by religious props crafted in the best possible taste. The age of reason was just as much an age of religion – though a lady's prie dieu was exquisite.
Inevitably Parisian luxury had its critics. The city was "the abyss of the human species" for Jean Jacques Rousseau, who renounced fashion and donned archaic Armenian garb as protest. Yet Rousseau's writing inspired its own modish aesthetic – a natural simplicity. What could be more picturesque than a duchess impersonating a dairymaid in straw hat and copious ribbons? Meanwhile, a parallel trade in "populuxe" brought curtains, coffee pots and card tables, wallpaper and hot water bottles to middling and even some plebian homes in Paris: a democratisation of luxury.
Paris: Life and Luxury celebrates well-upholstered leisure and a demanding hyper refinement, but it is emphatically not the story of royalty and courts. As every visitor to Versailles knows, Paris was not the seat of monarchy. Louis XV even ordered a special ring road to bypass the city en route from Versailles to Saint Denis. The historian Colin Jones characterises 18th-century Paris as "the kingless city of Enlightenment".
It was the capital of luxury and taste, but also of science and independent public opinion. The exhibition is not a study in decadence, insists the curator Charissa Bremer-David, but an attempt to recapture a world subsequently overshadowed by the tumultuous history of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, hindsight lends a wistful futility to the chiming of all those gorgeous clocks. Cupid was no match for time after all.
