TRANSPARENCY

Fichu-Turban. Chapeau de Paille, à bord retroussé, from Journal des dames et des modes, Costume Parisien, An 8, 4 juillet 1800. Hand-colored engraving, 19.8 × 11.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Neoclassical dress is transparent. The finest neoclassical dresses were made from Indian muslin woven from hand-spun yarns of a gossamer thinness. For centuries, this highest quality muslin had been imported in small quantities and used by Europeans as precious veils or handkerchiefs. Transparency was so highly prized in neoclassical dress that some garments added even more transparent panels of netting to amplify the effect (fig. 48), or formed decorative transparent stripes with needle techniques that drew apart the threads in some sections (fig. 49). Other neoclassical gowns were made entirely from transparent netting.1For example, dress 1947–1746 in the Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall, Manchester, UK. The effect of such transparency over the body was to lightly veil the flesh in a delicate whiteness, the dress thinned to a fine membrane (fig. 50).

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Description: Cotton muslin dress with embroidered net inserts, detail by Unknown

Fig. 48. Cotton muslin dress with embroidered net inserts (detail), ca. 1800–05. Manchester City Galleries (Platt Hall), 1922–1753

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Description: Cotton muslin dress with drawn threads and cotton embroidery, detail by Unknown

Fig. 49. Cotton muslin dress with drawn threads and cotton embroidery (detail), ca. 1800–05. Manchester City Galleries (Platt Hall), 1922–1765

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Description: Portrait of Josephine, the Wife of Napoleon, detail by Gérard, François,...

Fig. 50. François Gérard, Portrait of Joséphine, Wife of Napoleon (detail), 1801. Oil on canvas, 178 × 174 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

Petticoats, fichus, and chemises were used to manage the transparency of the outer garment, but at least some women exploited muslin’s see-through qualities to the hilt. George Moutard Woodward’s Too Much and Too Little, or Summer Cloathing for 1556 & 1796 (fig. 51) contrasts the upholstered and extravagantly shaped sixteenth-century body with the revealed 1790s body. Here, the transparent muslin is worn entirely without undergarments; the watercolorist has taken pains to distinguish between the veiled flesh of the torso and thighs and the blue-white hue of the gartered and stockinged legs, both clearly visible beneath the gossamer gown. As Lady Louisa Stuart (then aged 41) remarked in 1798:

Those who have real beauty are wonderfully distinguished by the present dress. . . . transparent dresses that leave you certain there is no chemise beneath! The fault of the reigning fashion when carried to its extreme, even for the youngest and handsomest, is, to say the truth, indecency. Not that it shows so much more than people have done at many other times, but that it both shows and covers, in a certain way. . . . And in a high wind! . . . Don’t imagine me an old maid growling at the young people, for some of the most remarkable statues in wet drapery are very fully my contemporaries at least.2Lady Louisa Stuart, letter to the Duchess of Buccleuch, May 31, 1798 (Clark 1896, p. 246). This is the only contemporaneous reference to “wet drapery” I have found, and it appears to be describing the clinging effect created when thin muslin blew against the body in a high wind. Despite its prominence in the later legends of this period, wetting garments to increase their transparency seems not to have occurred in the 1790s and early 1800s.

The effect of transparent dresses in high winds fascinated artists as well; Féréol de Bonnemaison’s Young Woman Overtaken by a Storm (fig. 52) paints the transparency of neoclassical dress as a vulnerability, exposing an isolated woman to dangerous natural forces. But exposure also left unfettered the skin, the crucial perceptual organ for the sense of touch.

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Description: Too much and too little, or, Summer cloathing for 1556 & 1796 by Woodward,...

Fig. 51. Isaac Cruikshank after George Moutard Woodward, Too Much and Too Little, or Summer Cloathing for 1556 & 1796, 1796. Hand-colored etching, 37.8 × 29 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

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Description: Young Woman Overtaken by a Storm by Bonnemaison, Ferréol de

Fig. 52. Féréol de Bonnemaison, Young Woman Overtaken by a Storm, 1799. Oil on canvas, 100 × 80.5 cm. Brooklyn Museum, New York. Gift of Louis Thomas, 71.138.1

The transparency of neoclassical muslin drew attention to the skin of the body not as a surface to be decorated but as the fine and perhaps permeable boundary between the self and the world, one that vibrated with sensation. Indeed, transparency was a desirable quality for skin itself; the advertisements for Dr. Gowland’s Celebrated Lotion acclaimed its ability to render “the surface of the skin smooth and transparent,” and Juliette Récamier’s beautiful complexion was described by one memoirist as a model: “her transparent pigment allows one to see the blood circulating beneath her epidermis.”3Morning Post and Gazetteer, December 1, 1800, n.p.; and “le teint transparent permet de voir circuler le sang sous l’épiderme,” in Reichardt 1896, pp. 99–100; quoted and translated by Cage 2009, p. 207. Skin was the crucial organ for the perception of touch, and as philosophers refined their theories of perception and cognition, the sense of touch, the sense that animated this interface, emerged as a key sense for empirically knowing the world. The clinging transparency of neoclassical dress, with its thinness and lightness reducing the interference between body and world, seemed to facilitate the employment of the haptic sense and to remake the body into a highly sensitive organ of embodied cognition.

