Frankenstein and the Critics

Frankenstein, annotated 2017

Loretta reports:

Mary Shelley’s reviewers had extremely different reactions to Frankenstein.

Following a plot summary, John Croker has this to say:

“Our readers will guess from this summary, what a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity this work presents ... The dreams of insanity are embodied in the strong and striking language of the insane, and the author, notwithstanding the rationality of his preface, often leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero." 

Following samples of the prose style:

“... we take the liberty of assuring [the author] ... that the style which he has adopted in the present publication merely tends to defeat his own purpose, if he really had any other object in view than that of leaving the wearied reader, after a struggle between laughter and loathing, in doubt whether the head or the heart of the author be the most diseased."

—Quarterly Review 18 (January [delayed until 12 June] 1818): 379-385. From the Mary Shelley Chronology and Resource Site, Scholarly Resources, Romantic Circles.

Walter Scott, however, is thrilled:

“So concludes this extraordinary tale, in which the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination. The feeling with which we perused the unexpected and fearful, yet, allowing the possibility of the event, very natural conclusion of Frankenstein's experiment, shook a little even our firm nerves ...

It is no slight merit in our eyes, that the tale, though wild in incident, is written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting that mixture of hyperbolical Germanisms with which tales of wonder are usually told, as if it were necessary that the language should be as extravagant as the fiction. The ideas of the author are always clearly as well as forcibly expressed; and his descriptions of landscape have in them the choice requisites of truth, freshness, precision, and beauty ... 

Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author's original genius and happy power of expression ... If Gray's definition of Paradise, to lie on a couch, namely, and read new novels, come any thing near truth, no small praise is due to him, who, like the author of Frankenstein, has enlarged the sphere of that fascinating enjoyment."

Start of review in La Belle Assemblée

—Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 (March 1818)
His whole review is well worth reading, as are others. You can read them here at the Romantic Circles website.

If you are in New York between now and the last week of January, you might want to stop by the Morgan Library for the exhibition, “It’s Alive! Frankenstein at 200.”

Images: Cover of 2017 annotated edition of Frankenstein; Beginning of La Belle Assemblée review of Frankenstein, Vol. 17, March 1818

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on a caption link will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed. And just so you know, if you order a book through one of my posts, I might get a small share of the sale.

Friday Video: Sparkly Little Pink Coat by Balenciaga

Loretta reports:

On a blog post a while back, I offered some images from the Balenciaga, Shaping Fashion exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Today’s video will give you an idea of the level of artistry and amount of work that went into one element of making a single garment displayed in the exhibition. After you view it, I strongly recommend you take a look at the closeups of the pink, feathery coat on the V&A website.

 

You might also want to take a look at some of the other V&A videos dealing with the exhibition. They’re short, and, among other things, provide some glimpses of the Conservation Department and its work, which I had the rare privilege of visiting, thanks to a thoughtful friend from London.*

The image above left is a still from the video, since nowhere, in the thousands of photos my husband and I took during this year’s travels, could I find one of this particular item. But then, none of our photos, shot through glass, would have been nearly as crisply close up as those on the V&A website.

*I mean you, Betsy!

V&A video: Lesage and Balenciaga, via YouTube

Clicking on the image will enlarge it, but it will be fuzzy.

Churchill War Rooms

Loretta reports from London:

Fairly early on in our time in London, we visited the Churchill War Rooms. This happened a few days after the attack at London Bridge, and made perfectly clear, in case we hadn't already realized, what it really means to be a "city under siege." As in, when bombs are falling and invasion is a definite possibility.

"The story of the Churchill War Rooms is ... one of brilliant improvisation in the face of deadly necessity," according to the guidebook. You can read a short history of its creation here, and learn more about it on the website. I'm going to do my usual while abroad with extremely low speed internet and alien computer technology, and offer pictures.

What I will point out is, not until you get down into this claustrophobic space, think about the numbers of people working here every day and night in secret, read the signs, see the working conditions, and so on, do you have the beginnings of a clue about what it might have been like to get through that war. I choked up more than once, thinking about the courage and endurance of these heroes.

All images: Photo copyright © 2017 Walter M. Henritze III

Casual Friday: A Little Balenciaga

Loretta reporting from London:

Yesterday I visited the V& A. I cannot show you pictures of my behind-the-scenes tour of the conservation department because pictures were not allowed, but I can tell you it was fascinating--and the conservationists there are extremely busy. All the time. Because the V&A has about a jillion or more (I like to be precise) works of art of various kinds, and everything deteriorates.

After lunch, I returned with the same London friend who got me into the conservation department, for a tour of the exhibition Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion. A show like this offers about the only opportunity for ordinary people like me to get up close and personal with haute couture. Even viewed through glass, the work is stunning. And even if one is not in love with a particular style, one can admire the artistry.  

