Introduction: Galateas

Rauser, Amelia

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Introduction: Galateas

Amelia Rauser

The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s

In the 1790s, elite women appeared in the metropolitan ballrooms, gardens, and opera boxes of Europe and the United States dressed as living statues...

Author

Amelia Rauser

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.7-23

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338.1

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23218

Chapter subject tags:Dress, NeoclassicalCostume--History--18th centuryFashion design--HistoryFeminine beauty (Aesthetics)

Introduction: Galateas

In the 1790s, elite women appeared in the metropolitan ballrooms, gardens, and opera boxes of Europe and the United States dressed as living statues. “Our girls and young women apologize for everything by saying they are making themselves into Greeks or statues, and that they drape themselves; they presently only want to wear quite clear and unfinished muslin,” a Parisian tailor reportedly complained.1“Nos filles et nos jeunes femmes s’excusent de tout en disant qu’elles font les Grecques ou les statues, et qu’elles se drapent. Elles ne veulent plus porter que de la mousseline bien claire sans nul apprêt.” Genlis 1825, vol. 9, p. 394; quoted and translated in Cage 2009, p. 205. The style of dress they wore, sometimes called the robe à la grecque, was a sheer, white, high-waisted muslin dress worn with minimal undergarments and often accessorized by a cashmere shawl (fig. 1). “The most fashionable female dress is now exactly after the antique statues—The flowing drapery, the high zone, and the head compressed as much as possible. The effect is graceful in the extreme. The use of powder is daily decreasing among our British beauties, and dark hair is the rage of the present moment,” announced the Oracle and Public Advertiser in January 1796.2Oracle and Public Advertiser, January 26, 1796, n.p. As it clung to haunches and exposed arms, eschewing most padding, powdering, and ornamentation, this new style of dress represented a dramatic departure from the mantuas and polonaises of the previous decades. Yet it was also short lived: by the 1820s, corsets, ornaments, silks, and full skirts were back in fashion.

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Fig. 1. Cotton muslin dress with silk embroidery, ca. 1800. Indian textile made for Western market. Los Angeles County Museum of Art

This new style is best referred to as neoclassical dress, for it was profoundly intertwined with the aesthetic experiments and philosophical puzzles of radical neoclassicists working in other artistic media in the same period. Neoclassicism is often discussed as a cold, masculine, rational, even bureaucratic style: words like “austere” and “stoic” are commonly used by scholars to describe it, and the columns, entablatures, and rotundas of neoclassical architecture have been the visual signature of banks and capitol buildings for more than 200 years.3These words are from Hugh Honour’s classic 1968 study, Honour 1968, pp. 34–7; see also Rosenblum 1967. Myrone 2005, p. 288, notes that even at the time “an opposition of ‘masculine’ classical art to a repulsive and feminized modernity was long established as a critical trope.” Indeed some key parts of the neoclassical movement, such as the creative circles of Salon painters in 1790s France, were self-consciously homosocial, structured around close networks of male artists interested in exploring the bounds of masculinity.4On the homosocial art world in France and the experiments with masculine identity in the period, see Crow 1995 and Solomon-Godeau 1997. For an alternative reading of neoclassicism as intensely emotional, morally relative, and theatrical, see Pop 2015.

However, in this book I wish to show that, in fact, the neoclassicism of the 1790s was often intensely embodied and deeply emotional, and that women were at its center: as ideals and allegories, as artistic agents—active aesthetic innovators and creators—and as important patrons. By “embodied” I mean a neoclassicism that valorizes the body as the site of diverse sensory experience, elevating the importance of sensation as the precursor to cognition and understanding. In addition, an embodied neoclassicism blurs boundaries between real and artistic bodies, art and life. Marked by a sensual, even ecstatic communion with a deeply strange and primitive classical past, this embodied neoclassicism aimed to use art as a portal through which the harmonious union of art and freedom—both bodily and political—could be brought back to life in a new golden age. At times this collection of ideas and ambitions has been discussed as a priapic neoclassicism centered around male desire and subjectivity.5Well-known examples include Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s homoerotic classical art history and Richard Payne Knight’s treatise for the Society of Dilettanti on Sir William Hamilton’s wax phallus collection; in addition, Singley 1993 discusses the phallic imagery at the heart of Claude Nicolas Ledoux’s ideal city plan. Davis 2008 argues that Knight’s treatise has a more subtle understanding than Hamilton himself did of such votives, analyzing them as both modern and ancient corruptions of an even earlier pansexual understanding of erotic generativity. But here I wish to argue for a “bacchantic neoclassicism,” a set of aesthetic, intellectual, and moral commitments that shaped women’s experiments with neoclassical dress and their engagement with art, philosophy, and popular culture (fig. 2).

