Luxury After The Terror

When Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21, 1793, the king’s death was to mark the physical end of the monarchy in France and sever the vast networks of luxury that had provided splendor and sophistication to the royal court. Even as the king’s royal possessions – from drapery and tableware to clocks and porcelain devices – were dispersed and destroyed, many of the individuals responsible for creating these forms of material finery found ways to survive regime change and the turbulent circumstances of the Terror.

Iris Moon will explore a biscuit, or unglazed porcelain sculpture, that depicts an allegory of Nature, and what it can tell us about luxury’s role in negotiating the complex politics of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Recently acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, La Nature was designed by Louis Simon Boizot and made of hard-paste porcelain at the Sèvres porcelain manufactory in 1794. It depicts the goddess Cybele in the guise of Nature, nursing a black child and a white child. The subject matter is an incredibly rare example of a Sèvres porcelain sculpture that commemorated the revolutionary government’s abolition of slavery. Iris explores how porcelain was used to reimagine the image of nature during a turbulent moment, as Sèvres adopted new aesthetics and iconographies that sought to respond to the swiftly changing political circumstances of the French Revolution. This talk situates French porcelain within the broader context of luxury during the Revolution, recently explored in the book, Luxury after the Terror (2022).

*Entrée Libre: free entry for students with ID

About Iris Moon

Iris Moon is an associate curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alongside curatorial work at The Met, where she is currently organizing the exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, she has taught at The Cooper Union. She is the author of Melancholy Wedgwood (2024), Luxury after the Terror (2022) and co-editor with Richard Taws of Time, Media and Visuality in Post- Revolutionary France (2021).