La Derniere Ressource, or Van Buchells Garters

This is one of nine prints satirizing various society women that Gillray created in the fall and winter of 1791 while Parliament was out of session. They include Patience on a Monument, featuring Lady Cecilia Johnston, The Finishing Touch, depicting Lady Sarah Archer, An Angel, Gliding on a Sun Beam into Paradice, highlighting the Queen's favorite, Mrs. Schwellenberg, Patent Bolsters with Mrs. Fitzherbert, and here in La Derniere Ressource and several other prints, the Honorable Mrs. Albinia Hobart.

Mrs. Hobart was one of Gillray's favorite subjects. Her substantial girth, her notorious extravagance, her gambling habits, and her frequent appearances in home theatricals made her a natural gift for caricaturists. In her first appearance in Gillray's work, La Belle Assemblée, she was portrayed in a parody of Reynold's Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces as one of a group of aged and unlikely devotees of love. In her hand was a copy of the playbook for Nina, or the Madness of Love, a two act play translated from the French by George Monck Berkeley in 1787. The translation was dedicated to her and it is likely that she played the heroine in one of her home theatricals.

Using similar techniques, La Derniere Ressource explores some of the same themes. Both imply a consuming concern with the latest fashions with titles in French. Both allude to the French play, Nina, or the Madness of Love partly to identify Mrs. Hobart, but, more importantly to suggest the same madness in the pursuit of love. Using Van Buchell's garters as the technique of "last resort," Mrs. Hobart is obviously hoping for the same resurrection of love that we see in picture behind her where Nina's true love, Germeuil, who was assumed to have been killed in a duel, returns as if from the dead to bring about the desired and appropriately romantic denouement.

Martin Van Butchell was a master of self-promotion and managed to make a comfortable living off the rich with a variety of what we would now call health and lifestyle products. In the January 17th edition of the London World, Gillray could have seen this advertisement:

Such Ladies, as wish, to dance with ease and grace at the Ball, which will be at St. James's to-morrow, are respectfully informed, that the wearing of MARTIN VAN BUTCHELL'S new invented SPRING-BAND GARTERS, (by the King's Patent) will help to make them superlatively happy! (The Marchioness of SALiSBURY,—the Countess of AYLESBURY,—and divers other Ladies, having had these Garters many months—now can tell their friends, How much they like them.)

There is no record of Mrs. Hobart's satisfaction with her garters.

Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on La Derniere Ressource, or Van Buchells Garters.
• Draper Hill, Fashionable Contrasts, 1966, #81
• "Albinia Hobart," Wikipedia
• "Martin van Butchell," Wikipedia
• Nina, or the Madness of Love
• Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #384
• Thomas Wright and Joseph Grego, The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist; With the History of His Life and Times p. 136

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