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Description: Emma, Lady Hamilton, as a Bacchante by Dunn, John

Fig. 2. John Dunn, Lady Emma Hamilton as a Bacchante, ca. 1798–1800. Miniature in watercolor on ivory, 8.6 × 6.8 × 0.3 cm. National Maritime Museum, London

The emergence of neoclassical dress in the 1790s is far more than a historical curiosity. Fashion is arguably the most important constituent of an era’s artistic culture, as getting dressed is an aesthetic decision that people make every single day, and one that situates their bodies in time, space, and culture. Englishwoman and amateur artist Ann Frankland Lewis memorialized a “dress of the year” annually over a period of 34 years (fig. 3), marking the span of her life with the ticking of a fashion clock.6Little is known about Ann Frankland Lewis, who lived in Yorkshire, but her album of watercolors is preserved in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. On the historicity of fashion, see Campbell 2016. Unlike painting or sculpture, however, fashionable dress is not an art form of masterpieces, but of multiples; like printmaking, fashion forms a discourse and its representational commitments are collective rather than individual. Thus, despite the fact that fashion articulates individual human identities with a particular age, status, season, and occasion, and despite the importance of a few fashion innovators in inventing and disseminating change, fashion can give us insight into broad cultural values and aspirations. When fashion changes dramatically, then, we should investigate. In the 1790s, the profound change of neoclassical dress signaled not a merely whimsical alteration of women’s taste, but rather a wholesale transformation of the aesthetic concerns of the moment and their intersection with women’s cultural position in particular. We should look hard at neoclassical fashion not only because it is a fascinating phenomenon in itself, but also because it points to important fault lines in neoclassical culture, revealing places of innovation, contestation, and debate over such issues as the science of life, the understanding of race, and the purpose of art.

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Description: Collection of English Original Watercolor Drawings, Plate 24 by Frankland Lewis,...

Fig. 3. Ann Frankland Lewis, 1798, from the Collection of English Original Watercolor Drawings, 1774–1807. Watercolor on paper, 23.5 × 17.8 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Of course, no one changes a culture’s approach to dress overnight, and interest in more “natural” dress had been growing throughout the 1770s and 1780s, especially among artists and aesthetes who pursued dress reform in tandem with other changes in the emotionality and physical expressiveness of the arts. French “Anglomania” of the 1780s associated lightweight cottons, round gowns (dresses pulled over the head rather than closed in front), and menswear derived from hunting clothes with the greater informality and personal liberty of English culture.7Grieder 1985. New dress forms like the polonaise and the caraco brought in slimmer proportions and greater ease of movement, often derived from working-class garments.8Chrisman-Campbell 2015. Most notably, the vogue for the robe en chemise or robe en gaulle, a ruffled white muslin dress associated with Marie Antoinette’s informal courts at the Trianon and her dairy farm, spread across Europe in the 1780s, providing elite women with an elegant but informal style.9There is some scholarly dispute about the origin of this fashionable style; Aileen Ribeiro (Ribeiro 1995) suggests it was first worn by the queen during her pregnancy in Marly in the late 1770s and was then adopted by other court ladies as informal dress at Versailles, and that the Duchess of Devonshire attended a concert in 1784 “in one of the muslin chemises with fine lace that the Queen of France gave me” (p. 71). However, it seems likely that these early gowns were not round gowns but, rather, open robes, meant to wrap across the front, which was a traditional style for pregnancy wear and structurally related to the then-current mantua. Sheriff 1996, p. 143, by contrast, says the style originated in England and was imported to France in the 1780s as part of that decade’s Anglomania, associated, for example, with the artless, charming naturalism of the English landscape garden. See also Weber 2006, pp. 156–63. A preference for informality and mobility in dress had been increasing for some time, then, but the exposure of bodily contour, the anti-fashion significations, and the high-waisted silhouette of neoclassical dress were nonetheless dramatic departures from the norms of just a decade or two earlier.

Contemporaries claimed they were “making themselves into Greeks or statues” when wearing neoclassical dress, and we should take them seriously, for the living statue was a concept with great intellectual weight in the eighteenth century. Scientists and philosophers used it as a thought experiment to contemplate the nature of life itself, while artists deployed the concept to explore the dialectic or continuity between ideal and real. What did it mean for women to adopt this concept as a frame for their self-presentation? Neoclassical dress requires us to consider questions of animation and petrification, stasis and mobility, body and fragment, classical and modern, primitive and civilized, contour and dimensionality, art and life. This book will use the idea of the living statue as the lens through which to view the emergence and meaning of neoclassical dress in the 1790s.

How can we accurately characterize an ephemeral art such as fashionable dress? Paintings and drawings have their own interpretative agendas; fashion plates have only an attenuated relationship to fashionable practice; surviving garments are partial and unrepresentative. This study takes into account a wide range of evidence, encompassing not only these artifacts but also periodicals, private letters, popular prints, and literature, in order to consider not just what was actually worn, but more significantly the contemporary perception, aesthetic meaning, and debate over neoclassical dress. We will focus on the innovative garments worn by a small number of elite women in the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe and the United States, where, I argue, dress formed an important part of advanced artistic culture. Yet these aesthetic innovations were not isolated; they reshaped the dominant silhouette worn by most Western women for nearly two decades. In this book I am interested in exploring the nexus of neoclassical dress with neoclassical culture, and its social meaning in the 1790s.

For most scholars, neoclassical fashion has appeared to be a French invention, an outgrowth of the Revolution of 1789 and part of the general taste for antiquity in furnishings and the decorative arts.10See Chrisman-Campbell 2015, Cage 2009, Grigsby 1998, Hollander 1994, Jones 2004, Lajer-Burcharth 1999, and Wrigley 2002. Aileen Ribeiro argues for more varied origins, although she still locates the most rigorous classical fashions in France and casts the British as less engaged with neoclassical dress; see Ribeiro 1995, 2002, and 2017. Its high point is associated with the most extreme practitioners of the nudité gazée—women such as Thérésa Tallien, Joséphine Bonaparte, and Juliette Récamier (fig. 4)—and their decadent circle active during the four-year period between the Terror and the rise of Napoleon, known as the Directory. But in fact, as we shall see, neoclassical fashion did not emerge from the crucible of political revolution, nor was it invented in France. Rather, it first arose as artistic dress, used by innovators in painting, theater, and dance across several European cultural centers in their search for a more authentic and expressive art.11I use the term “artistic dress” here deliberately to invoke a similar dynamic of artistic influence on women’s dress as happened in the well-known artistic dress movement of the later nineteenth century. For a detailed account of these origins, see Rauser 2017a. Far from merely expressing a conventional vogue for antiquity, the white muslin neoclassical dress of the 1790s was a choice redolent with disruptive meaning. Crucial moments of innovation in dress happened in studios and drawing rooms alongside other aesthetic experiments in diverse artistic media, as women used neoclassical dress to present themselves as works of art come to life.

