The Déjeuner Culture et récolte du cacao

Known as the Culture et récolte du cacao , the set features an unusual decorative theme ornamented with “Mexican” borders on the tray, coffee pot, milk jug, and sugar bowl. This chapter suggests that such regressive topoi play out in two ways. First, the visual themes tied to cocoa invoke a civilizing mission of cultivation in the colonies that first came to prominence during the early modern period in the “discovery” of the New World. Second, and perhaps less immediately apparent, is Develly's regression to compositional strategies and rococo pictorial idioms associated with the French ancien régime. Together, these created what has been evocatively described as a “colonial reverie,” where the colonies were nostalgically pictured as a fruitful and productive landscape ripe for conquering. Such a reverie contrasted with, but was inseparable from, Louis-Philippe's difficulty “taming” the fraught politics of domestic France through his juste milieu policies.