Fashion in European Art

Dress and Identity, Politics and the Body, 1775-1925

Justine De Young

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786722249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Genderforschung

Fashion reveals not only who we are, but whom we aspire to be. From 1775 to 1925, artists in Europe were especially attuned to the gaps between appearance and reality, participating in and often critiquing the making of the self and the image. Reading their portrayals of modern life with an eye to fashion and dress reveals a world of complex calculations and subtle signals. Extensively illustrated, Fashion in European Art explores the significance of historical dress over this period of upheaval, as well as the lived experience of dress and its representation. Drawing on visual sources that extend from paintings and photographs to fashion plates, caricatures and advertisements, the expert contributors consider how artists and their sitters engaged with the fashion and culture of their times. They explore the politics of dress, its inspirations and the reactions it provoked, as well as the many meanings of fashion in European art, revealing its importance in understanding modernity itself.

1

From the Studio to the Street

Modelling Neoclassical Dress in Art and Life

Amelia Rauser

In this 1798 French portrait (Figure 1.1), the female sitter poses in an austere neoclassical interior wearing the most radical version of neoclassical fashionable dress: a sheer white muslin overdress twisted at the bust and gathered with little tasselled cords to form tight sleeves. An opaque, high-waisted white shift underneath the sheer muslin drapes loosely over the sitter’s lower torso and legs, while a rich red shawl fills the chair behind her and twines around her back and over her left knee. Her un-powdered hair is simply dressed and ornamented only with a braid; she wears no jewellery. Restrained in palette, detail, and texture, this fashionable sitter’s ensemble is arranged to emphasize that her beauty is ‘natural’ and embodied in her physical form, rather than in artifice or ornamentation. Although it might seem surprising, women in late eighteenth-century Europe did actually wear the style of dress represented in this portrait; indeed, less extreme versions of the style are familiar to any viewer of Jane Austen films.¹ How did it happen that, in the late 1790s, fashionable women could wear such simple and transparent clothing, and what did it signify? As this chapter will show, neoclassical chic had a powerful alibi: it proclaimed its wearer’s natural beauty using the language of art.

1.1Anon., Portrait of a Woman in White, c. 1798. Oil on canvas, 125.5 × 95 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

This radical fashion of undress, sometimes called empire-style or robes à la grecque, swept the metropolitan centres of Europe in the 1790s, overturning mores of modesty and display and startling contemporary commentators during its short-lived reign. The simplicity and nudity of this style was a dramatic departure from the hoops, silks, padded hips or bums, tall hairstyles, and hair powder of the previous few decades. Scholars often explain it as a revolutionary political statement exemplifying classical virtue and moral transparency; or as decadent French chic; or as a Rousseauian gesture to authentic maternity and gender essentialism.² While these views do have significant explanatory power for the meaning of neoclassical dress in the 1790s, at its origins, neoclassical dress had another set of meanings that have been poorly understood. In fact, neoclassical fashion did not emerge from the crucible of political revolution, nor was it invented in France, but rather it first arose as artistic dress, used by innovators in painting, theatre, and dance across several European cultural centres as an aid in their search for a more authentic and expressive art. In this chapter, I will argue that neoclassical fashion’s status as cosmopolitan artistic dress provided both the inspiration for its emergence as street dress and the context for its meaning to contemporaries. As a kind of anti-fashion, neoclassical dress allowed women who embraced it to appear to rise above petty artifice and ornament and construct themselves as aesthetic agents at the centre of key artistic and philosophical discourses of the Enlightenment.

Artistic Dress in the Painting Studio

While discussions between painters and sitters about what sort of dress should be depicted in their portraits have probably always been fraught, by the 1780s the issue was considered to be critically important to the ambition of the artist and the success of the artwork. Indeed, as Sir Joshua Reynolds influentially argued in his Discourse VII, delivered to students at the Royal Academy in 1776, it is the depiction of nakedness and drapery that separates the great artists from the lesser ones; in the painting of modern dress, he said, the essential work had already been done by the tailor.³ He called on his students to elevate the national taste by adopting an idealized classical dress for portraiture in their own practices:

He, therefore, who in his practice of portrait painting wishes to dignify his subject … will not paint her in the modern dress, the familiarity of which alone is sufficient to destroy all dignity. He … dresses his figure with something of the general air of the antique for the sake of dignity, and preserves something of the modern for the sake of likeness.⁴

Reynolds’s own ideas about how much to concede to fashion in portraiture varied over time.⁵ Yet by and large, his grand manner portraits strove for this synthesis, featuring sitters wearing flowing robes without hoops or corsets but conforming to fashionable silhouettes and with their hair elegantly dressed and powdered.

Reynolds’s chief rival in English portraiture during the 1780s, George Romney, also preferred to clothe his sitters in generalized dress, even though he distinguished his portrait style by meticulous specificity in rendering his sitters’ expressions.⁶ With filial bias, his son even retrospectively credited Romney with leading the taste for antique-style dress:

Though it was the fashion during the greatest part of Mr. Romney’s practice, for ladies to wear high head dresses and stiff, long-waisted stays; yet, whenever he had an opportunity … he rid himself of those ungraceful incumbrances, and returned to nature and truth. His picture of Cassandra, in the Shakespeare Gallery, influenced the public taste, and was instrumental in expelling from the empire of fashion the long and shapeless waist; and in introducing a more simple and graceful mode of dress, approaching nearer to the Grecian.⁷

This characterization of ‘Grecian’ dress as ‘simple and graceful’ and aligned with ‘nature and truth,’ rather than worldly artifice, was universal by the early nineteenth century, when John Romney was writing. Indeed, Romney even traces a trajectory from the studio to the street here, crediting artistic practice with driving ‘the empire of fashion.’