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Description: Juliette Récamier (1777–1849) by Morin, Eulalie

Fig. 4. Eulalie Morin, Portrait of Madame Juliette Récamier, née Jeanne Françoise Bernard, 1799. Oil on canvas, 115 × 87 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France

ART WITHOUT ARTIFICE

Neoclassical dress was part of a wave of aesthetic gestures fueled by a growing distrust of artifice. For decades, artifice had been embraced in art and fashion as the desirable polish of civilization, the refinement of culture that defined politeness and separated humans from a state of nature. Earlier notions of identity valued artifice as a necessary social patina on the raw crudity of nature.12See Kuchta 2002, Carter 2001, and Cohen 2000. The individual was in some ways created by his social roles and networks, and thus to put on a powdered wig was not to deceive others about one’s natural hair but rather to courteously engage with social norms and to broadcast one’s role and stature in society.13Pointon 1993, pp. 114–23; and Ribeiro 2002. Similarly, the fashionable dress forms that dominated women’s dress for most of the eighteenth century celebrated the beauty of sophisticated artifice.

The most dominant forms were based on the mantua, a robe into which a woman slipped her arms, with the fastening in front (usually anchored by a separate piece, the stomacher), and exposing the separate skirt or petticoat (fig. 5). The mantua, which arose in the late seventeenth century and supplanted the two-piece jacket and skirt, was likely derived from the dressing gown, thus imparting a hint of eroticism and undress into this most formal and courtly fashion. Although the robe and the skirt were two separate pieces, they were often constructed from the same textile, giving a uniform appearance to the ensemble. Over the course of the eighteenth century, robes that were derived in form from the mantua developed slightly different shapes: they could flow loosely from the shoulders into a rear train (robe à la française); be tacked down with pleats to articulate the rear waist (robe à l’anglaise); or loop up the skirts into poufs (robe retroussé or à la polonaise; fig. 6). In any case, they were made of colorful, decorative, expensive fabrics and ornamented with lace, flounces, and embellishments. Indeed, the square-hipped hoops or panniers, worn during the mid-century decades and enduring as courtly dress through the end of the century, created a flat, rectangular skirt shape ideal for the display of sumptuous textiles (fig. 7).

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Fig. 5. Silk dress, ca. 1775. French. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Description: Robe à la Polonaise by Unknown

Fig. 6. Silk robe à la polonaise, ca. 1780–85. American. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Fig. 7. Stays, pannier (hoop petticoat) and chemise, 1750–80. English. Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The most highly decorated part of such an ensemble was usually the stomacher (fig. 8): a triangular element onto which the two sides of the robe fastened. This, along with the stays worn underneath, shaped the torso into a flattened cone with the breasts pushed up, often above the top of the garment, veiled by a thin kerchief known as a fichu, or by the exposed top of the chemise underdress. Stiffened with a strip of wood or baleen (whalebone) called a busk, the stays and stomacher smoothed the torso into a flat expanse for embellishment with embroidery, jewels, or ribbons. This inverted triangle sat atop the rectangle of the panniered skirt, regularizing the female body into a stack of abstract shapes whose surface was blizzarded with decoration. Powdered and elaborately dressed hair and pronounced cosmetics contributed to the bodily display of refinement and politeness via artifice.

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Fig. 8. Silk and linen stomacher with metal embroidery, ca. 1720. British. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Yet in the 1780s, an impulse toward more “natural” dress began to surface. Reformers and artists had long decried the artifice of fashion; moralists impugned its frivolity, deceptiveness, and profligacy, while artists disliked the falsity and temporality it imparted to their portraiture. But as new ideals of personal subjectivity took hold in the 1780s, the chorus became louder and more pointed.14See Stafford 1991, Wahrman 2006, and Rauser 2008. Now, the artifice of social roles seemed not to constitute the individual but rather to mask him. Instead, the most authentic version of the self was thought to be visible when the individual was in private, unmasked, and natural. The preoccupation with unmasking, with peering past the social facade to the truth within, led not only to the vogue for caricature but also to the passion for naturalism in fashion.15Rauser 2008. In the 1780s, fashionable women themselves began to embrace the chic of a dress that appeared closer to “nature.”