 

A quotation from the exhibition:

"Balenciaga alone is a couturier in the truest sense of the word. Only he is capable of cutting material, assembling a creation and sewing it by hand. The others are simply fashion designers." Coco Chanel

A Dinner Dress for the Holidays, c1824-26

Susan reporting,

I recently visited the Masterworks: Unpacking Fashion exhibition currently on display in the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They're not kidding about that title, either: every garment truly is a masterwork, and in exquisite condition. It's an amazing exhibition, and if you're fortunate enough to be in New York, it's definitely worth a trip to the Met.

With the Christmas holidays just around the corner, this dress from the exhibition seems particularly appropriate to share. This dress is simply fun, and it made everyone who came around the gallery corner smile.

It's also wonderful to see a dress like this in person. As Loretta has pointed out in other blogs featuring fashion plates from this era (here, here, and here), imagining exactly how the elaborate trimmings must have looked isn't easy. The detailed embellishments of this dress - poufs, red silk stuffed cording, and polychrome wool embroidery - add wonderful color and dimension to an otherwise plain white dress. (Loretta and I also marveled at how the wearer managed to keep a snow-white dinner dress so perfectly clean, without a single spot of gravy or spilled claret-cup - though that may be revealing more about us at Christmas parties than the unknown wearer.)

The museum's information is worth repeating here:

"Fashionable British dress from the early decades of the nineteenth century reveals a fascination with historical styles. Drawing inspiration from literature, theater costumes and history paintings of medieval and Renaissance subjects, dressmakers incorporated stylistic details from twelfth-through seventeenth-century dress into contemporary fashions. The decoratively slashed sleeves of the sixteenth century, through which linen undershirts were loosely drawn, inspired puffed trimmings such as the bouillons of fine white lawn that encircle the hem of this 1820s dress. Historicized elements such as these reflect a nostalgia for Britain's past, evoking romantic notions of the chivalry or patriotism of earlier eras. The wool crewel-embroidered holly boughs at the hem indicate that the dress was worn in winter, when the plant's berries and foliage provided welcome color and featured prominently in Christmas decorations."

When I shared this dress on Instagram, readers wondered how the wearer could have kept warm, wearing a short-sleeved cotton dress in December in houses without central heating. The answer: a luxurious cashmere shawl (see here and here.)

Above: Dinner Dress, maker unknown, British, 1824-26. White cotton lawn embroidered with holly motifs in red and green wool, trimmed with red silk taffeta. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photographs ©2016 Susan Holloway Scott.

The Extraordinary Style of the Countess Greffulhe

Isabella reporting,

French women have always had a reputation for being fashionable, but Élisabeth de Caraman-Chimay, the Countess Greffulhe (1860-1952) made fashion into an opulent gesture of self-expression. While she was known as a patroness of artists, writers, and musicians and as a hostess whose salons attracted the most brilliant members of European society, it is her sense of style that makes her so memorable today.

There are two reasons for this. First, she was immortalized as the fictionalized Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes, in the famous novel À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Second, her family preserved much of her famous wardrobe. The highlights of this collection are currently on display in the exhibition Proust's Muse: The Countess Greffulhe at the Museum at FIT in New York City through January 7, 2017. (Many of the pieces appeared first in an earlier exhibition organized by the Palais Galleria, Musée de la Ville de Paris, the permanent repository of the Countess's wardrobe.)

It's an amazing show. The earliest pieces date from 1887, when the Countess was a teen-aged newlywed. Already her taste - and her daring - are on display. There's a sleeveless, black lace bodice that would have been worn over a colored gown, not-so-subtle transparency that must have been shocking at the time.

By the later 1890s, the Countess was not only commissioning clothing from premier couturiers like the House of Worth, but collaborating with them, pushing the designers to create the dramatic clothing she craved. She loved to be the center of attention wherever she went, and journalists devoted countless words to describing what she wore to the opera or theatre. She posed for photographers like Paul Nadar, and polished her "image" before that very-modern sense of the word existed.

One of her most famous dresses by Worth, above left, was known as the "lily dress" for its bold black-and-white embroidered design. The photograph, above right, shows the Countess wearing the dress, with her pose carefully staged with the mirror to display both the dress, and her own beauty.

To me perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the exhibition is that it includes clothes worn by the Countess throughout her long life, from the heavily corseted dresses of the Belle Epoque to the narrower silhouette of the early 1910s, lower left, to straight, beaded shifts of the 1920s, lower right, to the beautifully cut and sinuous dresses and suits of the 1930s. Certain elements of her taste (for example, she frequently wore the color green, flattering to her auburn hair, and she loved exotic Byzantine prints and motifs) remain, weaving in and out of the changing fashions. Yet always her clothes remained constant to who she was, and how she wished to be seen - and remembered.

