13 January 2011

Get Inspired: Madame de Pompadour

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, painted around 1756 by François Boucher. This famous portrait of Louis XV's influential mistress is in the collection of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Germany.

"She had a horror of common or banal objects, or ones that were often copied, with fashionable motifs; if a piece of furniture was to please her it must be unique of its sort; the same applied to all her upholstery and hangings, always specially woven for her."

SOURCE: Nancy Mitford, Madame de Pompadour (New York Review Books, 2001), page 158.