Yet paradoxically, the path to nature was through an imitation—and embodiment—of art. Indeed, Daniel Chodowiecki’s Natur und Afectation (Natural and Affected Behavior; fig. 9), from 1777, expresses the growing distrust of artifice and ends up foreshadowing neoclassical dress. This illustration was part of a series representing the contrast between natural and affected manners, published in the influential natural philosophy journal Göttinger Taschenkalender (fig. 10). In a series of moral contrasts, the printmaker advocates for restraint in bodily expression, both in gesture and in fashion, whether in response to art, a beautiful landscape, or bad weather.16Griffith and Carey 1994, p. 57. In the first panel of this contrast, the man and woman stand in harmony with their natural setting, barefoot and draped only enough to be decent. In the second panel, the couple is overloaded with panniers, tall hairpieces, silk, fringe, and tassels, and the landscape is almost completely obscured behind their fashionable attire. Yet it is not only their dress but also their bodies that are contrasted: while the “natural” couple turns to face one another with joined hands and weight shifted in classical contrapposto, the “affected” couple looks out at the viewer, touches hands in a courtly gesture, and steps forward with the crossed ankles of balletic first position. For much of the eighteenth century, lessons from dancing masters had imparted the courtly body with civilizing refinement in posture and gesture, yet here Chodowiecki criticizes such refinement as inauthentic artifice, choosing instead classical poses as signifiers of truth.17Cohen 2000. Significantly, the natural man is almost completely nude; in an embrace of the classical notion of arete, his athletic body itself expresses his moral virtue. The natural woman, by contrast, seemingly cannot escape some fashioning even in a state of nature, and so it is the drapery of a classical sculpture that is taken to be most at harmony with natural man: hair pulled back and dressed with bands of ribbon, and a simply draped garment that bares both virtuous breasts, wrapped with a cord that circles the waist and crosses over one shoulder. As we shall see, Chodowiecki’s “natural woman” costume of 1777 is very close to the actual dress that would be worn by the most fashionable women 20 years later.

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Description: Natur und Afectation by Chodowiecki, Daniel Nikolaus

Fig. 9. Daniel Chodowiecki, Natur und Afectation, from the Göttinger Taschenkalender, 1777. Etching, 8 × 4.4 cm. Heidelberg University Library

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Fig. 10. Daniel Chodowiecki, Natur und Afectation, from the Göttinger Taschenkalender, 1777. Twelve etchings, each 8 × 4.4 cm. Heidelberg University Library

Indeed, neoclassical fashionable dress was startlingly naked. Satires such as James Gillray’s Ladies Dress, as it soon will be, 1796 (fig. 11), reveal British contemporaries’ ridicule and glee at the degree to which these new fashions exposed the body. Much like Chodowiecki’s “natural” woman, this fashionable lady bares her breasts, drapes herself in white muslin, and dresses her hair with a simple ribbon—although she adds the fashionable accessories of ostrich plumes, fan, and embroidered stockings. Drawing on a visual similarity to the underdress or chemise commonly worn under an outer robe (seen peeking out from beneath the stays in fig. 7), neoclassical dress seemed to eschew entirely the formal, fashionable layer of costume donned by earlier generations. In the crucible of the Terror in Paris, the chemise underdress also came to signify aristocratic prison wear: what elite women wore after being stripped of their polonaises and locked into La Force or Les Carmes prison. Thus, to be undressed in neoclassical muslin in the 1790s was not only to be classical, “natural,” and half-naked; it was also, especially in Paris, to have been dangerously vulnerable and to have survived.

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Description: Ladies dress, as it soon will be by Gillray, James

Fig. 11. James Gillray, Ladies Dress, as it soon will be, 1796. Hand-colored etching, 31.3 × 22.5 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

But beyond its unprecedented nudity, neoclassical dress represented a kind of anti-fashion. It swathed the body in an articulation of its limbs, joints, contours, and masses, rather than treating the body as a surface to be decorated. Neoclassical fashion was simpler to craft and to clean, and it appeared to eschew the idea of lavishly upholstering the body in favor of lightly veiling a mobile form. In particular, however, it represented a kind of artistic or aesthetic dress—a way of dressing that was explicitly outside fashion and affected superiority to it in its timelessness and appeal to authenticity, naturalism, and women’s artistic agency. As anti-fashion, neoclassical dress allowed the women who embraced it to appear to rise above petty artifice and ornament, and to construct themselves as aesthetic agents at the center of key artistic and philosophical discourses of the Enlightenment.

THE LIVING STATUE

D’ ALEMBERT:	. . . Then stone must be sensitive.
DIDEROT:	Why not?
D’ ALEMBERT:	It’s hard to believe.
DIDEROT:	Yes, for him who cuts, chisels, and crushes it, and does not hear it cry out.
D’ ALEMBERT:	I’d like you to tell me what difference there is, according to you, between a man and a statue.
DIDEROT:	Not much. Flesh can be made from marble, and marble from flesh.18“Conversation between D’Alembert and Diderot,” 1769; see Diderot 1966.

That statues could live was an idea that fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists in the eighteenth century. For the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the “statue-man” figured as a productive thought experiment—a statue as a Lockean blank slate, without senses and thus without ideas. Gradually endowing his inanimate marble creature with one sense at a time, Condillac watched as the statue came alive, transmuting sensation into cognition and working out the ontological implications of empiricist science.19“Treatise on the Sensations,” 1754; see Condillac 1982. Despite Condillac’s “statue-man,” however, in the long history of living statues in the Western tradition, the statues that men experienced as enlivening were almost always female figures. See Hersey 2009. This same imagined enlivening was central to aesthetic theory of the period: “A statue must live,” Johann Gottfried Herder argued, “its flesh must revive: its face and mien must speak. We must believe we can touch it and feel that it warms itself under our hands.”20Herder 1769, p. 88; my translation. In both cases, the statue enlivens as sensibility—whether its own or its observer’s—increases. In addition, vitalist science posited that cognition was dispersed throughout the body, and that all matter was either imbued with self-organizing life or had the potential to be. Thus, all knowledge, including aesthetic experience, was understood as located in the body and fed by the senses: those who cultivated their sensibility by enlivening such intersubjective feelings as sympathy and desire facilitated more precise and sensitive perception of the world.