Unfortunately the Musée de la Ville de Paris prohibited visitor photography. You can see more of the Countess's dresses here, on the the exhibition's blog, and on the museum's Flickr account here.

Many thanks to Nicole Bloomfield, Costume & Textile Conservator, and Ariele Elia, Assistant Curator of Costume & Textile, Museum at FIT, for their help with this post.

Upper left: Evening gown, known as "La Robe aux Lis" (the lily dress) c1896, by House of Worth. Photograph by L. Degraces et Ph.Joffre/Galliera/roger-Viollet.
Upper right: The Countess Greffulhe by Paul Nadar, c1896. 
Lower left: Evening dress, c1913, by Pierre Bulloz. Photograph ©Zach Hilty/BFA.com
Lower right: Evening dress, c1925, by Jenny. Photograph ©Zach Hilty/BFA.com.
Bottom left: The Countess Greffulhe in a Ballgown by Otto Wegener, c1887.
All images from Palais Galliera, Musee de la mode de la Ville de Paris.

Relics of Old London, 1875-1886

Loretta reports:

Thanks to an overnight visit to New Haven this past weekend, I was able to make two visits to the Yale Center for British Art. During the first, I made my way to the fourth floor gallery, one of my favorite places, to view the new display of the collections, “Britain in the World.” You can read about it here.

On the second visit, I spent a long time in a small, fascinating exhibit, Art in Focus: Relics of Old London, which runs until 14 August 2016.

On display were beautiful carbon photoprints of London buildings in the later Victorian era. These were part of a project begun in 1875 when “ a group of friends united to memorialize”* the Oxford Arms coaching inn, which was facing demolition. “Over the following decade, the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London continued to issue photographs of buildings that were abandoned, altered, or soon to be destroyed, to honor bygone and overlooked sites and to rouse public sentiment against such development projects.”

Oxford Arms, the galleries

Since I like to write road books, I was especially interested in the photos of old coaching inns. But all of the images give one a sense of time travel.

The exhibition photographs come from the Paul Mellon Collection, and are part of a complete set of 120 photographs the museum owns. The photos were originally issued in “portfolios of green morocco leather, with gilt lettering.” This, and the decision to produce carbon prints, which are highly stable and thus permanent, show that the images were meant to be a lasting record. According to the exhibition pamphlet, “the accompanying letterpress included detailed scholarly excavations of the layers of history in each site photographed.”

You can see the images and the descriptions at the Royal Academy Collections.

I also recommend a visit to one of the 2NHG’s favorite London blogs, Spitalfields Life, where you can see some Then & Now: Relics of London photos to compare with photos of the buildings that escaped destruction.

*All quotations from exhibition catalog: Art in Focus: Relics of Old London, Yale Center for British Art.

Image: The Upper Gallery, The Oxford Arms, Warwick Lane, 1875, ca.1875, scanned from Exhibition catalog (Note: the copyrighted images at, e.g., the Royal Academy of Arts, are much sharper. Oxford Arms, the galleries, looking from Warwick Lane, courtesy Wikipedia.

Oxford Arms in Better Days

Note: For those readers who are joining the Lord of Scoundrels read/re-read-along this month, Jessica would have watched the fight from a gallery like this, but in much better condition, obviously in 1828. Unfortunately, I lost the link to the image at left.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption (except for the one at left) will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Remarkable Dr. Mead

Ramsay, Portrait of Dr. Richard Mead

Loretta reports:

Sometimes it’s my husband’s fault. He’s the one who asked me if I’d ever heard of Dr. Mead. When I looked blank, he read the following from a New Yorker piece  on papyrus scrolls: “Mead was a distinguished British physician, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a noted book collector, with a library of more than a hundred thousand volumes in his house in Bloomsbury, which was dispersed in an epic, fifty-six-day auction after his death, in 1754.”

A hundred thousand volumes? Naturally, I had to investigate.

Among other discoveries, I found this obituary in Munk’s Roll, Royal College of Physicians, Lives of the Fellows, and a series of blog posts, written in conjunction with an exhibition I wish I’d seen: "The Generous Georgian: Dr. Richard Mead."

He was, most definitely, a gentleman of the Enlightenment. Along with the book collection (which this site puts at 10K, not 100K), he was a patron of the arts, gave generously of time and money to The Foundling Hospital, experimented on himself—e.g., drinking snake venom—to test theories, published a number of treatises (here’s one), strongly supported smallpox inoculation (but do take a look at which persons were experimented on first) and ...

Gillray, The Cow-Pock 1802

But why not just click on the Generous Georgian link, and read the posts for yourself? In sum, this man was no slacker.

