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WHITENESS
Amelia Rauser
Description: The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
NEOCLASSICAL DRESS wasn’t always white. Sometimes women wore dyed muslin tunics over their white chemises, or chose textiles embroidered with colored threads and spangles or printed with small figures made in a new industrial roller-printing process...
Author
Amelia Rauser
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2020 The Author
Related print edition pages: pp.125-130
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338.8
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23225
Chapter subject tags:Dress, NeoclassicalCostume--History--18th century
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WHITENESS
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Description: La Phrase changée. (Robe croisée) by Unknown
La Phrase changée. Robe croisée, from Modes et manières du jour, 1799–1800. Hand-colored etching, 19.1 × 12.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Neoclassical dress wasn’t always white. Sometimes women wore dyed muslin tunics over their white chemises, or chose textiles embroidered with colored threads and spangles or printed with small figures made in a new industrial roller-printing process. Sometimes gowns were made in colored or striped silks, often remade from an older gown, as with this red damask dress (fig. 108), carefully pieced and recut to create the fashionable new shape. Accessories such as hats, shawls, ribbons, and gloves were often colorful. But looking for these exceptions proves the rule: neoclassical dress was overwhelmingly, distinctively, white.
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Description: Dress by Unknown
Fig. 108. Red and gold silk dress, 1790s. French. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
In many neoclassical ensembles, the whiteness of the textile was augmented by white embroidery (fig. 109). White-on-white embellishment ornamented hems with borders or articulated the textile field with tiny florets or sprigs. Usually such embroidery was completed in India, with antique or vegetal motifs intended for the export market. When gowns were made up from this yardage in Britain, Germany, or France, domestic seamstresses might add white-embroidered buttons or decorative accents on a sleeve, or mimic the original embroidery to match a pattern or make a repair. The white-on-white of neoclassical dress provided visual interest and articulation while maintaining the matte, unified, formalist effect that was key to the dress’s visual logic.
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Description: Evening dress by Unknown
Fig. 109. White cotton dress with cotton embroidery (detail), ca. 1804–5. Indian textile; dress fabricated in France. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
White became a fashionable color in the 1780s when it was associated with the pastoral robe en chemise, and then, too, it was a reaction against the extravagantly embroidered and woven silks that had dominated fashionable dress to that point.1Ribeiro 1995, pp. 70–72. By the mid-1790s, white was not assumed, but asserted, as in this caption for a June 1795 fashion plate in Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion, which uses the word six times:
Two white ostrich feathers, and one white feather d’esprit on the right side. Robe of fine lawn, the bottom embroidered in white; long sleeves, trimmed at the wrists with lace . . . Ruff of white blonde lace round the neck. Medallion suspended by a white riband. Diamond ear-rings. White gloves and shoes.2Ladies in the Great Concert Room, in Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion, June 1795.
The watercolorist of the illustrative print has toned the shadows and details a bit with gray, but otherwise the only hints of color are in the subject’s bright green fan, the faintest pink of her cheek, and the portrait miniature of a man that hangs around her neck (fig. 110). Compared with that tiny painted likeness, she is a ghostly wraith, with no distinction between the white cotton of her dress, the white leather of her gloves, and the white flesh of her bosom on which the portrait rests.
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Description: Ladies in the Great Concert Room, detail by Unknown
Fig. 110. Ladies in the Great Concert Room, fig. 36 (detail), from Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion, June 1795. Hand-colored etching and engraving, 34 × 26.5 cm. Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale University
The transparency of fine muslin could be deployed in thin layers over the arms or breast to whiten the body, creating an intermediate tone between the flat white of the garment and the color of the wearer’s skin. This gave a sense of a living statue’s metamorphosis, gradually warming—or cooling—before one’s eyes. Yet artists varied in their treatment of such effects, sometimes seeming to emphasize the living flesh beneath the muslin, as in Young Woman in White (fig. 111), and other times the way muslin seemed to turn the flesh to stone, as in Thomas Lawrence’s Sally Siddons (fig. 112)—showing a young woman who, perhaps not coincidentally, was dying from consumption at the time of this portrait.3See Day and Rauser 2016, pp. 467–9.
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Description: Portrait of a Young Woman in White, detail by Unknown
Fig. 111. Unknown, Portrait of a Young Woman in White (detail), ca. 1798. Oil on canvas, 125.5 × 95 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
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Description: Portrait of Sally Siddons, detail by Lawrence, Thomas
Fig. 112. Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Sally Siddons (detail), ca. 1790s. Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Private collection
Whiteness was also central to neoclassical aesthetics. Johann Joachim Winckelmann argued in his influential History of Ancient Art of 1764:
Color . . . should have but little share in our consideration of beauty, because the essence of beauty consists, not in color, but in shape, and on this point enlightened minds will at once agree. As white is the color which reflects the greatest number of rays of light, and consequently is the most easily perceived, a beautiful body will, accordingly, be the more beautiful the whiter it is . . .4Winckelmann 1972 [1764], pp. 118–19.