It is not surprising, then, that the story of Pygmalion, which placed both desire and the living statue at the core of aesthetic experience, was very prominent in eighteenth-century theater, dance, and visual art.21Rosenthal 2004 notes the significance of the Pygmalion myth in the eighteenth century as a racializing discourse central to the creation of the idea of the “fair sex.” See also Carr 1960 and Holmström 1967 on eighteenth-century productions of Pygmalion in a variety of media. See Stoichita 2008 and Gross 2006 on the conceptual meaning of Pygmalion and related stories of living artworks. Most eighteenth-century viewers knew the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Pygmalion was a Cypriot king who became disgusted by real women after seeing contemporary prostitutes. He carved a beautiful ideal woman in ivory, fell in love with it, made offerings to it, and pleaded with Venus to bring it to life. By the eighteenth century the sculpted woman had acquired the name Galatea, Greek for “she who is milk-white.” Herder’s aesthetic treatise, “Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream” (1778), used the myth to muse on sculpture’s seeming ability to come to life in the imagination of the viewer via a spark of desire that transformed sensory experience into aesthetic understanding.22Herder 1778. The dream of Pygmalion, then, was not only the dream of a superhuman creative artist, but also the dream of an art that lives, of sensations that speak truth, and of a world that aspires to the same perfection and idealism as art. As a potent embodiment of the aspirations to blur boundaries between art and life, and to bring the golden age of the past into the present, Pygmalion was suited to artistic innovations aimed at conveying greater authenticity, sensuality, and embodied naturalism.

These engagements with sensation, cognition, and aesthetic experience brought new attention to the sense of touch—”the most profound and philosophical” of the senses, according to Denis Diderot.23From Diderot’s 1749 Letter on the Blind; see Paterson 2007, p. 2. On the haptic and art, see also Zuckert 2009. If indeed the whole body were a kind of thinking organ, and knowledge derived from sensation, then the sensate organs of the body are not only the eyes, but also the nose, ears, tongue, and skin. The haptic sense, once derided alongside taste as a decadent sense that endangered the moral health of the soul, became the subject of new scrutiny in eighteenth-century thought, not only in science and philosophy but also in the newly founded “science of sensation,” aesthetics. In the apprehension of art, haptic perception sparked art to life in the mind of the viewer, particularly when stimulated by desire. Beauty, desire, and the sense of lifelikeness in art were thus rooted in Enlightenment theories of vital embodiment.

These three ideas—the elevation of the haptic; the primacy given to embodied sensation as the engine of cognition; and the central role of desire in the appreciation of art—all centered qualities long associated with women and femininity at the heart of prestigious cultural discourses. As modern Galateas, or enlivened sculptures, women’s closeness to nature and greater sensitivity to the tactile could be claimed as granting them a privileged access to aesthetic and even moral truth. This provided a limited, yet potent, way for women to assert their aesthetic agency and extrapolate from these theorized forms to a lived experience. Already characterized as more emotional, more embodied, less rational, and more attuned to the “lower” senses of taste and touch, women were able to assert expertise in these arenas and exercise aesthetic agency as artists and patrons. As this book argues, women made paintings, wrote poetry, staged performances, patronized art, and dressed and styled their own bodies as ways to intervene and participate in these cultural discourses.

Yet as we shall see, the growing participation of women in vanguard neoclassicism also triggered a gendered backlash. Neoclassical visual culture was a stew of transmission and translation, high and low, imitation and invention, public and private, elite and commercialized, two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Some contemporary commentators grew alarmed by this, and by women’s artistic participation, and diminished and dismissed women’s formative role in this modern aesthetic. Women’s aesthetic interventions were often characterized by such critics as debased aping and mere dilettantism; over the course of the decade, terms such as bacchantism, amateurism, and dilettantism became negative and feminized epithets. As the taste for authentic, embodied classicism spread through prints, attitude performances, theater, ballet, and fashionable dress, to wider, less educated, and more female audiences and agents, the ridicule grew: women were clueless imitators of true art.

Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton and companion of the British ambassador to Naples, was a lightning rod for this debate, both lauded as a masterful performer of neoclassical “attitudes” and mocked for her vulgar aping of classical idealism.24Emma Hart’s “attitudes,” analyzed in detail in Chapter One, were a series of still poses imitating figures in classical, and sometimes religious, art. She developed them as a parlor entertainment and performed them for decades for audiences at her home in Naples and when traveling abroad. Satirist James Gillray’s Dido, in Despair! (fig. 12) distills the ridicule: this living statue is no Venus, sensitively attuned to the refinements of formalist perfection, but, rather, fat, maudlin, messy, and drunk. Her dress is not neoclassical drapery, but a common nightgown. And ordinary women in neoclassical dress were nearly as laughable, their pretentions to aesthetic vanguardism just as ridiculous. Gillray’s Advantages of wearing Muslin Dresses!—dedicated to the serious attention of the Fashionable Ladies of Great Britain (fig. 13) features a woman whose fashionable muslin has caught fire and whose fat body and ungainly pose echoes Hart’s in Dido. Humiliations are heaped upon her as an upset tea table, loaded with neoclassical porcelain, spills tea right into her lap. By invoking fashionable women’s “serious attention,” Gillray mocks the ideas and values women attached to their aesthetic choices as frivolous and stupid: muslin catches fire, the neoclassical icon of erupting Vesuvius is only sublime at a distance, and it is ridiculous to pose at being classical sculpture brought to life. These are nothing but silly pretentions.