Online you can also find these catalogs from the auction of his collection:

“Valuable gems, bronzes, marble and other busts and antiquities" and some weird other stuff here.  "Pictures, consisting of portraits, landscapes, sea-pieces, architecture, flowers, fruits, animals, histories" here. "Genuine, entire and curious collection of prints and drawings (bound and unbound) here.

"The said collection may be view'd on Thursday the 9th and every day after (Sunday excepted) till the time of sale, which will begin each evening punctually at half an hour after five o'clock."

Images: Allan Ramsay, Dr. Richard Mead (1747) courtesy Coram in the Care of the Foundling Museum. James Gillray, The Cow-pock—or—the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation (1802) courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

"Philadelphia in Style": A Century of Fashion

Isabella reporting,

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows by now , there are few things I enjoy more than an exhibition of historic clothing. Last week I attended the preview of a splendid one: Philadelphia in Style: A Century of Fashion from the Robert and Penny Fox Historic Costume Collection, Drexel University. The exhibition is now on display at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA, not far from Philadelphia, and what a pleasure it is.

I saw a selection of pieces from the Fox Collection on display last year, but their holdings are so vast (over 14,000 pieces) that there aren't any duplicates this time around. The focus of this show is Philadelphia as center of style, and features clothing and accessories made, worn, or sold by Philadelphia women from 1896-1994. Unlike many costume exhibitions, the clothes are not locked away in Plexiglas boxes, making it easy to see (and photograph) the details of stitch, lines, and embellishments. I also appreciated that, while the clothes did belong to an elite group of customers, these women also came in a variety of heights, sizes, and shapes. These aren't all minuscule model-sized garments, and they reflect their wearers' bodies (and supporting undergarments) as much as their tastes.

In addition to some truly exception clothes made by some of the biggest names in modern fashion history - Dior, Chanel, Halston, Callot Soeurs, Gallanos, Oscar de la Renta, Adrian – the exhibition also includes a selection of fashion drawings from the 1920s-1950s. These stylish sketches, (like the one middle left) some with fabric swatches attached, helped wealthy customers decide what to order from designers in those days before everyone had an iPhone aimed at the runway.

As difficult as it is for me to choose favorites, here are two of the dresses that I liked the most. The navy blue day dress, above left and right, was part of a Philadelphia bride's trousseau in 1903. The fabric is "homespun" (an evocative, romantic term by then, not a literal one) wool, but a very light-weight wool, woven in an open weave, that would have made it practical for summer travel or promenades. But it's not entirely sensible: the contrasting trim adds stylish emphasis to the dress's lines, and the embroidered Chinese-inspired applique is bright and eye-catching. The young bride who wore this dress would have begun her married life quite fashionably.

Not even twenty years separate the navy dress from my second favorite, but fashion changed dramatically in that time. Gone is the ground-skimming hem and corset-defined shape The dress, right, is a 1916 evening dress by the famous Parisian design house of Callot Soeurs, and it's as insubstantial as a summer breeze.

Made of silk satin and net, and trimmed with metallic embroidery, velvet trim, and millinery flowers, the colors are still fresh and vibrant. There are two long streamers from the back shoulders, and those, combined with the airy full skirt, must have been made for the latest foxtrot. But although the colors are still fresh and bright - I'd bet there are plenty of high school girls today who'd love to wear this dress to their proms - the dress itself is so fragile that this will likely be its one and only time on display. Like Cinderella herself, this dress will have this final time beneath the lights to sparkle, and then back it will go into careful storage.

Philadelphia in Style will be on view through June 26, 2016. See the exhibition web site for more information and directions. For more information about the Fox Historic Costume Collection, see here.

Top dress: Day Dress, blue homespun wool, 1903, American. 
Middle illustration: Fashion Illustrations for Nan Duskin, watercolor, gouache, ink on paper, c1954, American.
Lower dress: Evening Dress, by Callot Soeurs, silk satin, net, velvet, millinery flowers, with glass and metallic embroidery, c1916-1917, France.
All pieces from the Fox Historic Costume Collection, Drexel University. 
All photographs ©2016 Susan Holloway Scott.

Friday Video: Behind-the-Scenes at the Fox Historic Costume Collection

Isabella reporting,

Fashion exhibitions are wildly popular with museum-goers, but they're not easy ones for curators to arrange and mount. Historical clothing can be fragile and susceptible to lighting, and each piece requires a custom mannequin or display fixture.

This short video - by Sean Quilty and Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics -goes behind the scenes of the Immortal Beauty exhibition from the Fox Historic Costume Collection, Drexel University. While I've already shared several pieces from the exhibition here, here, and here, this video focuses on what is perhaps the most popular garment in the entire show (at least among Philadelphians): a brilliant coral evening gown from the 1960s designed by Givenchy for Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco.

