Page 170 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

Yuanmingyuan on Display 155
Eugénie instead made the Chinese Museum distinctly private and personal, which
is surprising. By 1863, she had taken on a prominent political role and was also
extremely active in charity projects. 18 Matthew Truesdell has shown that Napoleon
and Eugénie turned every possible event into a public relations campaign, embellished
with grand constructions, speeches and ceremonies, and extensive press coverage. 19
But whereas the China war was publicized by the Tuileries exhibition and elaborate
military celebrations in the Place de la Concorde in 1858 and 1861, Eugénie’s
Museum opened with just one brief news report, accompanied by one illustration,
with the collection only viewable upon special invitation. More cabinet of curiosities
20
than modern museum, the project’s atypical intimacy shows Eugénie taking firm
possession of the collection for herself and for more personal effects of cultural prestige.
I suspect she viewed these tokens of gratitude from the army as confirmation of
her insecure status as an empress and an opportunity to consolidate her cultural
equivalence with former and reigning queens. Her chosen site, the Château of
Fontainebleau, was less public and more familial than the Tuileries. It held deep
personal significance both for Eugénie, whom Napoleon first courted here in 1852,
and for Napoleon himself, who had been baptized in Napoleon I’s presence on the
palace grounds. 21 Within the building, she chose ground-floor rooms in the private
wing, where she and Napoleon installed their private offices, and their son his
bedroom. While sources speak of relaxed family evenings spent in the Museum’s main
salon, it was surely a site of disaffection as well; the very year Eugénie oversaw the
collection’s installation, 1863, Napoleon began one of his most public affairs with
a woman whom he installed in an apartment in Fontainebleau. This infuriating slight
added to earlier wounds that gave Eugénie a newly assertive independence in the
1860s. 22
The private salon next to the Fountain Court thus became not so much a space
of familial harmony as a space of individual identification with other strong-
willed queens, emphasized through their common links to China. One was Marie
Leszczynska, queen of Louis XV. Eugénie hung full-length portraits of the couple in
the main salon, partly because they had built this wing of the palace, partly to rein -
force Napoleon’s broader revival of ancien régime court culture—including lavish
balls, re-instituting the morning lever, and making courtiers wear eighteenth-century
costumes. 23 (see Figure 9.2) Typical of her age, Leszczynska had identified with
chinoiserie culture; her private apartments at Versailles included a Chinese room
installed in 1761, with elaborate porcelain and her own paintings related to
Chinese tea. 24
This was subsequently renovated by Marie-Antoinette, queen to Louis XVI, to
whom Eugénie paid cult-like devotion, re-using her furniture, restoring her Petit
Trianon and imitating it at Saint-Cloud, hanging her portrait in the bedroom, and
especially developing a style of billowing crinoline dress that made Eugénie an icon
of royal fashion and feminine power, peaking around 1862. 25 Therese Dolan says
the Spanish Eugénie admired Marie-Antoinette as a foreign-born queen with political
strength, helping reinforce “legitimist ideas of continuity and succession” based on
royal culture rather than heredity. 26 That culture included substantial China-related
material culture. Marie-Antoinette had a chinoiserie carousel installed at the Petit
Trianon and her own rooms at Versailles included a “Grand Cabinet” in which she
displayed Chinese porcelain and Chinese or Japanese lacquer boxes, on chinoiserie
27
furniture designed by the great Jean-Henri Riesener. Though this furniture was sold