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Description: Dido in despair! by Gillray, James

Fig. 12. James Gillray, Dido, in Despair!, 1801. Hand-colored etching, 25.3 × 35.8 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

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Description: Advantages of wearing muslin dresses! by Gillray, James

Fig. 13. James Gillray, Advantages of wearing Muslin Dresses!—dedicated to the serious attention of the Fashionable Ladies of Great Britain, 1802. Hand-colored etching, 25.2 × 35.4 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

INVENTING NEOCLASSICAL DRESS

Neoclassical dress thus began in controversy, mockery, and scandal. Yet its breadth and longevity indicate that it must have been both useful and satisfying for the women who wore it. Indeed, by the early years of the nineteenth century neoclassical dress was so ubiquitous, and so secure in its identification as modern, chic, and natural, that numerous individuals tried to take credit for inventing it. In her Memoirs (published 1835), Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who was known for wearing a white muslin dress and turban while painting in the studio as early as the 1780s, several times mentions her own fashion interventions, taking credit for the innovative neoclassical performance dress of Emma Hamilton in Naples and for arranging the toilettes of the Grand Duchesses’ robes à la grecque in Russia.25Vigée-Lebrun 1989, pp. 44–5. In 1830, the son of British portraitist George Romney claimed his father led 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 [fig. 14], 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.26Romney 1830, pp. 195–6.

In 1832, artist Albertine Clément-Hémery’s memoir credited one of her studio-mates in Paris, Adèle Tornezy, with inventing the style, saying “it was from our studio that Greek clothes came out to replace the shapeless bodices called à la Coblentz” and noting that after the young women artists paraded one day in 1794 the whole town imitated them:

The following Sunday, the Tuileries, the Champs-Élysées were filled with women streaked with bright-colored belts, hairbands, and Greek cothurnes. Tornezy triumphed; her haberdasher owed her his fortune.27Clément-Hémery 1832, pp. 25–6: “Le décadi suivant, les Tuileries, les Champs Elisées étaient remplis de femmes bariolées de ceintures, de bandelettes, de cothurnes grecs. Tornezy triompha: son passementier lui dût sa fortune.” See Siegfried 2015, p. 89, for a remarkable discussion of fashion’s role for the women in Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s studio.

But contemporaries who noticed the new fashion arising during the 1790s, rather than decades later, tended to credit it to one of three women: Lady Charlotte Campbell in London, said to be the model for Gillray’s satire of ladies’ dress discussed above (fig. 11); Emma Hart (later Lady Hamilton) in Naples, who posed for Romney’s Cassandra mentioned above (fig. 14); or Madame Thérésa Tallien in Paris (fig. 15). These three women will appear as focal characters in Chapters One, Three, and Five.

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Description: Cassandra Raving, Troilus & Cressida. Act II. Scene II by Legat, Francis

Fig. 14. Francis Legat after George Romney, Cassandra Raving, from Troilus and Cressida, 1795. Etching and engraving, published for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, 57 × 41.4 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

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Description: Portrait of Madame Tallien by Duvivier, Bernard

Fig. 15. Jean-Bernard Duvivier, Portrait of Madame Tallien, 1806. Oil on canvas, 125.7 × 93.3 cm. Brooklyn Museum, NY. Healy Purchase Fund B, 1989.28

“It is scarcely fifteen years,” reported La Belle Assemblée (London) in 1809, “since Lady Charlotte Campbell was the most distinguished ornament of the fashionable circle. . . . It is perhaps unnecessary to inform those female readers who are possessed of experience in the science of costume, and can count the revolutions of fashions with accuracy and precision, that Lady Charlotte Campbell was the first inventor of what is technically called short waists”28La Belle Assemblée; or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine (London), no. 46 (June, 1809), p. 167. Yet others had attributed this innovation—the raised waist, with its accompanying freedom from “that martyrdom which beauty has sustained from whalebone and tight lacing”—to Emma Hart, the striker of “attitudes” at Sir William Hamilton’s house in Naples.29The writer in La Belle Assemblée, no. 46 (June, 1809), p. 167, explicitly credits the new dress style with liberating women from tyrannous corsets. The Times of London credited Hart in 1793 with “attempting to introduce the dress and manners” of “Grecian models,” while her old lover Charles Francis Greville teased her about her influence in the summer of 1793, writing: “Tell Lady H. that I hope she does not follow the fashion of others; at the [Queen’s] birthday the prevailing fashion was very unlike court dress, & very unlike a Grecian dress, & very unlike Lady H. dress, but evidently an imitation of her.”30The Times (London), May 3, 1793, n.p.; Fraser 1987, p. 165.

Still other sources, such as this British account from 1796, credited Thérésa Tallien—the Parisian beauty and heroine of Thermidor (the end of the Reign of Terror)—with introducing the antique style to London, repeating a familiar dynamic of Britons following a Parisian fashion:

The Ladies of the present day, without waists, did not perhaps know that they copy this fashion from Madame Tallien, who copied it from the Greeks. Madame Tallien is one of the most elegant women in Europe, and had her waist shortened by a cestus of diamonds . . . The original Greek dress is a short negligee, and all of one piece from top to bottom, but never with a petticoat dropped over the body.31Morning Post and Fashionable World, February 26, 1796, n.p.