If you receive this post via email, you may be seeing only a black box or empty place where the video should be. Please click here to watch the video.

A Trio of Opulent 1920s Dresses

Isabella reporting,

When Loretta recently wrote a post featuring the latest fashions for 1919 - the first glimpse of new styles for a new age - the simplicity of the fashions appealed to many of you. The uncorseted clothing for women of the 1920s was in fact much more relaxed, with a narrower and less complicated silhouette that hadn't been seen in fashion for over a hundred years.

But uncomplicated didn't mean plain, at least where couture dresses were concerned. In skilled hands, those simple rectangular shapes became the perfect canvas for lavish beading, lace trims, embroidery, tassels, and all-around embellishment. Rich fabrics and brilliant, saturated colors added to a lavish sense of opulence.

I saw these three dresses in the Immortal Beauty exhibition from the Fox Historic Costume Collection of Drexel University, Philadelphia. In a gallery filled with beautiful clothes, they stood out like the gems that they are.  They glowed, and I can imagine how they must have stood out in any party.

The afternoon dress on the left is the work of Vitaldi Babani,  a Parisian fashion house founded in 1894 that also imported and sold exotic goods from around the world. With its vivid color and dramatic patterning, this velvet dress reflects the international influences that were so much a part of 1920s design.

The other two dresses are evening wear, designed by the trendsetting Callot Soeurs. The three French sisters - Marie, Marthe, Régine, and Joséphine - were known for their luxurious, detailed garments, and they often incorporated Asian textiles and motifs into their designs. The dresses came from the estate of Philadelphian Amanda "Minnie" Drexel Fell Cassatt, whose taste favored the opulent creations of the Callot Soeurs.

The details in the dresses are astonishing, featuring elaborate embroidery and faux gemstones. The close-up of the bodice (click on the image to enlarge it fruther), right, shows how the metallic thread embroidery was given extra texture through the use of hundreds of tiny glass pearl beads. With the sheer shoulder straps blending into the skin, this dress would have been quite daring, a stunning, shimmering fashion statement that's still modern today.

Immortal Beauty will be on display from October 2 - December 12 in the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery on Drexel's campus at 3401 Filbert Street. The exhibition is open Tuesday-Sunday, from 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Above: Afternoon dress by Vitaldi Babani, c1926; Evening gown by Callot Soeurs, 1926; Evening gown by Callot Soeurs/Henri Bendel, 1919.
Below: Detail, Evening gown by Callot Soeurs, 1926.
Photographs copyright 2015 by Susan Holloway Scott.

A Fashion Rarity: A Life-Sized French Mannequin, c.1765

Isabella reporting,

Eighteenth-century Paris must have been an affluent consumer's dream, with every kind of shop to cater to every taste. Fashion had become both a necessity and an obsession that had reached the most dizzying heights of refinement, and dozens of craft and tradespeople were required to outfit a stylish lady or gentleman (see this post for an idea.)

It's not surprising, then, that the shops of Parisian mantua-makers would have set the trends in shop displays as well as in their wares. They were likely the first to replace the popular small fashion dolls - the "petite pandoras" that had been used to show styles in miniature to customers - with the new, larger dolls - the "grande pandoras" – that were the earliest life-sized shop mannequins.

This elegant lady is apparently the only survivor of those first mannequins, withstanding more than two centuries of wars and revolution and (most perilous of all) changing tastes. I spotted her via Instagram; apparently she was one of the most popular pieces in a recent exhibition, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish which was shown at both the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in  Musée Bourdelle in Paris earlier this year. (If any of our readers saw her in either place, I hope you'll share your thoughts.)

Like all fashionable models, she's tall (5'9") and well-proportioned. Carved from wood, she wears a blond wig, paste jewelry, and what is surely her original robe á la Française - the now-faded pink floral silk matches the color and design painted on her wooden shoe. Her hands are a bit odd, with flexing fingers, and I'm guessing they was designed to hold some delightful accessory to tempt buyers further.

What I found most interesting about her, however, is how surprisingly realistic she appears. Her body isn't exaggerated to conform to an impossible-to-achieve fashionable ideal. Yes, her figure reflects the long waist and flat front that 18thc. stays (corsets) create, but every woman who came into her shop in the 1760s would have had that shape, too. While the earlier, smaller pandoras and the fashion plates of the same era show ladies with too-small waists and teeny-tiny feet, this mannequin seems almost...normal.

In other words, she's not at all like modern store mannequins that are so unnaturally proportioned that even the size 2 clothes must be pinned in the back. Was she designed to show dresses that women might actually try on and buy? Was she modeled after a real woman - perhaps even the owner of the shop? And were all mannequins of the time like this, or was she an anomaly?

