The Brock brothers of Cambridge—famous illustrators of Jane Austen, Charles Lamb and Swift, among many others—were all fond of using Georgian antiques and costume as ‘props‘ in their illustrations to canonical texts. They collected all sorts of antiques for this purpose and for all we know they may even have indulged in ‘themed ‘dinner parties on special occasions. The celebrated architect Sir Albert Richardson (1880 -1964) was another ‘old fogey‘ in this respect. His house in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, which was inherited by his grandson, Simon Houfe (b.1942), the industrious author of many reference works on book illustration, was chock full of Georgian furniture and other antiques of the period. As someone with a strong sympathy for the Georgian era, it is easy to imagine him holding ‘Georgian dinner parties‘ complete with period crockery, eating utensils, silver candlesticks and cruets, with the host dressed in a Georgian wig, tunic breeches and shoes with steel buckles.
Doubtless in an age when the Classical world was revered, there must have been many re-enactments of Roman feasts. Perhaps the architect Sir John Soane, whose house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was ( and still is ) crammed with Classical sculpture, plaster casts and Classical relics of all kinds, had dinners that celebrated the Ancient World. We now know that the Victorian architect Thomas Talbot Bury attended what his trainee, John Wornham Penfold in his diary for 1846 called a ‘ Palladian Party ‘, although it is not known whether Bury was the host or guest at this occasion.
However, accounts of such parties that celebrated the Classical world are thin on the ground (or almost unknown ) in English literature, which is a shame. In French cultural history there is at least one. A description of the ‘ Supper a la Grecque ‘, which was eaten in Paris in 1788, in the year before the Bastille fell, is taken from Austin Dobson’s inestimable Bookman’s Budget (1917), and derived from the Souvenirs of the hostess Mme Vigee-Lebrun, ‘ the artist on whose habitually informal and unpretentious receptions it was a hastily improvised reception ‘ ( Dobson).
‘ Sitting one evening in expectation of her first guests, and listening to her brother’s reading of the Abbe Barthelemy’s recently published Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grece, it presently occurred to her to give an Attic character to her little entertainment. The cook was straightaway summoned, and ordered to prepare, secundum artem, specially classic sauces 1) for the eel and pullet of the evening. Some Etruscan vases were borrowed from a compliant collector of the premises, a large screen was decorated with drapery for a background, and the earliest comers, several very pretty women, were summarily costumed a la grecque out of the studio wardrobe. Lebrune-Pindare ( the then popular poet ), arriving opportunely, was at once unpowdered , divested of his side-curls, crowned as Anacreon with a property laurel-wreath, and robes in a purple mantle belonging to the Count de Parois, the accommodating owner of the pottery. The Marquis de Cubieres, following next, was speedily Hellenized, and made to send for his guitar, which his taste for the antique has apparently already prompted him to gild like a lyre. Other guests were similarly
1) Probably some combination of grated cheese, garlic, vinegar and leek…
‘translated’. For Mme Lebrun herself, it needed but the addition of a chaplet of flowers and a veil to her customary white dress, to convert her to the Aspasia of the minute; and when at ten , M. de Vaudreuil and M. Boutin arrived for supper, they were amazed to find themselves in a company of latter-day Athenians, singing a chorus of Gluck to the accompaniment of the golden guitar of Cubuieres. A supplement had been made to the regulation bill of fare in the form of a cake confected with currants and honey; and a flask of old Cypriot wine, which had been a present, completed the illusion. Lebrune-Pindare declaimed a selection of his own translations from Anacreon, and the proceedings passed off with triumphant success. Though the hostess wisely refrained from any attempt to repeat this fortunate impromptu, her circumspection did not prevent rumour from exaggerating its details. At Versailles the ‘ supper in the manner of the Ancients’ was aid to have cost twenty thousand francs. This, on the precedent of Byrom’s “ Three Black Crows “, at Rome became forty; at Vienna , sixty; and at St Petersburg eighty thousand. Naturally, the frugal King grumbled at such reckless prodigality. But the Marquis de Cubieres, who had been present, was able to reassure him. As a matter of fact the entire expense had not exceeded fifteen francs.’
( Mme Vigee-Lebrun ‘ in Old Kensington Palace, (1910, pp 92- 94.)
R.M.Healey