As sensationist thought elevated the body as a site of perception and cognition, clothing’s role also became contested in a new way. Not only could thick or constrictive clothing interfere with the body’s interaction with and understanding of the world, but also it could be deceptive, hiding the truth. A preoccupation with unmasking and widespread worry about artificial and disingenuous surfaces caused a longing for transparency and for technologies of representation, like caricature, that would expose the truth of a person’s interior self.4Rauser 2008. As Richard Wrigley has shown, attempts to legislate clothing during the French Revolution were chiefly aimed at creating a semiotically transparent and legible set of garments that simultaneously revealed the pure, Jacobin hearts of their wearers and shaped men and women into authentic citizens.5Wrigley 2002. Transparent dress also revealed wholeness, countering the abjection of the fragmented, the diseased, or the dismembered. Harmony between interior values and exterior presentation, then, was both highly prized, and highly doubted. Transparent neoclassical dress promised authenticity, wholeness, and naturalism.

Transparency was also an aesthetic trait exploited in the increasing number and variety of visual spectacles in the 1790s. Drawing on the growing attention to sensation in the age of sensibility, visual spectacles like panoramas and illuminations both explored the limits of sensation, and exploited the senses’ potential for deception.6Bermingham 2007, p. 205. Illuminations employed oiled, painted transparent illustrations and might be used to celebrate public celebrations or festivals, such as the return of George III to health in 1789; as theatrical presentations, as with the novel stage effects of Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg; or as the scrolling “moving landscapes” of Louis Carrogis Carmontelle. But “transparencies” also had a vogue as a domestic decoration in the 1790s, mostly made by women as items of handcraft, particularly in England. British publishers Rudolph Ackermann and Edward Orme produced prints and instruction books directing users to transform an etching or engraving into a transparency by painting it with watercolor scraping away some areas, and applying varnish to turn the paper translucent. The results could be used as window coverings, lamp or candle shades, fire screens, or fans. Moonlit scenes, erupting volcanoes or other scenes with dramatic lighting effects were particularly well suited to the treatment, as in Outside of a Castle (fig. 53), published by Ackermann in 1798. Just as with the spectatorship of Emma Hart’s attitudes, the enjoyment of transparencies was interactive, dramatic, domestic, and communal; the painted prints could be admired in regular light, and then were held up against a strong light, backlit, to divulge a sudden reveal of the glowing scene (fig. 54).7Barnaby 2017, p. 30, notes that while this was a theatrical practice, in the domestic sphere the performer and the audience were merged.

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Description: Outside of a Castle. To Lady Charlotte Campbell, this print from the original...

Fig. 53. Edward Orme after James Hook, Outside of a Castle. To Lady Charlotte Campbell, this print from the original Transparent Drawing in her Ladyship’s Collection, 1798. Etching with aquatint and hand-coloring, 22.2 × 27.7 cm, photographed in normal light. Optical Devices and Views Collection (GC138); Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University

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Fig. 54. A backlit version of Outside of a Castle. Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University

Like women and fashionable dress, transparencies were easily dismissed; the Monthly Review called them “a plaything of art;-the amusement of an idle hour.”8Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal Enlarged (London), vol. 58 (January–April, 1809), p. 216. John Plunkett has shown how the aesthetics of transparencies, which were both radiant and passive, reposing dully until an external spark of light made them glow, were often conflated with both amateurism and femininity.9Plunkett 2016, p. 56. Indeed, the language of animation pervades the enjoyment of transparencies, as it did the living statue. They were sometimes used as a poetic metaphor for vitalist animation, as in William Parson’s “Sonnet, On Some Transparencies Done By A Lady”:

What tho’ their forms, inanimate and cold,
Unaptly plac’d, are objects of disdain:
As spoke th’omniscient Word—”LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
—With sudden lustre skies, and groves, and streams
Start, as from Chaos old, in beauty bright,
When new Creation felt the vital beams!10William Parsons, Travelling Recreations (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807), vol. 2, p. 156.

At least one printmaker made the connection between the transparency of neoclassical dress and the vogue for illustrated transparencies, and the animating qualities of each. Transparencies (fig. 55) shows three women against a black background, casting sharp shadows. All wear transparent neoclassical dress that clearly reveals the shapes of their legs and the voids of space between them—and, in the case of the woman shown from the rear, the curve of her buttocks. This print, with its dramatic lighting effects and strong contrast between dark ground and light figures, was intended either to be transformed into a transparency or to mimic the effects of one.

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Fig. 55. Unknown, Transparencies, 1799. Etching and aquatint, 26.9 × 25.5 cm. British Museum, London

The transparency of neoclassical dress, then, was not only aimed at erotic effects. In making—and wearing—transparencies, women participated in the cultural exploration of materiality, light, sensation, and visual knowledge, and in technologies of self-construction and self-representation, even when they remained within the intimate spaces of drawing room and salon.11Plunkett 2016, pp. 43–4; and Barnaby 2017, p. 30.

1 For example, dress 1947–1746 in the Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall, Manchester, UK. »

2 Lady Louisa Stuart, letter to the Duchess of Buccleuch, May 31, 1798 (Clark 1896, p. 246). This is the only contemporaneous reference to “wet drapery” I have found, and it appears to be describing the clinging effect created when thin muslin blew against the body in a high wind. Despite its prominence in the later legends of this period, wetting garments to increase their transparency seems not to have occurred in the 1790s and early 1800s. »

3 Morning Post and Gazetteer, December 1, 1800, n.p.; and “le teint transparent permet de voir circuler le sang sous l’épiderme,” in Reichardt 1896, pp. 99–100; quoted and translated by Cage 2009, p. 207. »

4 Rauser 2008. »

5 Wrigley 2002. »

6 Bermingham 2007, p. 205. »

7 Barnaby 2017, p. 30, notes that while this was a theatrical practice, in the domestic sphere the performer and the audience were merged. »

8 Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal Enlarged (London), vol. 58 (January–April, 1809), p. 216. »

9 Plunkett 2016, p. 56. »

10 William Parsons, Travelling Recreations (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807), vol. 2, p. 156. »

11 Plunkett 2016, pp. 43–4; and Barnaby 2017, p. 30. »

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