Blue velvet lines the nécessaire made of bois de violette and mahogany. The contents consist of two small teacups and a teapot imported from Asia, a sugar pot, a gold box for tea leaves, a crystal flask, and two teaspoons. This exquisite service for two, which packages intimacy, luxury, and convenience in semiprecious materials, embodies the values of the Regency. Between 1715 and 1723, France was governed from Paris by the owner of this nécessaire, Philippe II d’Orléans, the nephew of Louis XIV and the granduncle of the minor king Louis XV. The subject of a recent exhibition and its resulting catalog, La Régence à Paris (1715–1723), L’aube des lumières, the Regency is probably best known to the nonspecialist as the era of Antoine Watteau, whose atmospheric fêtes galantes depicted elites conversing, dancing, and listening to music in dewy parks. This catalog, directed by the exhibition’s organizers, José de Los Lanos and Ulysse Jardat, offers a more detailed and expansive picture of the period, considering the political context as an agent rather than a mere backdrop while foregrounding architecture and the decorative arts as the site of the most sustained cultural innovations. Useful to lay readers and art historians alike, the catalog’s achievement is to show that culture flowered under the Regency not despite, but because of the period’s transitional, provisional character. The death of Louis XIV inaugurated a moment of release, encouraging hedonism and experimentation, but this was balanced against the caution inspired by the impending majority of Louis XV and the court’s return to Versailles. 

During its short tenure, the Regency saw an astonishing incidence of cultural production as well as one shocking financial catastrophe—the crash of the Scotsman John Law’s financial “system,’’ during which paper currency circulated for the first time in France. The catalog approaches the period through three axes: politics, the “renewal” of Paris and the decorative arts, and arts and literature.

For art historians, the first section, “Un Nouveau régime,” is particularly welcome for its lucid and concise description of the political and economic developments that fostered the period’s cultural production. At the heart of this section lies the Regent himself whose exceptional qualities are shown to have played an essential role in maintaining domestic stability while encouraging the flowering of the arts. A famous libertine who spent his evenings closeted with a small circle of equally debauched companions, the Regent began his career as a brilliant military commander, as Alexandre Dupilet’s essay recounts (35–37). The Regent was also a painter, accomplished enough to design and execute, along with his teacher Antoine Coypel, a cycle of twenty-five paintings for his wife’s apartments. The subjects of the cycle, the romance of the shepherdess Chloe and goat-herder Daphnis, ended with the discovery that both protagonists are the children of rich landowners—a narrative of miraculous economic transformation that anticipated the pamphlets and journal articles promoting John Law’s financial enterprises. As Arnaud Orain’s fine essay shows, this popular literature of gallant fantasy encouraged financial speculation in the name of aspirational social mobility (63–66).

The Regency was characterized by multiple centers of political and cultural power, a legacy of the fragmentation of the court during the final years of the reign of Louis XIV. The Regent’s most significant challenger was the oldest son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan, the Duc de Maine, the legitimized bastard whose significance to the period is assessed by Pierre-Louis Lesnel (72). Despite losing their status as “Princes of the Blood,” both the Duc de Maine and the Comte de Toulouse, the youngest son of Madame de Montespan and Louis XIV, commissioned elaborate campaigns of interior decoration at their respective Parisian hôtel particuliers—lavish private residences. Arnaud Manas describes the celebrated Galerie dorée, designed by Robert de Cotte and François Vassé for the Comte de Toulouse which is still in situ in what is now the Banque de France (138). While the seventeenth-century vault painted by François Perrier was left intact, Vassé designed a new setting of gilded arabesques, the motifs of which included Iroquois war clubs and wampum beads, a nod to France’s ongoing engagement in the Louisiana territories. During the Regency, close ties existed between the world of the arts and the Compagnie des Indes. In 1712, the ennobled financier Antoine Crozat, brother of the influential art collector Pierre Crozat, was given a monopoly on trade in Louisiana, a privilege that he sold to John Law in 1717, two years before the completion of the Galerie dorée.

