Caps and Randomness

20 Thursday Dec 2012

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NGA- Lady Wearing a Large White Cap

NGA- Lady Wearing a Large White Cap

Sweet cap, right? It all started because it’s cold this morning here in RI and I thought about skating when I went out to get the Times, and that led to Gilbert Stuart, which led to the National Gallery.

They have a fun search option, similar to the Tate Britain’s subject-search, but not quite as elegant.
You can start with a subject search, and then add a sub category. Results (stability not guaranteed) show you things you would not have otherwise expected, and that’s one more reason to love online catalogs & databases.

NGA Screenshot

NGA Screenshot

The results give you little unexpected galleries, and the juxtaposition or similarities of the thumbnails help you see the work differently. Black dresses and white collars are prevalent on this page: why? Is this fashion alone, or are these mourning garments? they’re earlier than the Civil War, but maybe it’s time to re-read This Republic of Suffering.

NGA- Sarah Cook Arnold knitting

NGA- Sarah Cook Arnold knitting

But wait–who is this? It’s Probably Sarah Cook Arnold, Knitting. (Probably is not her name, smartypants, it’s an adverb.)

She’s knitting in the round, by the way, on three incredibly tiny pins from an invisible ball of yarn, possibly swallowed by the cat hidden in her skirts. (I know a woman who can knit with these skinny quadruple-ought pins, but they are a hazard in my hands.)

I would not have found Sarah Cook Arnold knitting without using the random subject search, nor would I have found Fabulous Cap at the top. Sometimes you need to enjoy the journey as much as the destination.

Smibert Smitten

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

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John Smibert made me laugh. He’s been dead since 1751, so it wasn’t easy.

The day I went to the MFA and walked into the gallery with Mrs Tyng on wall, I laughed, and said, “I know her!” while my son died a small interior death. Then I pulled up the record and image for Mrs Browne, and showed him how I knew Mrs Tyng.

Follow Smibert’s pictorial advice if you’re reenacting an American woman of means between 1729 and 1732, and you’re wearing blue silk. You may have a red silk wrapper/shawl. Your shift will show at the center front and sleeves to show off your fine linen. You look like you might be a little cold, but perhaps that explains the “I store oranges in my bodice” look.

See for yourself:

MMA, Mrs Brinley & her son

MFA, Mrs MacSparran

RIHS, Mrs Browne

MFA, Mrs Tyng

MFA, Mrs Dudley

Smith College- Mrs Erving

Smith College- Mrs Erving

 

Yale- The Bermuda Group

Yale- The Bermuda Group

After a while, you start to wonder if there was only one woman in the colonies in 1730… And then you wonder how she got into every painting…

I know, style and conventions helped create these portraits as much as Smibert’s skill. And the portraits only get weird when you do the thing that was never supposed to happen. We were never meant to see all of these portraits all together, all at once, anywhere.

h2_2010.148-1 So, what’s she wearing? Probably this dress. No, not this exact dress, though if it was same woman in all those paintings, maybe the Met does have her actual dress. (Sometimes I have these weird museum-y ideas, and that’s generally when I need a vacation or come up with a new program idea.)

The robe volante shows up in paintings of women dressing, and in informal scenes, as below. She’s clearly wearing stays, which is helpful to know, because while I knew the women in the Smibert paintings ought to be wearing stays, and they had conical torsos, the orange-smuggling look was confusing.

Galerie Dreyfus- Scène galante dans un parc, ca 1725

Galerie Dreyfus- Scène galante dans un parc, ca 1725

In fact, it confuses me still.

Seriously, the 18th century was a pretty sexy place, if you like oranges and silk.

Yale- Mrs Tyng

Yale- Mrs Tyng

Look, there’s Mrs Tyng again! She’s left the MFA and taken a chair at Yale.

Linings, perhaps not Silver

17 Monday Dec 2012

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MMA, 2011.104a–c, Silk & linen suit, 1780-1790

MMA, 2011.104a–c, Silk & linen suit, 1780-1790

The house is cleaned up for Christmas, which means all the sewing things have been put away, which is rather sad. Cassandra is banished to the basement, fabric stashed and stacked. It’s only ten days: better if I don’t count all that lost time when I could be pleating! Better to finish up some portable plain sewing, like shift and shirt.

On Friday, I spent part of the morning in the Cave of Wonders known as Textile Storage with a historical costume expert who specializes in men’s clothing. He had already promised to leave and sworn not move in before I opened the door, and that was probably a good thing. But I got a chance to ask some questions and here are the answers.