Two women artists of the 1780s, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Angelica Kauffman, not only frequently painted their sitters in generalized classical dress, but also adopted such dress themselves, both as studio dress and in their numerous self-portraits.⁸ Kauffman’s Self-Portrait as the Muse of Painting (Figure 1.2), made for the Duke of Tuscany’s famous gallery of self-portraits in 1787, is a masterful example, hovering as it doesbetween self-portraiture and allegory.⁹ On one hand, she denotes with precision her distinctive physiognomy, well-known through her many previous self-portraits, and her gestures draw our attention to the tools of her trade: the pencil she holds in her right hand; the drawing book, claimed with her signature, that she balances on her left knee; and the paintbrushes and palette she points to with her left index finger. Yet, on the other hand, her open pose – seated in a three-quarters view with her face turned pensively away from the viewer’s gaze – marks her as a figure to be contemplated rather than as an active agent, and her idealized dress and youthful beauty (perhaps not completely faithful to her then-47-year-old appearance) seem to set her apart in a space of timelessness. Kauffman’s dress is similar to those deployed in many other of her portraits and self-portraits over the years: a loose drape of white, matte textile that crosses over the bust, drapes over the shoulders, and is gathered high under the breasts, falling in folds across her legs. It reveals glimpses of an underdress with gathered, elbow-length sleeves and a modest neckline. Kauffman’s hair is loose and un-powdered, dressed with a kerchief that blends into the colour of her hair, and her only ornament is a gold clasp at her shoulder and an elaborate cameo belt, the most detailed element of the entire portrait.

1.2Angelica Kauffman, Self-Portrait as the Muse of Painting, 1787. Oil on canvas, 128 × 93.5 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

The cameo, made prominent by its location in the centre of the painting and its visual contrast of dark and detailed against light and summary, reproduces a well-known jewel from Naples that depicts the contest between Minerva and Neptune for Athens.¹⁰ Kauffman had gestured to Minerva before in her self-portraits; in her Self-Portrait with the Bust of Minerva from c. 1775–80, she ‘establishes an alternative artistic matrilineage,’ as Angela Rosenthal has argued, classing herself as a descendant and devotee of the virginal goddess of wisdom and patroness of the arts and handicrafts.¹¹ Here, the cameo has two purposes: it indicates the artist’s scholarly and professional knowledge of antiquities; and it reminds viewers that Minerva was victorious in that legendary contest – that female wisdom and craft can triumph even in competition with powerful men. The white classical dress she is wearing fuels the analogy between Kauffman and Minerva. If women’s bodies were traditionally the empty vessels to be filled with allegorical meaning rather than the active agents of their own self-fashioning, then here, as elsewhere, Kauffman self-allegorizes in order to seize that constraint and turn it to her advantage.¹²

The similarity between Kauffman’s invented 1787 studio dress and the 1798 sitter’s fashionable dress discussed above is clear. In palette, material, texture, and silhouette the garments are strikingly similar, even though only the later portrait depicts a dress that was actually worn in social settings. Yet in the 1780s, there began a vogue for fashionable dress that was considered more ‘natural’ and simple than the silk mantuas, embroidered stomachers, panniers, and tall headpieces that had dominated the fashions of the 1770s. The robe en chemise, also known as the robe en gaulle, was first associated with Marie Antoinette and worn in her informal courts at the Trianon and her dairy farm.¹³ A round gown that went over the head and was belted at the waist, the robe en chemise (as its name implies) evoked the simple muslin shift that had been worn under formal gowns for decades, thus importing a bit of erotic excitement with its connotation of ‘underwear as outerwear.’¹⁴ As worn by fashionable ladies in the 1780s, it usually featured a deep flounce at the hem and a long ruffle around the neckline, and was made of fine, imported white muslin. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s well-known portrait of Marie Antoinette wearing the robe en gaulle celebrated the queen as an icon of simple, natural beauty, but upon its exhibition at the Salon of 1783, the portrait generated such controversy about the queen’s inappropriate informality that it had to be removed after only a few days.¹⁵ While the robe en chemise is similar in many ways to the later neoclassical dress – it shares the same textile, white muslin, and the same desire for unornamented simplicity – its main connotation was the informality and romance of the pastoral life, rather than an evocation of antiquity, and its silhouette was very different from the high-waisted gowns of the 1790s. Nonetheless, as a prominent example of ‘reform’ dress and as a first fashionable appearance of white muslin, the robe en chemise ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Addressing Fashion in Art
• 1 From the Studio to the Street: Modelling Neoclassical Dress in Art and Life
• 2 Parures, Pashminas, and Portraiture, or, How Joséphine Bonaparte Fashioned the Napoleonic Empire
• 3 Temporalities of Costume and Fashion in Art of the Romantic Period
• 4 Dress and DesireRossetti’s Erotics of the Unclassifiable and Working-Class Models
• 5 Mourning for Paris: The Art and Politics of Dress after ‘l’année terrible’ (1870–1)
• 6 Mannequin and Monkey in Seurat’s Grande Jatte
• 7 ‘But the coat is the picture’: Issues of Masculine Fashioning, Politics, and Sexual Identity in Portraiture in England c. 1890–1900
• 8 Silencing Fashion in Early Twentieth-Century Feminism: The Sartorial Story of Suffrage
• 9 Puppets, Patterns, and ‘Proper Gentlemen’: Men’s Fashion in Anton Räderscheidt’s New Objectivity Paintings
• Contributors
• Selected Bibliography