Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV

Interpreting the Art of Elegance

Kathryn Norberg, Sandra Rosenbaum, Kathryn Norberg, Sandra Rosenbaum

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780896728585
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Between 1678 and 1710, Parisian presses printed hundreds of images of elegantly attired men and women dressed in the latest mode, and posed to display every detail of their clothing and accessories. Long used to illustrate dress of the period, these fashion prints have been taken at face value and used uncritically. Drawing on perspectives from art history, costume history, French literature, museum conservation and theatrical costuming, the essays in this volume explore what the prints represent and what they reveal about fashion and culture in the seventeenth century. With more than one hundred illustrations, Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV constitutes not only an innovative analysis of fashion engravings, but also one of the most comprehensive collections of seventeenth-century fashion images 04 Activeable in print.

Part One

The Fashion Print

Chapter One

The Fashion Print: An Ambiguous Object

Françoise Tétart-Vittu

Translated by Kathryn Norberg

The engraved and illuminated prints of fashionable people found in the LACMA Recueil and other collections are usually placed chronologically between the sixteenth-century prints of national or regional dress and the first fashion journals of the eighteenth century (like the Gallerie des modes and the magazines published by Esnault and Rapilly or their competitor Basset after 1778). Traditionally, the seventeenth-century images are considered forerunners of a new kind of publication, the illustrated fashion journal, which would only come into being more than a century later, in November 1785 with the Cabinet des modes, the first fashion magazine with a printed text accompanied by illustrations.

The seventeenth-century print is an unstable object in two ways: materially (the plate can be manipulated and prints can differ between one strike and the next, and elements in the background or the figure can be added or dropped); and in its interpretation (the accompanying text or caption can alter or obscure the meaning and purpose of the image, making it hard to interpret).

In this article, I want to place the seventeenth-century fashion print within the context of print production under Louis XIV, and describe the milieu in which prints were made. A study of the material object and the conditions of its creation can shed light on our assumptions about the kinds of information provided by the print. Because all these fashion prints were destined to be sold and were reproduced only if they could bring a profit, we can learn or infer from the print something about the audience for which they were designed. I will say very little about the clothing in these images because other contributors to this volume address this issue.

The Fashion Print as Document

For much of fashion history, the seventeenth-century fashion print is a document—an illustration of a dress or suit—that requires no explanation and receives no analysis of the images’ function or utilization. In the general costume histories, the image is a piece of information to which selections from literary texts are added. In this context, the image stands in for the lack of authentic clothing from this era. It is true that the authentic garments are few in number and dispersed. The images, however, are easily available and are considered by scholars completely reliable and meaningful in a way that Louis XIV's contemporaries might not have understood. For many fashion historians, the fashion prints constitute an indisputable and accurate reflection of a particular garment. This is a grave and unforgiveable error: we know that even photography is no reflection of the truth, that with retouching it can produce an untrue image and can convey an ambiguous message.

I would say that the seventeenth-century fashion print is a document that provides a selection of information about clothing to different individuals who are interested in fashion history for different reasons. Let us not forget that the first goal of these prints was to provide information to artists (Rubens owned collections of prints of historic costumes) and this continued to be the goal of the fashion collections published in England by Strutt (1776) or Planché (1834).¹ In the nineteenth century, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79), architect and promoter of a particular conception of the historical decorative arts, worked with fashion prints but stopped in the Renaissance. Auguste Racinet (1825–93), engraver of historical documents and author of the encyclopedia of the costume arts entitled Le costume historique (1874–87) also intended to provide images for artists.² The last to provide examples of clothing to artists was Maurice Leloir (1853–1940) who compiled an encyclopedia of costume inspired by Viollet-le-Duc based upon authentic garments. Portions of this book appear in his Dictionnaire du costume, written between 1935 and 1940. While providing an impressive bibliography, all of these authors had as their principal goal to furnish examples of historical costumes to artists in imitation of similar books on furniture and the decorative arts.

In contrast, costume specialists have considered the fashion prints as a kind of chronicle of fashion, even as models for seventeenth-century men and women who followed fashion. This was the position of fashion historian Jules-Étienne Quicherat in 1850–51 and dress specialists François Boucher and Gustave-Georges Toudouze as late as 1950–60.³ They used the series of fashion prints without second thought as a kind of chronological frieze or picture of fashion without ever wondering about the type of image they were using.

Are more recent historians of the fashion print any more trustworthy? Let us take the two best known examples: J. L. Nevinson, who wrote “L’origine de la gravure de mode” in 1955 during the first congress of fashion historians held in Venice; and Raymond Gaudriault, whose Répertoire de la gravure de mode française des origines à 1815 appeared in 1988.⁴ Both provide a list of printers and publishers of fashion prints from the rue Saint Jacques and we learn little more about the process by which the fashion print came to be.

Nevinson traces quickly a chronological summary of the costume prints since the sixteenth century without considering how the production of such images was constrained by the technology of etching. He then compares these images to those in the Mercure galant but without taking into account the various problems encountered by its editor, Jean Donneau de Visé (1638–1710), who had to contend with the bitter quarrels over privileges between different guilds. Nevertheless we must applaud Nevinson's willingness to have reservations when it comes to interpreting the prints: “one can wonder,” he states, “if the books of costumes like those of Vecellio were ever used by fashionable women as patterns.”⁵ And we have to admit that at the time he wrote he did not possess the knowledge we have today of the reception and the material history of the printed image.

