Afterword

Ribeiro, Aileen

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Afterword

Aileen Ribeiro

The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750 to 1820

~Dress is not a profound art. It is functional and it can delight the senses, but in itself it cannot express the complex human emotions that are revealed in such arts as literature, music and painting. No one would disagree with Hazlitt in his judgement...

Author

Aileen Ribeiro

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00308.6

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22506

Afterword

Dress is not a profound art. It is functional and it can delight the senses, but in itself it cannot express the complex human emotions that are revealed in such arts as literature, music and painting. No one would disagree with Hazlitt in his judgement that ‘those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress’. It is easy to laugh at clothing that to our eyes looks grotesque and vulgar, and distorts the shape of the body; what we are criticising, of course, is not the dress itself, which is inanimate, but those who wear it and what we think it signifies about them – we make value judgements largely based on visual evidence. Dress can become a laughing matter when we think it departs from a sense of harmony and proportion, when we feel it becomes exaggerated and no longer related to the natural shape; this is true of certain periods in the history of dress when artifice prevails over ‘classical’ restraint. ‘Du sublime au ridicule, il n’y a qu’un pas’ was Napoleon’s comment on the retreat from Moscow, but what can apply to the rapid changes of Fortune’s wheel in politics can equally be relevant to costume as when, over a short period of time, the supremely elegant styles of the last years of the ancien régime became – under the disintegrating forces of the French Revolution – the caricatured extremes of the costume of the incroyables and the revealing toilettes of the merveilleuses. In a period of volatile political upheaval, with explicit and implicit rules about dress and manners discarded, it was perhaps natural that critics focused on such a visible sign of the times; clothing was in many ways the visualisation of political concepts and social change. Delécluze was right to point out that costume was ‘un objet sérieux d’études’, because ‘il précède ordinairement un changement ou au moins une modification importante dans les moeurs’.1Delécluze (1863), p. 136. As has been seen, in the decade leading up to the Revolution dress was becoming simpler and more ‘democratic’, a tendency that political events furthered, not just in France but all over Europe. In the same way, in the early nineteenth century contemporaries noted that fashion was beginning to move from its self-denying ordinances, from its politically motivated austerity, towards greater luxury – particularly with regard to women’s dress – which indicated a general revival in the fortunes of monarchy, a tendency to be confirmed by the post-Napoleonic peace congresses.

However, intelligent men and women were aware that new political ideals and the consequent years of European war had created a very different society from that of the eighteenth century. Lady Susan O’Brien, writing in her old age, recalled the changes between 1760, when ‘great civility was general in all ranks’, and 1818, when she discerned ‘a certain rudeness or carelessness of manners affected both by men and women’; as to politics, ‘the topic is become universal’.2The Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox 1745–1826, ed. Countess of Ilchester and Lord Stavordale, 2 vols, London, 1901, II, pp. 291–3. How familiar this lament would be to people who had lived through any tumultuous event in history that seemed to create a sharp break with the reassurance of the past. Such a brave new world could appear so contemptuously dismissive of the complicated apparatus of etiquette, manners and dress which had evolved over a long period of time. The change from the stylish certainties of the ancien régime to the brashness of post-revolutionary society must have seemed startling and unnerving, particularly when coupled with the longer-term economic and social upheavals of what was beginning to be perceived by the end of the period as an industrial revolution. Taking the place of the unspoken sumptuary rules of the eighteenth century, based on a seemingly immutable system of privilege and luxury, was a new sartorial language (particularly for men), in which the worlds of ability (of all kinds) and industry were reflected. In France dress became politicised through symbolic affiliations; the State made use of costume both as propaganda and to reinforce its identity and authority in a more obvious way than had been the case before. Politics also served to make dress more ‘modern’, to make it relevant to a society where the leitmotiv seemed to be constant change.

The inter-relationship between dress and art has been one of the themes in this book; their elective affinities – a mutual necessity and attraction – have been reinforced not least because both communicate by sight. Walter Vaughan pointed out in his Essay Philosophical (1792) that artists would ‘agree that the Excellence of a Picture or Statue is more certainly proved by the Impression it makes upon the Senses than by comparing its several Dimensions’.3Vaughan (1792), p. 22. So with dress, it is through the senses, especially sight with all its interpretative connotations, that we perceive and appreciate it, rather than through the craft of its construction. A portrait represents the joint contributions of artist, sitter and costume; in this context clothes can reveal character, both heroic and mundane, and all the frailities of human nature, including vanity and pretention. A painting can take the form of an almost photographic record of the person, warts and all, with minute attention to the details of the costume, or it can be a more subtle concept in which, in the words of Fuseli, ‘Historic Invention administers to Truth’, that is, where the artist uses his poetic imagination rather than sticking to the reality of facts. Of course the society artist had often to compromise – flattering his clients without being too obsequiously far from the truth. When, in Venice in 1750, Nattier was asked by Casanova how he managed to make the plain Mesdames de France (the daughters of Louis XV) look like Aspasias (the beautiful mistress of Pericles), the artist replied, ‘c’est une magie que le dieu de goût fait passer de mon esprit au bout de mes pinceaux’.4Quoted in Paris (1984), p. 334.

Good taste (however defined) and the importance of rules in art contributed to the conformity of much eighteenth-century portraiture; where dress was concerned it proved quite difficult to meet the expectations of critics that the general idea should be incorporated with the particular to bring out the individuality of the sitter. When, by the early nineteenth century, the stranglehold of fanciful dress in portraits – for example, Nattier’s royal and noble patrons in mythological guise, Hudson’s solid English gentry as van Dyckian courtiers and Reynolds’s ladies in their ‘timeless’ draperies – had been largely discarded, it became easier to concentrate on the character of the sitter, something facilitated by simpler styles of dress for men and women.

This book should end with a confession of sins of omission. Apart from the self-evident fact that the topic chosen is vast (my excuse would be that I have dealt with various aspects of the dress of this period elsewhere and from a somewhat different angle), I am particularly conscious that I have tended to concentrate on portraiture to the exclusion of much history painting that merits discussion from the point of view of dress. There is also a danger, at times, of treating artists as though they are being deliberately wilful in their neglect of accurate costume in history painting in particular, but also with regard to fashionable portraiture in general. Mea culpa. Part of the problem arises from the limited information available on the preparations and intentions of artists, and on the contribution made by their sitters to the dress in a painting.

My intention has been to try and analyse a range of works of art by looking at the different ways in which dress is depicted; ‘without truth of costume’, claimed Thomas Hope, ‘the story cannot be clearly told . . .the picture must ever remain a riddle’.5T. Hope, Costume of the Ancients, London, 1809, p. 5. While telling the story of dress, albeit in a simplified form with the image as the starting point, this book is mainly designed to aid the understanding and appreciation of costume in art, to further what Ramsay in his Dialogue on Taste (1755) calls, ‘the discovery of truth and the just relation of things’.

1 Delécluze (1863), p. 136. »

2 The Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox 1745–1826, ed. Countess of Ilchester and Lord Stavordale, 2 vols, London, 1901, II, pp. 291–3. »

3 Vaughan (1792), p. 22. »

4 Quoted in Paris (1984), p. 334. »

5 T. Hope, Costume of the Ancients, London, 1809, p. 5. »

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