Throughout the Directory period, European periodicals followed the extreme and revealing fashions of the Merveilleuses, especially Madame Tallien, as fashion trendsetters. Yet by contrast, a Parisian fashion journal in 1799 credited not local beauties, but Emma Hart, by then Lady Hamilton, as the leader of fashion or “l’oracle du goût”: “As we know, Lady Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador in Naples, . . . is the model and the director of the fashion and adornment of women; as soon as she adopts a form of dress or hat, one can be sure that the next day it is copied by all the fashionables of the court.”32“On sait que lady Hamilton, épouse de l’ambassadeur d’Angleterre à Naples . . . On sait qu’elle est le modèle et la directrice de la mode et de la parure des femmes; dès qu’elle adopte une forme de robe ou de bonnet, on est sûr que le lendemain elle est copiée par toutes les élégantes de la cour.” Tableau général du goût des modes et costumes de Paris, par une société d’artistes et gens de lettres, An VII (1799), p. 19.

Innovation in fashion is difficult to pin down and is usually due to a confluence of sources and influences. Nonetheless, the repeated crediting by contemporaries of these three women—Emma Hart in Naples, Lady Charlotte Campbell in London, and Thérésa Tallien in Paris—lends credence to their being among the leaders of the neoclassical innovations of the 1790s, standing metonymically for larger communities of influence located in these places. These sources also draw our attention to the cross-border influence of these women—Hart, for example, is called the setter of style in Paris and London, even though she’s based in Naples, while the Parisian Tallien is a model for both London ladies and distant European courts. Contemporaries’ discussions of neoclassical dress also allow us to sketch a timeline for neoclassical dress’s appearance and dissemination. The emergence of white, high-waisted drapery from stages and art studios to fashionable evening and day wear occurred first in Naples in the late 1780s and early 1790s, led by the example of Hart. Campbell spent the winter of 1789–90 in Naples with her mother, the Duchess of Argyll, who was the first high-born British lady to receive Hart and who became close to her.33Indeed, when the duchess died in December 1790, Hart lamented in a letter to Greville, “I never had such a friend as her.” Morrison 1893–4, vol. 1, p. 143. Campbell brought the concept of neoclassical dress back with her to London, and it was just after she had turned 18 and emerged into the London social scene, in spring 1793, that we first begin hearing of the high waists, padded bellies, and transparent drapes she popularized. Meanwhile, Tallien, only two years older than Campbell, was in Bordeaux at this time, having divorced her émigré husband and taken refuge with relatives. There she met the charismatic Jean-Lambert Tallien, her future husband, and appeared as Goddess of Liberty in Bordeaux’s Festival of Reason in December 1793. Her emergence as a fashionable icon began with her release from prison in 1794 and her renown as “Our Lady of Thermidor,” with her taste for blond wigs and white muslin round gowns. Extreme neoclassical fashion flourished in the Directory period, led by Tallien and other ladies in her circle. At least two of these women, Joséphine de Beauharnais (Bonaparte) and Fortunée Hamelin, were Creoles who incorporated some of the practices and connotations of West Indies plantation culture into their muslin ensembles. The emergence of new illustrated fashion journals in London, Paris, and Weimar in the late 1790s cross-fertilized these innovations and spread them further. By 1800, the high-waisted white muslin dress was the orthodox style for women across Western Europe and the Americas.

TIME, PLACE, PERSON, FORM, MEANING

This book traces the emergence of neoclassical dress from the “attitude” costume of Naples to the belly pads of London to the transparent confections of Directoire Paris over the course of a tumultuous decade. Paintings, prints, aesthetic treatises, popular periodicals, memoirs, plays, scientific studies, sculptures, and garments all form the tapestry of evidence. Five elements distinguish the material form and expressive capacity of neoclassical dress: its drape, or the way it clung to the form of the body rather than creating a surface for decoration; its transparency, revealing the body but also metaphorically evoking truth and authenticity; its high-waistedness, with a columnar silhouette that highlighted the breasts and belly; its whiteness, based on the bleached cotton fabric called muslin; and its lightness, the spare yardage of the style and the resulting exposure of arms, breasts, and backs. In this book, the cultural history of neoclassical dress will be anchored by attention to the material truths of its construction and design. Short formalist studies of each of these five material features of neoclassical dress intersperse the chapters that follow, highlighting the form’s emblematic connection to a larger constellation of contemporary concerns.

In what follows, I consider five overlapping matrices—time, place, person, form, and meaning—each of which aims to map an aspect of neoclassical dress. Chronologically the narrative proceeds across the decade of the 1790s, while geographically it follows the emergence of neoclassical dress in Naples and its spread to London and then Paris. Each of these three geographical nodes is also associated with three women who were key innovators in each place: Emma Hamilton in Naples, Lady Charlotte Campbell in London, and Thérésa Tallien in Paris. Finally, each chapter takes one iconic figure by which women were often understood as living artworks as the point of departure for an exploration of an aspect of the living statue paradox: Galatea; the bacchante; Psyche; the Corinthian Maid; the wax statue; and the femme sauvage. When taken as a whole, these five matrices undergird the synthetic essays that form each chapter of the book, and shape my argument that women’s self-presentation as living statues in the 1790s was a substantive aesthetic project with historical significance and enduring cultural efficacy.

