RSVP: info@historiccoralgables.org
Free to Members. $20 Non-members. Join the Historic Preservation Association for its annual meeting and social. French fare and wine to celebrate Marie Antoinette’s birthday. Antoinette felt obliged to escape the tedious formalities of court life until the French Revolution put an abrupt end to the Queen’s bucolic reveries. Special guest, art historian, and lecturer Juan P. Lluria will share his knowledge and enthusiasm on Marie Antoinette and the fine arts and decorative arts of 18th Century France.

Event will be hosted by the Palace Coral Gables. Time from 6.30 to 9pm

About Juan P. Lluria

Juan P Lluria is a locally based art historian who is a University of Miami graduate and since 1984 has been a appraiser, consultant, private broker of fine art and antiques. He is president of Lluria Fine Arts Services LLC and certified on the highest levels as an appraiser of general fine residential contents with the prestigious American Association of Appraisers in New York.
Juan’s specialized area of interest and study has long been the fine arts and decorative arts of 18th Century France and Continental Europe with a related focus on the decorative arts of 18th Century Sweden on which he will be speaking today and sharing his contagious enthusiasm.
Juan has been a frequent lecturer this past years at various Miami Museums and cultural organizations, including Vizcaya, The Lowe Art Museum, The Wolfsonian, The Bass Museum and the Alliance Francaise… He has also been a frequent lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute in New York and the Institute of Fine Art in Minneapolis where the same lecture he is sharing today he was also invited there. Most recently, he was invited by Kip Forbes to speak in New York to a private evening to entertain the major donors to The American Friends of the Louvre.

About Marie Antoinette

At a time when fashion and decoration set the tone and absorbed the attention of society more than politics and economics, it isn’t surprising that the first priority of Marie Antoinette was to be queen of fashion. The controversial wife of Louis XVI was often resented for her interference in politics, her disregard for Court protocol, her limitless spending and her blatant favourtism. At the same
time she had enormous charisma and undeniable charm. She exercised an influence on
French styles that was genuinely creative.

Thanks to the Queen’s passion for clothes, and her protection of the leading Parisian modiste,
Rose Bertin, fashion became a French institution. And, at a time when décor was raised to a
fine art form which was universally admired, Marie Antoinette was the most discerning of
patrons for whom the greatest artisans and ébénistes of the day produced some of the finest
examples of French furniture and objects d’art in the elegant Neo-Classical Style. Yet, like many of her fashionable contemporaries Marie Antoinette felt obliged to escape the tedious formalities of court life. Bored by constraints, she promoted informality in dress and escaped frequently to her private retreat of Petit Trianon. Here she and her friends could revel in a stylized version of country life in the English garden and its adjoining picturesque farm village until the French Revolution put an abrupt end to the Queen’s bucolic reveries.