The frock coat tail linings of calendered linen: Nancy wanted to know if they didn’t stick to men’s breeches, linen catching on broadcloth, in the plainer suits. No, my source says, because the linings were slick. That was the point of the glazing. When it was new and fresh, it was much slicker than it is now. After 220+ years, slickness will fade. Calendered fabric has been pressed and heated, and that process makes it slick. If you’ve ever pressed a wool dress with too hot an iron, you might have achieved a glossy, slick finish that you weren’t expecting. Calendering is similar, but on purpose.

Incroyable-No3-detAnd then there’s padding. Sabine made an amazingly beautiful jacket based on an original. The lining is really interesting, because it is padded. Well, that padding is about style. In the plate at left, the shoulder line of the jacket is high, and the collar rises up as well. The chest is rounded, as we can see along the side. The way to achieve that look is through tailoring, including the use of padding.

The militia jackets in the collection at work include one with some pretty intense (several inches thick) padding in the front. That was for line, not repelling bullets, or even so much for warmth. The padding we find in men’s and women’s tailored clothes is about style, and maintaining a line. You’ll see this often in women’s riding habits or “Amazones.”

V&A T.158-1962

V&A T.158-1962

V&A, T.158-1962, overview

On pages 160-161 of Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail, there are two examples of padding used to shape garments. The first is a riding habit, seen here in detail and in overview. (Click for the record & larger views.) The padding here has been used to create the smooth, conical silhouette.

Sweet Little Dresses

16 Sunday Dec 2012

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Bellville Sassoon rang no bells for me, being American. So I did the google and ended up at the V&A, of course. They have a Bellville Sassoon evening gown, which is a lovely column of froth and beads, but not my taste.

V&A T.17-2007

V&A T.17-2007

This led me to gifts from David Sassoon,including this miniature dress, a quarter-scale couture reproduction of a Jean Dessès dress.

Whoa. That’s really interesting!

There’s a Madame Grès as well, and the V&A catalog record notes:

“These scaled copies use the same fabrics and show the superb craftsmanship as their full size equivalents. The V & A have four of these miniature dresses which the donor acquired from the archive of the wholesale house of Dorville. Wholesalers would buy the copyrights to couture dresses so that they could sell modified ready-to-wear copies. It is thought that these quarter-scale dresses were sold alongside the patterns to show how the dress looked when made up.” Ever see the Newman-Woodwar movie A New Kind of Love?

What I love about the the Dessès dress is how much it reminds me of these dresses:

KCI 1845 English Day Dress

KCI 1845 English Day Dress

V&A ca. 1895 T.17-1985

V&A ca. 1895 T.17-1985

That’s one of the fun things about fashion, and about history. Details emerge and re-emerge in style and design (yes, historicism) and connect our present with the past. Museums strive to do that every day, but fashion can do it on the street and in your closet. That’s another kind of living history.

LBJ Had a Question

15 Saturday Dec 2012

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Swearing in of LBJ as President

In 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson was inaugurated as president on a hot, over-crowded airplane on the tarmac at Love Field outside Dallas. He had spent the years since JFK’s inauguration in 1961 becoming increasingly irrelevant, unnecessary, and humiliated. All the power that LBJ had built up first in the house and then in the senate–the place where he became the master of power, process, and of men–all that power was gone.

The Treatment: LBJ & Chicago’s Mayor Daley

He knew what lurked in the hearts of men, and knew how to use it or to buy it. He knew how to get things done, good and ill. It was Robert Caro’s recent book, The Passage of Power, that fully explained to me how kickbacks work. LBJ didn’t get rich by working hard in the conventional way. And yet: he never forgot Cotulla, Texas. Never forget the road gang, never forgot working hard with his (admittedly enormous) hands.

LBJ and MLK at signing, Voting Rights Act, 8-6-1965

LBJ and MLK at signing, Voting Rights Act, 8-6-1965

With the benefit of hindsight, does LBJ become clearer? We can never forgive him Vietnam, but we can remember the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Great Society. Johnson’s hero was FDR, his model the New Deal. In late 1963, when an ally told him that the fight for civil rights was a lost cause, Johnson had a rebuttal, according to Robert Caro.

“Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

Johnson, not elected to the office he now held, and with another election about to swing into gear, asked that question. What was the presidency for, but to fight for lost causes, noble causes. Why else would you work so hard to build political capital, but to spend it?

What the hell’s the presidency for, but to fight for what a nation, or a nation’s most vulnerable people, need?

LBJ was corrupt, profane, adulterous, and coarse. I can’t say what he would have done in the political climate today, but the question he asked is worth asking today.

All images from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library‘s photo archive.