It refers to the daily: to Pompadour’s untiring quest to buy, use, display and give away Vincennes/Sèvres wares every day that she spent as Louis XV’s mistress between 1745 and her death in 1764. “Everyday” as Rosalind Savill, former director of the Wallace Collection, uses it in her exhaustive study of Madame de Pompadour’s porcelain is not qualitative-that is to say it does not denote the mundane, banal, dull or ordinary-rather it is temporal. The retail price for the two volumes, fully justified by its Sunday-best production values, renders it moreover a luxury in its own right. Rococo is synonymous after all with 18th-century luxury and elite taste, the very opposite of the “everyday”. The title of this magnificent new book- Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain-on a familiar, indeed almost clichéd subject is intriguing and intentionally paradoxical.
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