Update: This lady was just sold on March 8, 2016 at auction by Sotheby's for 37,500GBP! 

Above: Painted wood mannequin, French, c. 1765. Pelham Galleries. Photographs copyright Pelham Galleries

"Immortal Beauty": Historic Fashion on Display in Philadelphia

Isabella reporting,

Those of you who follow me on Facebook and Instagram know where I was today: at the preview of a new exhibition of historic fashion in Philadelphia. Immortal Beauty is the first retrospective exhibition of the Robert and Penny Fox Historic Costume Collection (FHCC) in Drexel University's Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. That's a lot to remember, I know - but the clothes are unforgettable.

Seventy-five pieces have been chosen from the over 14,000 pieces in the collection, and they're the best of the best. The earliest piece in the show is a fragment of 16thc. Italian velvet, and there's also a delightful flowered 18thc. robe a l'anglaise with a looped skirt as well as an ethereal white muslin gown from 1808.

But the most impressive items highlight fashion from the 1880s onward, from an elaborately beaded and embroidered mantle from Charles Frederick Worth to an Alexander Wang dress straight from his 2013 runway. From the Callot Soeurs and Mariano Fortuny through Gilbert Adrian and Madame Grés to Chanel, Halston, Mary Quant, Givenchy, Dior, and Charles James - the clothes and accessories here are like a roll call of great designers.

What's most striking, however, is how accessible so many of the pieces are. True, few modern women would want to wear the corset the 1880s suit above would require, but the color-blocking of the skirt, combining broad stripes with the print, seems very modern, and the trio of 1920s dresses above could find their place on any modern red carpet.

And in a way, that has been the point of the collection from its earliest days. When A.J. Drexel founded the Drexel Institute in 1891, he included funding for purchasing both fine and decorative arts. The costume collection has always been a teaching collection, available to students for study and inspiration. Design students today may take pictures of the costumes with their iPhones, but who knows how a 1920s beaded ornament may evolve into the hit of some future New York Fashion Week?

But you don't have to be a student to visit and enjoy this exhibition. Immortal Beauty will be on display from October 2 - December 12 in the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery on Drexel's campus at 3401 Filbert Street. The exhibition is open Tuesday-Sunday, from 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. and the gallery is a short walk from Amtrak's 30th Street Station. Best of all, admission is free.

I'll be sharing more clothes from Immortal Beauty over the next weeks. Many thanks to Clare Sauro and Alex McKechnie for answering my questions, and showing me through the exhibition.

Upper left: Afternoon dress by Vitaldi Babani, c1926; Evening gown by Callot Soeurs, 1926; Evening gown by Callot Soeurs/Henri Bendel, 1919.
Upper right: Day dress by Augustine Martin/Darlington Runk, 1880.
Lower left: Day ensemble by Mary Quant, 1963; Suit by Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel, 1959.
Lower right: An assortment of 18th-19thc. women's shoes.
All photographs ©2015 Susan Holloway Scott.

An 1836 Wedding Gown with Matching Slippers

Isabella reporting,

June is the month for brides, and here's an 1836 wedding gown with matching slippers to usher in the season. Both are included in the same exhibition (Cosmopolitan Consumption: New England Shoe Stories 1750-1850) that I mentioned here on Monday, and earlier here.

Sarah Eliza Smith married Mark Langdon Hill in Bath, Maine, on October 11, 1836. This was a fashionable wedding. Not only are the bride's wedding clothes made of a costly silk damask, but the bridegroom was from a prominent New England family, the great-nephew of Governor John Langdon, a Revolutionary War general, a signer of the US Constitution, and a prosperous merchant and ship-builder.

Certainly the bride was dressed for the occasion. While some 19thc. brides were choosing white for their gowns (as we've noted before, this was by no means traditional at this point, and no, Queen Victoria did not "invent" the white wedding dress), Sarah Eliza chose an elegant shade of celadon green silk damask, which has unfortunately faded to beige over the centuries.

Although the name of the dress's maker is now forgotten, she was clearly very skilled. The tiny pleats, tucks, and gathers of the sleeves and bodice were all beautifully stitched by hand, with many of the seams trimmed with matching piping as well. The dress would have originally been worn with feather-stuffed sleeve puffs to fill out the sleeves to give it the extravagant silhouette shown in this fashion plate. (Today the silk is too fragile to manipulate for any "stuffing" for display.) The full sleeves might also have made the bride appear almost as wide as she was tall; from the size of her dress, Sarah Eliza must have been tiny, probably only about 4'10" or so.