As for Gaudriault, he aimed only to create a repertoire of prints for collectors. His book is very useful and accessible to connoisseurs of eighteenth-century fashion prints.⁶ But for the seventeenth-century prints, Gaudriault is very disappointing. He is less precise than the inventory of the Fonds français of the Bibliothèque nationale and separates portraits en mode (portraits of court figure in fashionable clothes) from “fashion engravings” according to vague criteria based principally on the captions. Since a print might be captioned “a woman of quality in a summer dress” at one time and then at another “Elisabeth Charlotte de Bavière, Madame duchesse d’Orléans,” we know that the captions are not reliable. More worrisome, in La gravure de mode feminine, Gaudriault makes an error all too common in traditional scholarship. He assumes that seventeenth-century readers utilized the fashion prints like nineteenth-century readers. Citing Antony Valabrègue (1891) on Bosse, Gaudriault writes, “a gentleman or a lady had only to leaf through this series (of prints) in order to learn how to dress in the latest Parisian fashion.” Or he cites André Blum (1924) who claims that “the seventeenth-century ladies looked for engravings of fashionable dresses.”⁷ These nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors were used to seeing ladies seated in libraries perusing costume collections for historic touches to add to their masquerade gowns. They probably assumed that seventeenth-century fashion collections were used by court ladies in the same way.

The So-Called Fashion Engraving in Print Production

It seems logical to begin an analysis of the fashion print with the milieu in which it was produced. In this second half of the seventeenth century, we are dealing with an image produced by etching and eventually engraving, classed in the category semi-fine always in quarto or small folio format. Merchants referred to any print this size as MODES.⁸ “This expression is used in the paint and gilding shops on the Pont Notre Dame and the Quai de Gesvres and it is used to refer not only to prints which represent different French fashions but also to the frames in cedar, black wood, chestnut, and other woods that surrounded these same prints. The frames called ‘fashion frames’ are 10 inches 9 lines high by 7 inches 4 lines large.”⁹ This explains why the print inventories use the strange expression “saints en modes” or “saints in fashionable clothes,” which actually means saints in fashion-sized frames.

To locate the fashion print in the world of engravers and publishers (called print merchants in the seventeenth century), we must begin with the designer who was frequently also the engraver. This is the case with the prints of Robert Bonnart and Jean Bérain. We know that family businesses make the attribution of prints to a specific member of the family difficult.¹⁰ Most of the designers of prints were engravers who reproduced paintings for publishers who also sold paintings and drawings from the king's art collections (Cabinet du Roy) or exhibitions of the Academy of Saint Luc. The engravers who reproduced paintings and drawings exercised a guild-free or open profession, but these engravers were nonetheless frequently in conflict with the guilds of book sellers and printers, painters, and etchers.¹¹

Do the Original Drawings of These Engravings Depict Fashions of the Time?

We still have a certain number of fashion drawings from the seventeenth century, but they pose problems. They were sometimes created before and sometimes after the engraving. When created after, the drawings served as models for new engraving or painting. We know what happened to Abraham Bosse's prints: many were reproduced as paintings now owned by the Musée de Tours. The figures represented in fashion prints might once have been portraits commissioned by the curators of the king's art collection (le Cabinet du Roy) or models for court theatricals or festivals. This was the case with images designed by Jean Bérain (1637–1711) and engraved by the family Lepautre. They gave the public costumes designed by the Menus Plaisirs the section of the royal household charged with creating and organizing for the king's festivals and entertainments. The LACMA Recueil includes costumes for Lully's Cadmus et Hermione, an opera presented in 1673. It also contains seven costumes for another Lully opera, the Triumph of Love, staged at Saint Germain the January 21, 1681, as well as several Costumes grotesques pour l’opéra (Grotesque costumes for the opera). These engravings recopy the costumes or scenery painted on parchment that served as models for the designers and the tailors of the Menus Plaisirs.¹² Later the costumes were carefully redrawn and illuminated for the princes who had commissioned them or for the participants in the court festivals. There are hundreds of examples of these drawings in the volumes bound in 1768 on the orders of Papillon de la Ferté, the head of the Menus Plaisirs. These drawings spread throughout Europe and found their way into the collections of the margrave of Baden, the miniatures of Joseph Werner, and especially the bound collections of the Kupferstich-cabinet in Dresden.¹³ A series depicting the Carousel of the Amazons of 1686 was sent to the court of Sweden in 1694. I should add that the costumes drawn on parchment in Dresden also exist on in an engraved and illuminated version on paper.

If there were a painter in the family (Robert Bonnart, for example), that simplified print production process because there was no need to find a designer and risk conflict with the guild of painters.¹⁴ It also helped to have an etcher in the family and a book printer, too. Some engravers made a specialty of engraving human figures, figures that could be used later to populate landscapes or grouped together in gallant scenes or included in depictions of historical events. Engraver Jacob Gole used several figures by Saint-Jean in The departure of the Prince of Orange for England, dated 1688.¹⁵ There one finds Saint-Jean's woman in the striped déshabillé from a fashion print and the man surprising a woman in her bath from a gallant engraving.

The engraver, as much as the designer, determined the style and content of the print. Between two strikes of the plate, the engraver could modify the image and change its dimensions and details. In the case of the designs of Bérain, one notices the high quality of the backgrounds consisting of detailed architecture or gardens. For second strikes, the engraver would sand the copper and just print the figures. Sometimes collectors bound next to one another two versions of the same figure, the second print including a more recent hat, or skirts that are longer and wider or a wig that is more recent.¹⁶ One can even find three variations of the same print, such as the dancing master in the collection Dutuit at the Petit Palais or the Cabinet des Estampes at the Bibliothèque nationale. One figure has a hairdo dating from approximately 1665; the other has a wig. B...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Fashion and Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV
• Part One: The Fashion Print
• Part Two: Contextualizing the Fashion Print
• Part Three: The Fashion Print as a Historical Resource
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover