How did Walt Disney learn from Ancien Régime decoration?
"Make it pink! Make it pink!” says the chubby fairy Flora, aiming her wand at Princess Aurora’s new ball gown in Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959). A few magic sparks must have fallen on the walls of Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle in Anaheim, California, which have been painted (and repainted) in several shades of cotton-candy pink since the faux fortress opened in the summer of 1955, well before the film itself was completed. Two centuries earlier, in 1757, Jean Hellot, the general inspector of the porcelain factory at Sèvres, invented the slightly deeper “rose Pompadour,” a ground color named in honor of Louis XV’s chief mistress and the factory’s most important patron. This pink appears on the scallop-patterned lids of two large Sèvres vases (c.