Her matching slippers have silk rosettes on the toes and leather soles, and are as insubstantial as a feather. They still follow the shape of flat, Romantic-era slippers. The thin silk cords for tying around the foot and ankle to help secure the delicate shoe to the foot still survive, too. It's easy to imagine Sarah Eliza dancing with her new bridegroom, her skirts swirling over the silk rosettes - perhaps even attempting that a daring European dance, the waltz.

Many thanks to our good friend Kimberly Alexander for assistance with this post. For more information about these shoes and many others, stayed tuned for Kimberly's upcoming book Georgian Shoe Stories From Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.) In the meantime, please check out her blog, Silk Damask, for more fascinating fashion and textile history.

Wedding Dress and Slippers, 1836, worn at the wedding of Sarah Eliza Smith to Mark Langdon Hill. Portsmouth Historical Society.

Photographs copyright 2015 Susan Holloway Scott.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Historical Shoes!

Isabella reporting,

Since one of the purposes of this blog is to talk about shoes (we say it right up there on our masthead), it seems only fitting to mention a shoe-related exhibition and symposium for you lucky folks in the Northeast.

Fellow shoe-fanatics and nerdy-history-folk: can you say "road trip"?

Cosmopolitan Consumption: New England Shoe Stories 1750-1850 is the name of the exhibition, now on display through June 5 at the Portsmouth, NH Athenaeum. Not only does the exhibition include stunning historical shoes - many from small collections that are seldom on view - but also explores how the owners prized, celebrated, and displayed their shoes as markers of fashion and genteel sensibility. Click here for more information as well as directions.

The symposium connected with the exhibition takes place on Friday evening, May 29 - Saturday, May 30. Experts will discuss historical shoes, their manufacture, and their places in the wearers' lives. While I'm not a scholarly expert, I am definitely a shoe consumer and devotee, and as such on Friday night I'll be speaking on why shoes have always occupied such a much-loved place in the wardrobe. I hope you'll join us, and if you're a TNHG reader, please don't be shy - introduce yourself!

Click here for more information.

UPDATE: Sadly, the symposium has been cancelled. If you have already registered, you will receive a refund check shortly in the mail. However, the exhibition is still running until June 5, and I hope all you shoe-fanatics in the northeast will be able to visit!

Above: The Shoe Peddler, or The Shoemaker's Wife, by Martin Engelbrecht, c. 1750. Bavarian State Library.

A German Lady Travels to Matlock in Jane Austen's Time

Matlock Tor by Moonlight

Loretta reports:

Those familiar with Pride & Prejudice will remember Elizabeth Bennett’s trip to Derbyshire, when she fell in love with Mr. Darcy’s house.

Johanna Schopenhauer (mother of the philosopher) traveled to Derbyshire early in the first decade of the 1800s. Her account of her travels was published in German, but not translated into English until the 1980s. If you understand German, you might want to listen to the audio version here.

The following excerpt is from Ruth Michaelis-Jena and Willy Merson’s A Lady Travels: The Diaries of Johanna Schopenhauer, the translation that helped me time travel as I wrote Miss Wonderful.

~~~

This lovely valley, friendly yet vast, lonely yet full of life, is one of the most beautiful in Britain.  It may be that Matlock’s springs are not very effective, but this is not necessary to the finding of new energy and vitality in this heavenly place ...

The actual spa consists of three large inns and two lodging-houses, with the village of Matlock about a mile and a half away. It is impossible to describe the charm of this valley in mere words: it is so peaceful, so intimate, with the Derwent flowing through it, surrounded by high cliffs which stand rugged and bare against the sky, yet usually looking friendly, as their summits are crowned with beautiful trees.

We took a boat on the Derwent as far as it is navigable, which is only a short stretch. After that it becomes a wild torrent, full of rapids and whirlpools ... Opposite us was the highest cliff in the neighbor hood, which the local people call the High Tor. We climbed it easily, up a shaded path, and from the top we could see on one side the narrow valley in all the glory of its rich vegetation, with the river running through the center. ON the wooded rocks opposite were the fine buildings of the spa, providing a friendly picture of pleasant social life ... On the other side we saw a second valley, looking as if no human foot had ever trod there, so remote and silent was it, enclosed by green hills ... Nowhere else had we seen the wild, simple beauty of nature more happily combined with civilization than here on the banks of the Derwent.

~~~

Image above: Joseph Wright of Derby, Matlock Tor by Moonlight (1777-80), courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Note: This work is part of the splendid exhibition, The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art 1760-1860, very well worth seeing.

Image below: Joseph Wright of Derby, Matlock Tor by Daylight, ca 1785, from the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK, via Wikipedia.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

A Rare Creamware Water Cistern

Loretta reports:
Another object that caught my eye during my visit to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta was this 18th century water cistern.