1 “Nos filles et nos jeunes femmes s’excusent de tout en disant qu’elles font les Grecques ou les statues, et qu’elles se drapent. Elles ne veulent plus porter que de la mousseline bien claire sans nul apprêt.” Genlis 1825, vol. 9, p. 394; quoted and translated in Cage 2009, p. 205. »

2 Oracle and Public Advertiser, January 26, 1796, n.p. »

3 These words are from Hugh Honour’s classic 1968 study, Honour 1968, pp. 34–7; see also Rosenblum 1967. Myrone 2005, p. 288, notes that even at the time “an opposition of ‘masculine’ classical art to a repulsive and feminized modernity was long established as a critical trope.” »

4 On the homosocial art world in France and the experiments with masculine identity in the period, see Crow 1995 and Solomon-Godeau 1997. For an alternative reading of neoclassicism as intensely emotional, morally relative, and theatrical, see Pop 2015. »

5 Well-known examples include Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s homoerotic classical art history and Richard Payne Knight’s treatise for the Society of Dilettanti on Sir William Hamilton’s wax phallus collection; in addition, Singley 1993 discusses the phallic imagery at the heart of Claude Nicolas Ledoux’s ideal city plan. Davis 2008 argues that Knight’s treatise has a more subtle understanding than Hamilton himself did of such votives, analyzing them as both modern and ancient corruptions of an even earlier pansexual understanding of erotic generativity. »

6 Little is known about Ann Frankland Lewis, who lived in Yorkshire, but her album of watercolors is preserved in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. On the historicity of fashion, see Campbell 2016. »

7 Grieder 1985. »

8 Chrisman-Campbell 2015. »

9 There is some scholarly dispute about the origin of this fashionable style; Aileen Ribeiro (Ribeiro 1995) suggests it was first worn by the queen during her pregnancy in Marly in the late 1770s and was then adopted by other court ladies as informal dress at Versailles, and that the Duchess of Devonshire attended a concert in 1784 “in one of the muslin chemises with fine lace that the Queen of France gave me” (p. 71). However, it seems likely that these early gowns were not round gowns but, rather, open robes, meant to wrap across the front, which was a traditional style for pregnancy wear and structurally related to the then-current mantua. Sheriff 1996, p. 143, by contrast, says the style originated in England and was imported to France in the 1780s as part of that decade’s Anglomania, associated, for example, with the artless, charming naturalism of the English landscape garden. See also Weber 2006, pp. 156–63. »

10 See Chrisman-Campbell 2015, Cage 2009, Grigsby 1998, Hollander 1994, Jones 2004, Lajer-Burcharth 1999, and Wrigley 2002. Aileen Ribeiro argues for more varied origins, although she still locates the most rigorous classical fashions in France and casts the British as less engaged with neoclassical dress; see Ribeiro 1995, 2002, and 2017. »

11 I use the term “artistic dress” here deliberately to invoke a similar dynamic of artistic influence on women’s dress as happened in the well-known artistic dress movement of the later nineteenth century. For a detailed account of these origins, see Rauser 2017a. »

12 See Kuchta 2002, Carter 2001, and Cohen 2000. »

13 Pointon 1993, pp. 114–23; and Ribeiro 2002. »

14 See Stafford 1991, Wahrman 2006, and Rauser 2008. »

15 Rauser 2008. »

16 Griffith and Carey 1994, p. 57. »

17 Cohen 2000. »

18 “Conversation between D’Alembert and Diderot,” 1769; see Diderot 1966. »

19 “Treatise on the Sensations,” 1754; see Condillac 1982. Despite Condillac’s “statue-man,” however, in the long history of living statues in the Western tradition, the statues that men experienced as enlivening were almost always female figures. See Hersey 2009. »

20 Herder 1769, p. 88; my translation. »

21 Rosenthal 2004 notes the significance of the Pygmalion myth in the eighteenth century as a racializing discourse central to the creation of the idea of the “fair sex.” See also Carr 1960 and Holmström 1967 on eighteenth-century productions of Pygmalion in a variety of media. See Stoichita 2008 and Gross 2006 on the conceptual meaning of Pygmalion and related stories of living artworks. »

22 Herder 1778. »

23 From Diderot’s 1749 Letter on the Blind; see Paterson 2007, p. 2. On the haptic and art, see also Zuckert 2009. »

24 Emma Hart’s “attitudes,” analyzed in detail in Chapter One, were a series of still poses imitating figures in classical, and sometimes religious, art. She developed them as a parlor entertainment and performed them for decades for audiences at her home in Naples and when traveling abroad. »

25 Vigée-Lebrun 1989, pp. 44–5. »

26 Romney 1830, pp. 195–6. »

27 Clément-Hémery 1832, pp. 25–6: “Le décadi suivant, les Tuileries, les Champs Elisées étaient remplis de femmes bariolées de ceintures, de bandelettes, de cothurnes grecs. Tornezy triompha: son passementier lui dût sa fortune.” See Siegfried 2015, p. 89, for a remarkable discussion of fashion’s role for the women in Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s studio. »

28 La Belle Assemblée; or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine (London), no. 46 (June, 1809), p. 167. »

29 The writer in La Belle Assemblée, no. 46 (June, 1809), p. 167, explicitly credits the new dress style with liberating women from tyrannous corsets. »

30 The Times (London), May 3, 1793, n.p.; Fraser 1987, p. 165. »

31 Morning Post and Fashionable World, February 26, 1796, n.p. »

32 “On sait que lady Hamilton, épouse de l’ambassadeur d’Angleterre à Naples . . . On sait qu’elle est le modèle et la directrice de la mode et de la parure des femmes; dès qu’elle adopte une forme de robe ou de bonnet, on est sûr que le lendemain elle est copiée par toutes les élégantes de la cour.” Tableau général du goût des modes et costumes de Paris, par une société d’artistes et gens de lettres, An VII (1799), p. 19. »

33 Indeed, when the duchess died in December 1790, Hart lamented in a letter to Greville, “I never had such a friend as her.” Morrison 1893–4, vol. 1, p. 143. »

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