Indeed, ideal beauty, Winckelmann argued, was like pure water, “drawn from the spring itself; the less taste it has, the more healthful it is considered, because free from all foreign admixture.”5Winckelmann 1972 [1764], pp. 118–19. A rhetoric of purity and austerity thus attended the elevation of neoclassical aesthetics and its rejection of riotous color. Indeed, color had been dismissed as shallow and superficial by Western philosophers for centuries.6Lichtenstein 1993 and Batchelor 2000. For Enlightenment aesthetic philosophers, whiteness was healthy, enlightened, beautiful, and free of “foreign admixture.” White clothing thus allowed the wearer to align herself with the most elevated and prestigious aesthetic discourses of her era.
Whiteness was the beauty ideal not only for neoclassical gowns, but for the body and skin as well. A white mask of cosmetic face paint, or blanc, had long been the norm for formally dressed ladies in the eighteenth century, but in the 1790s the deliberate artifice of the white mask was supplanted by a desire for a “natural” whiteness without additional coloring.7On the changes in cosmetic practices over the eighteenth century, see Martin 2009; on the cultural meanings of cosmetics and their deep connection to artistic practices, see Hyde 2000 and 2006, and Fend 2017. “Rouge is no longer used; pallor is more interesting,” wrote one commentator in 1804; “The ladies only use the blanc, and leave the rouge to the men.”8“On ne met plus de rouge, la pâleur est plus intéressante. . . . Les dames ne se servent plus que de blanc, et laissent le rouge aux hommes.” Kotzebue 1805, p. 281. Beauty, by Francesco Bartolozzi after G. B. Cipriani (fig. 113), features a nude woman whose whiteness is lighter than the cloud she sits on, emblematized by the lily she holds—an oft-invoked allegory for an enviably pale complexion. Her companion, the majestic and colorful peacock, provides the foil for Beauty’s whiteness.
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Description: Beauty by Bartolozzi, Francesco
Fig. 113. Francesco Bartolozzi after G. B. Cipriani, Beauty, 1783. Stipple and etching printed in reddish-brown ink, 25.3 × 19.1 cm. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
The pallor of fashion leader Madame Tallien was renowned, and thematized in a drawing by Jean-Baptiste Isabey (fig. 114). Described by one memoirist as “a beautiful statue” with “a neck round and polished like ivory, her beautiful face of an animated white without apparent colors,” Tallien is here seated on a stone bench in a garden, analogized both to nature and to classical sculpture.9“. . . son col rond et poli comme de l’ivoire, son beau visage d’un blanc animé sans couleurs apparentes . . .” Abrantès 1838, p. 142. Drawn with pencil and heightened with gouache, the drawing is colorless, yet rich in shadow and contour. The leafy foliage behind her head echoes the shape of her curled hair, while the white hollyhocks at the left border are visually linked with the strokes of white gouache on her bodice and the rounded forms of her bare breast. Yet her body is also rhymed with the sculptures in the garden, and the drape of her skirt is identical in both shape and pattern to that of the statue perched on the plinth behind her. She is a statue who has stepped off the pedestal: transparent in dress and pure in body, artlessly natural even as she embodies the grace of classical art. The skimpiness of her costume clings and reveals, making it absolutely clear that her body is whole, coherent, complete, and colorless.
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Description: Portrait of Thérésa Tallien as a Muse of Poetry by Isabey, Jean-Baptiste
Fig. 114. Jean-Baptiste Isabey, Portrait of Theresa Tallien as a Muse of Poetry, ca. 1800. Pencil and wash heightened with gouache, 64.5 × 48.8 cm. Private collection
The whiteness of neoclassical dress participated in evolving understandings of color and race in the late eighteenth century.10For an introduction to this important and growing field, with a special attention to visual culture, see Bindman 2002, Painter 2010, Lafont 2017, Fend 2017, and Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal 2016. Narratives that explained human variety were changing rapidly. Earlier accounts explained different body colors as colored saps visible beneath a transparent skin, changeable according to geographic location and exposure to the sun or other stimulants.11See Fend 2017, pp. 146–7. But as the transatlantic slave trade intensified, European explanations for variety increasingly taxonomized humans by racial type, with the color of the skin as the most salient discriminatory detail. In 1792, the physician and social reformer Benjamin Rush attributed black skin to endemic leprosy—a condition which also made black people less sensitive, less able to receive and process sensory information about the world.12Smith 2006, pp. 17–18. By the late 1790s, racialized taxonomies had begun to harden, and whiteness was constructed as naturally superior.
