Georg Friedrich Kersting: Briefschreibende Dame im Biedermeier Interieur, 1817
If you’re curious about the process I go through developing characters for living history programs, or best practices for women of the Revolutionary War-era armies, among other topics, there are some tickets left, and you can register online here.
But before I can compile what I’ve found about food markets in 18th century Boston, I have to go back to writing for this weekend.
Those Providence servants don’t research and describe themselves, and the housekeeper is particularly unreliable.
The more you look, the harder things get. That’s usually cause for celebration, but I’m starting to feel the pressure of more ideas and commitments than time. Here’s a question: in these undated Sandby watercolors, are the women wearing the bonnet colloquially called lampshade? What does lampshade look like from the side? My guess is that it looks a great deal like the headwear of the woman sitting on the wall. (Click the images to go to the Royal Collection site where you can enlarge them.)
So much good stuff in this image: the woman sitting on the wall, swinging her foot (take that, decorum); the black silk mantles; sleeve ruffles; gloves; pointy shoes; big skirts.
About those pointy shoes and big skirts….much as I would love for this image to be really relevant to my quest, we are looking at the 1750s. At least lampshade comes in to greater focus, both in date and in construction. Ooh, look! More lampshade.
The eldest of these young ladies was born in 1760 and the youngest in 1762, so we’re really close to 1770 here. They’re not only incredibly adorable (I know a quite darling and very young lady for whom I want to make one of these pretty much immediately), but they’re in the right time period. Most of the bonnet images in the Royal Collection seemed to be of young women or girls, until I happened upon this image, from 1768.
This is by no means an exhaustive search, but thanks to a Facebook commenter, I’ve rediscovered the Royal Collection, and found later images of the peculiarly lamp-shade like headwear, and one image with a firm date of 1768.
In Book of Ages, Jill Lepore quotes a February 27, 1766 letter from Jane Franklin Mecom in Boston to Deborah Read Franklin in Philadelphia, regarding the clothing her brother Benjamin had shipped to her. “For ‘Each of us a Printed coten Gownd a quilted coat a bonnet.’ She continues about her bonnet, “is very suteable for me to were now being black and a Purple coten.” (Lepore, Book of Ages, p. 144)
What do you suppose that 1766 bonnet looks like? Do you think it looks more like lampshade, or these transitional forms? Probably lampshade, but the materials are intriguing: Purple cotton. Is that the brim lining? Jane Mecom is in mourning, so I’d expect the main body (brim and caul) of the bonnet to be black, and most likely taffeta, which turns up as a descriptor in the runaway ads.
Wide-brimmed, black taffeta bonnet, possibly lined in cotton, 1766-1768. But how long did bonnets last?* What went into them– Buckram? Pasteboard? Coated pasteboard? Baleen? A combination of pasteboard and baleen?
I’ve got some ideas, and if the next winter storm doesn’t delay the mail too long, I might have experiments to conduct this weekend.
*Or any clothing? But that’s a post for another day.
Ackermans’s Repository of Arts., etc. April, 1817.
Every now and then, someone argues with me that the historic house where I work would not have had window curtains or drapes. Sometimes they like to expand that argument to “there were no curtains at all” in early Federal America. The reasoning is usually that textiles were too expensive to “waste” on window dressing. If you know me, you know this kind of argument is a Bad Idea. The public fight (I was angrily accosted by a now-former docent during a public presentation) is known as The Great Curtain Kerfuffle, and resulted in my reply that the owner of the house could very well afford anything he pleased. Fabric is Money.*
There’s another iteration of my argument: Color is Money.
Ackermans’s Repository of Arts., etc. April, 1817. page 244
“Crimson is very rich, but blue is handsomer,” wrote Eliza Ward to her sister, Mrs John Innis Clark, in the 1790s. Curtains and covers were fringed (Mrs Hazard Gibbes was blue and yellow). Windows were dressed, and younger, less affluent relatives received hand-me-down curtains. In 1803, Elizabeth Watters in Wilmington, North Carolina was having a carpet “wove in true Scotch taste in imitation of Highland plaid.”
John Phillips (1719-1795) Oil on canvas by Joseph Steward,1794-1796. Sack Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.
Some carpets, no? Maybe the new mantra is Carpets are Money.
But quite aside from an obvious display of wealth, what we have to realize about these images and letters is that they are depicting a world that looks very different from our own. Color sensibilities, tolerance for pattern mixing, non-matchy-matchy sewing and dressing. We have to abandon our 21st century aesthetic sensibilities when we dress ourselves or our spaces for the past, and really embrace the vivacity of that world. Sensory overload, perhaps, but getting closer to what the world of the past looked like will help us see– in every sense– the way the people of the past did.
*I may or may not have made additional statements afterwards to the effect that of course wealthy Americans squatted naked in the corners of their well-appointed mansions gnawing raw meat until Benjamin Franklin invented fire and fabric. I should be sorry about that, but I don’t seem to be.
Whilst serving as the commandant for a research-paper writing prison*, I spent some time perusing the Met’s digital collections, in particular the Costume Institute’s collection of Men’s Fashion Plates, because, you know, stuff.
Men’s Wear 1790-1829, Plate 002, 1807. Gift of Woodman Thompson Costume Institute Fashion Plates Metropolitan Museum of Art
John Myers. Oil on canvas by Thomas Sully, 1814. MFA Boston 45.894 Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865
I stopped at Plate 002, because I knew I’d seen that coat somewhere before. Why, yes: at the MFA in the Art of the Americas Wing, where I recently spent a pleasant afternoon with the Drunk Tailor. After some initial joy at discovering dust on a teapot, we got down to the business of setting off proximity alarms, reading labels, and contemplating the occasional neck stock.
Mr Myers stopped me, though: what a handsome coat. High shoulder seams, long cuffs, buttoned all the way up. Nifty high-waisted grey trousers, too, and what seems to be a yellow waist coat. The portrait is dated 1814, and the fashion plate 1807.
Detail, 1807 fashion plate
Hmmmm…
Men’s Wear 1790-1829, Plate 005, 1807. Gift of Woodman Thompson, Metropolitan Museum of Art
The brown M-notch collar coat is clearly a thing in 1807. It’s popular in 1802. So popular. 1802 on the left. On the right, 1812.
Portrait of a Gentleman of the Society of the Cincinnati. Miniature by James Peale, American, 1802. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000-137-11
Portrait of a Young Man by James Peale, 1812. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1944-47-1
And our friend Sully paints one in 1814.
After seeing Copley and other early American painters use English prints as references for portraiture, I wondered if Sully was at all influenced by fashion plates, and then to what degree American men and their tailors were influenced by published fashion plates.
Portrait of the Artist. Thomas Sully, 1821. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 94.23.3
Brown coats are clearly classic: Sully’s got one himself in 1821. I’m sure there’s a dissertation out there somewhere on the influence of fashion plates on American men’s fashion and representation in portraiture– I can almost remember stumbling across the reference. So that echoes and re-echoes and reflects through time even as I recall not just the the folk wisdom about brown suits, but the significance of well-tailored suit. Maybe from 1802-1821, brown is the new black.
*Ah, teenagers. The Young Mr failed to complete a paper by the due date, so I spent some quality time ensuring he got back on track.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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