Like the tea party I showed previously, this is the sort of thing that can easily make its way into a story.  While the objects are interesting and beautiful in themselves, and their workmanship delights and impresses, they also help us visualize a bygone world, helping writers bring a scene to life and nerdy history persons do a bit of time traveling.

You can get another view of this cistern as well as learn more about it here.




Water Cistern and Cover, 1790-1795.  Cream –colored earthenware.  Leeds Pottery (Leeds, England), maker.  Purchase in memory of Frances Floyd Cocke, 2009.6a-b.  High Museum of Art.

 Clicking on the image will enlarge it.

An Upcoming Exhibition for Lovers of Historical Shoes

Isabella reporting,

Anyone who reads this blog knows our great love for shoes. We're not shy about it; we state it right up front, over there beneath our selfie.

With that in mind, I'm delighted to announce an upcoming exhibition devoted not only to historical shoes, but also the women who wore them. Cosmopolitan Consumption: New England Shoe Stories 1750-1850 will be opening on Valentine's Day (how appropriate!) at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, Portsmouth, NH, and will run through June 5, 2015. Over forty pairs of shoes borrowed from various collections will be featured as well as a number of costumes and accessories, and admission is free. The 1750 print of The Shoe Peddler, above left, appears on the invitations to the exhibition, and the peddler's wares hint a the diversity of the show as well.

One of this blog's good friends, Dr. Kimberly Alexander, is co-curator of the exhibition, and she has generously shared advance photos of several of shoes with us.  In the past,"the ankle and instep were considered sexually charged," she notes. "How much of a glimpse of that region the onlooker captured had to do with flirtation....You can learn so much from the way people wore their shoes, altered, their shoes, saved their shoes. [Men and] women's shoes give us a chance to talk about what their lives were like."

Take the story of the shoe, right, (and yes, it was once part of a pair that was split so that two of the wearer's children could each have a memento.) The shoes were worn by Sally Brewster Gerrish, the newlywed daughter of innkeeper William Brewster. President George Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789, and of course a ball was given in his honor. Since Washington slept at the tavern kept by Brewster, Sally was asked to ride in the carriage with the president, and these were the shoes she wore with her ball gown. The once-stylish shoes have crumpled a bit over the centuries, the silk has faded, and the decorative buckles that closed them have long since been removed, but the magic remains in the slippers a young Yankee lady wore to an unforgettable ball.

The detail of the shoes, below left, tell a story that's more about evolving tastes and fashions. By the end of the 18th c., women's dresses had changed dramatically. Gone were the wide skirts and stiff stays to shape the body. In their place were softer, more narrow gowns with raised waists that reflected an interest in classically-inspired silhouettes, combined with exotic accessories such as plumed turbans and paisley patterned shawls from India. This shoe is as flat as an ancient sandal, with a sharply pointed toe that accentuated the new narrower skirts, and the Eastern-inspired design printed on the leather brought a touch of exoticism to the now-unknown New England lady who wore it. (And I have to admit that I'd love to wear these now myself.)

I'll be sharing more images and stories from the exhibition over the next weeks. See here for information about the exhibition.

Above left: The Shoe Peddler or The Shoe Seller's Wife, by Martin Engelbrecht, c. 1750. Bavarian State Library.
Right: Brocade shoe, maker unknown, c. 1789. Portsmouth Historical Society.
Lower left: Fine grained slipper with "Alhambraesque" detail, c. 1790s, Portsmouth Historical Society

Embellishments: Constructing Victorian Detail

Loretta reports:

Continuing my report on Astrida Schaeffer’s lecture at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, MA: 

As promised, today we look at Embellishments:  Constructing Victorian Detail, Ms. Schaeffer’s book accompanying what clearly was a marvelous exhibition.  On display were twenty-five garments from the Victorian era, from the Irma Bowen Collection of the University of New Hampshire Museum.

The book helps explain, as described in the first chapter, “The Victorian Aesthetic Mindset.”  This is an aesthetic some some may think of as Wretched Excess or clutter, because it seems so busy to the 21st century eye.

But it reflects a time of burgeoning consumerism, expanded international connections, and the many “technologies, discoveries, and opportunities bursting out of the Industrial Revolution.”  Even without fully understanding the aesthetic, however, we can appreciate the beauty and workmanship of these garments.  This book lets us get up close and personal.

We’re treated not only to close views of design details but instructions for making them as well.  The photographs and illustrations are simply spectacular, and made me wish I had the skills to try recreating some of the adornments.  You can view sample pages here and images from the exhibition here.

Do check out the dashing Art Nouveau coat (back view second from left in first photo, front view at right of fourth and fifth photos).  That's my favorite.  Which garment do you like best?