Caricatures and fashion plates

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1998 by Katharine A. Lochnan

For glimpses of contemporary life we must turn to the humbler categories of portraiture, landscape, and genre painting, while bearing in mind that these works were idealized, sanitized, and politically corrected so as to appeal to well-healed patrons and the academy juries.

Perhaps it was as an antidote to the high-minded seriousness of academic art that new genres of works on paper with subjects firmly rooted in contemporary rife began to flourish at this time. Representing the opposing aesthetic poles of the real and the ideal, the etched and hand-colored caricature and fashion plate came into their own during the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), one of its earliest practitioners, defined the goal of caricature at the end of the sixteenth century:

Is not the caricaturist's task exactly the same as the classical artist's? Both see the lasting truth beneath the surface of mere outward appearance. Both try to help nature accomplish its plan. The one may strive to visualize the perfect form and to realise it in his work, the other to grasp the perfect deformity, and thus reveal the very essence of a personality. A good caricature, like every work of art, is more true to life than reality itself.(1)

This indulgent sentiment was not shared by the opinionated Irish academician James Barry (1741-1806) who, in 1795, as caricature reached its zenith in Britain, maintained that it would have been "Better, better far, there had been no art, than thus to pervert and employ it to purposes so base, and so subversive of everything interesting in society."(2)

It was not until half a century later, in 1846, that the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire attacked the artificiality of academic painting and urged artists to look to modern life for their subject matter.(3) Then, in his hugely influential essay of 1863, The Painter of Modern Life, he made the astonishing recommendation that contemporary artists seek out eighteenth-century fashion plates and caricatures as prototypes. His essay begins:

I have before me a series of fashion plates dating from the Revolution and finishing more or less with the Consulate. These costumes, which seem laughable to many thoughtless people...have a double-natured charm, one both artistic and historical. They are often very beautiful and drawn with wit; but what to me is every bit as important, and what I am happy to find in all, or almost all of them, is the moral and aesthetic feeling of their time. The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self.(4)

Echoing Carracci, Baudelaire noted that

these engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues.... The women who wore these costumes were themselves more or less like one or the other type, according to the degree of poetry or vulgarity with which they were stamped.(5)

He urged artists to replace the search for a nonexistent ideal beauty with a search for modern beauty, epitomized by modern women and by the fashion and gestures which characterized the age. His essay fueled the impressionist movement, which finally broke the strangle hold of the academies.

The fashion plate originated in response to the desire of wealthy individuals to imitate the latest French fashions.(6) Before its invention, "information concerning the latest fashion was so hard to come by that Marie Antoinette's dressmaker found it worthwhile to travel the Continent every year in a huge berline containing dolls dressed in the latest modes de Paris."(7) With the industrial revolution the French looked to the promotion of luxury goods, especially fashion, for a competitive money-maker, since they did not have the iron and coal deposits that fueled industry in Britain.(8) For this reason, the promotion of French fashion was very much in the national interest.

The first fashion plates appeared in periodicals wholly or partly devoted to fashion in France, Britain, and Germany. Until 1790 they were published in black and white and colored by the purchasers, often dressmakers. After this time they could be obtained hand-colored for twice the price of black and white. Because of the decorative qualities of fashion plates and the new enthusiasm for framing and hanging prints on the wall, the majority of early albums of fashion plates were broken up, and it is rare to find surviving plates in good condition.(9)

The first monumental series of French fashion plates appeared in Paris in 1778. Published by Jean Esnauts and Michel Rapilly, it was entitled Gallerie ties Modes et Costumes Francais Dessines d'apres Nature [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VI OMITTED]. When it ceased publication in 1787, on the eve of the French Revolution, there was a gap in the production of fine fashion plates until 1794. In that year Nicolaus Wilhelm von Heideloff of Stuttgart moved from Paris to London and began to issue the Gallery of Fashion, "a Repository of English National Dresses of Ladies." In the "Advertisement" that accompanied the first number, Heideloff stated that the Gallery was "intended to be a collection of all the most fashionable and elegant Dresses in vogue" to "point out the superior elegance of British taste." His secondary aim was to create works of art. The high quality etchings characterized by wire-like outlines and subtle aquatint shadows embellished with exquisite hand-coloring were also designed to appeal to artists and print collectors. Breaking with the convention of showing single figures, Heideloff illustrated groups drawn from life and engaged in various activities [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE V OMITTED]. He pointed out in the "Advertisement" that "the figures are executed in an entirely new manner and coloured from nature, with the utmost accuracy."