The story of the Regency is one of Paris and of its hôtel particuliers which were fitted onto irregular urban plots—constraints that encouraged architects to innovate. These hôtels and their spectacular interiors are the subject of the catalog’s second section, “Le Renouvellement Urbain de Paris et les Arts Décoratifs,” which features substantive contributions by Nicolas Courtin, Isabelle Dérens, and Jardat. Courtin explains that at the Palais Royal, the seat of the Regent, Gilles Marie Oppenord designed an oval “Italian salon” to finesse the fact that the gallery and the grand appartement were in separate wings (140). Instead of calling for a ninety-degree turn, the oval salon enabled a flowing movement between the spaces. This minimal alteration yielded a plethora of results: the curved form went on to entirely infiltrate interior decoration and architecture, a process enabled by the medium of printed ornament as well as what Jardat calls the “oralité des ateliers” (144). Modest, yet responsive inventions are typical of how the period’s style moved towards the full-fledged rocaille while maintaining an interest in classical simplicity and harmony. What was left more decisively behind was classical pomp—not even the grandest Parisian interiors could support the scale of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. A crucial innovation, also implemented at the Palais Royal, was the creation of suites of “petits appartements.” The previous century’s “grands appartements” were designed for large receptions and public parades—the kind of bedrooms where a king could be born while the entire court watched. The petits appartements offered cozy luxury and most importantly, privacy. It was to such a suite of rooms that the Regent retreated in the evenings, accompanied by his friends and lovers.

The catalog’s third section, “Les Arts, Les lettres et des idées,” feels less robust. Although works by Charles-Antoine Coypel, Alexis Grimou, and Jacques Autreau are reproduced throughout the catalog, little substantive commentary is offered on these works that tantalize with a wealth of detail and fresh coloring. In the works of Grimou and Autreau, portraiture slides into genre painting, while occasionally stumbling into a stiff, rather naïve figural idiom. But Grimou’s Le Marquis d’Artaguiette en buveur (1720) is a delight, attesting to the influence of Flemish and Italian naturalism in a palette of browns, whites, and pinks which looks forward to Chardin (199). Grimou’s rendering of Artaguiette’s rosy cheeks and powdery white wig also recalls how pastellists like Rosalba Carriera handled “carnations.” Attesting to the richness of artistic exchange in this period of cosmopolitanism and rising (as well as falling) fortunes, Valentine Toutain-Quittelier’s essay notes the importance of Carriera’s visit to Paris in 1721 as well as the role played by the “Venetian” party in the development of painting during the Regency (192).

The volume is beautifully illustrated, which is a great boon given that paintings from this period, except for the works of Watteau, are too rarely reproduced. At intervals, the catalog offers sequences of luscious full-page details that bleed to the edge of the page. These sequences, which are captioned at the end of the section, allow for fascinating and informative juxtapositions. A sheet of grotesques (ca. 1715) by Jean-Bernard Toro, an influential decorator, is placed opposite Sebastiano Ricci’s reception piece, La France, sous les traits de Minerve, terrasse l’Ignorance et protège les Arts (1718) (148–49). While Toro’s design offers the conventional aerated forms of the grotesque as it tips towards the arabesque, with expressive masks placed atop slender pediments and elongated acanthus strapwork, Ricci’s oil painting is fully fleshed in vivid jewel tones. Both works, however, offer the lightness, playfulness, and sensuality that mark the shift in the period’s style, from grandeur to luxury, from the coldness of marble to the warmth of gilded wood.

The catalog leans into how the Regency was multiple, faceted, and of both the past and the future at once. By actively performing his role as a placeholder, the Regent enabled innovation and experimentation in the realm of the arts and finance—people lost their shirts during the Regency, but many prospered in a way hitherto unimaginable. It seems fitting that the catalog’s final essay by Anne Dion-Tenenbaum is about the extraordinarily large diamond extracted in India weighing 140.64 modern carats in its cut state, which the Regent purchased from Thomas Pitt. No other European monarchs would touch it, but the Regent bought it to grace the garments of Louis XV at the crucial moments of his youthful reign: when he received the Turkish ambassador in 1721, when he met his betrothed, and of course at his coronation. This extraordinary jewel, with its many facets embodying the multiplicity and the complexity of its period, was named upon its purchase, Le Régent.