Even abolitionist imagery often exaggerated racial differences, using a heightened consciousness of race to appeal to white people’s pity and charity.13See Gamer 2012 and Gikandi 2011 on the ways even abolitionism often depended on a heightened sense of racial difference. Sympathetic accounts of slavery’s horrors also shaded easily into exploitative eroticism; see Wood 2002. An abolitionist mezzotint from 1796 (fig. 115) shows a white woman, barefoot and clad in a thin, white, muslin dress, bringing a little water in her cupped hands to a suffering dark-skinned man who kneels in supplication. His posture quotes the famous abolitionist emblem designed by Josiah Wedgwood and reproduced widely in the eighteenth century (fig. 116). Everything about the slave figure is in contrast to the woman: male against female, black against white, low against high, passive against active. While the woman’s bodily contour is clearly visible, her body is nonetheless glossed by the meanings of neoclassical dress as cultured, artistic, and refined; by contrast the slave is naked rather than nude, in a state of nature without the veneer of art. A strong whiff of eroticism pervades their encounter, familiar in slave narratives if a bit unusual in this gender inversion.14Wood 2002 argues that a pornographic element pervades plantation and even abolition narratives in the period. This print presents the suffering slave in need of assistance from a white savior, who uses the associations of neoclassical dress—its virtue, aestheticism, sensibility, and refinement—to justify her actions.
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Description: Untitled by Say, William
Fig. 115. William Say, Untitled, 1796. Mezzotint, 50 × 40 cm. British Museum, London
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Description: Antislavery Medallion by Hackwood, William
Fig. 116. Josiah Wedgwood, Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, ca. 1790. Unglazed stoneware, white with black clay, 2.9 × 2.7 cm. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, VA
Yet during this decade of flux and formation, racialized whiteness did not necessarily map directly onto classicism. Although some scholars presume a kind of indexicality between the white male Enlightenment, the white marble sculptures they revered, and the asserted cultural superiority of Europe and its appropriated classical inheritance, in fact classicism, as we have already seen in women’s embrace of the neopagan bacchante, was also associated with a version of primitivism and naturalism in the eighteenth century.15For example, Lafont 2017, p. 110, states that the antique Greek male sculpture was the idealistic model for White Man and the basis for judging all hierarchies. By contrast, Bindman 2002, p. 92, argues that the utopianism of neoclassicism was at least theoretically separate from its whiteness. I do not think classicism/ neoclassicism’s whiteness was completely mapped onto racialized whiteness during the eighteenth century, but rather that this was an area of acute cultural contestation in the 1790s, in which women in neoclassical dress participated. This left uncertainty around who, exactly, were the true heirs to classical beauty, liberty, and virtue. Neoclassical dress engaged with this debate, as we shall see in Chapter Four, at times defining its wearers’ superiority by contrasting their whiteness with abject blackness, and other times disentangling whiteness from classical virtue and undermining the supposed binary nature of race, engaging instead with a spectrum of embodiment. Indeed, the mutability inherent in the idea of the living statue continually problematized, even as it engaged with, the concept of race.
 
1     Ribeiro 1995, pp. 70–72. »
2     Ladies in the Great Concert Room, in Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion, June 1795. »
3     See Day and Rauser 2016, pp. 467–9. »
4     Winckelmann 1972 [1764], pp. 118–19. »
5     Winckelmann 1972 [1764], pp. 118–19. »
6     Lichtenstein 1993 and Batchelor 2000. »
7     On the changes in cosmetic practices over the eighteenth century, see Martin 2009; on the cultural meanings of cosmetics and their deep connection to artistic practices, see Hyde 2000 and 2006, and Fend 2017. »
8     “On ne met plus de rouge, la pâleur est plus intéressante. . . . Les dames ne se servent plus que de blanc, et laissent le rouge aux hommes.” Kotzebue 1805, p. 281. »
9     “. . . son col rond et poli comme de l’ivoire, son beau visage d’un blanc animé sans couleurs apparentes . . .” Abrantès 1838, p. 142. »
10     For an introduction to this important and growing field, with a special attention to visual culture, see Bindman 2002, Painter 2010, Lafont 2017, Fend 2017, and Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal 2016. »
11     See Fend 2017, pp. 146–7. »
12     Smith 2006, pp. 17–18. »
13     See Gamer 2012 and Gikandi 2011 on the ways even abolitionism often depended on a heightened sense of racial difference. Sympathetic accounts of slavery’s horrors also shaded easily into exploitative eroticism; see Wood 2002. »
14     Wood 2002 argues that a pornographic element pervades plantation and even abolition narratives in the period. »
15     For example, Lafont 2017, p. 110, states that the antique Greek male sculpture was the idealistic model for White Man and the basis for judging all hierarchies. By contrast, Bindman 2002, p. 92, argues that the utopianism of neoclassicism was at least theoretically separate from its whiteness. I do not think classicism/ neoclassicism’s whiteness was completely mapped onto racialized whiteness during the eighteenth century, but rather that this was an area of acute cultural contestation in the 1790s, in which women in neoclassical dress participated. »