A Modern Belle Going to the Rooms at Bath
This is the first of five prints that Gillray published in the first three months of 1796 satirizing women's fashions. Others include Ladies Dress, As It Soon Will Be (January 20), The Fashionable Mamma, or the Convenience of Modern Dress (February 13), La Belle Espagnole, ou la Doublure de Madame Tallien (February 25) and Lady Godina's Rout, or Peepin Tom Spying Out Old Pope Joan. (March 12). In this case he attacks the absurd height of the plumes women were wearing as head dresses.
© Trustees of the British Museum
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This was not the first time, high head-dresses had been in fashion and were accordingly satirized in caricature. During the "macaroni craze in the 1770's, both men and women sometimes wore wigs of enormous size like those featured in Hieronymus Grimm's Is This my Daughter Ann? (1774) and The Preposterous Head Dress, or the Featherd Lady (1776) by Matthias Darly. But Gillray is most likely to have remembered and been influenced by another Darly print, this one from 1772, The Ladies Ridicule, which like his, shows a lady in a sedan chair.
© Trustees of the British Museum
But as usual, when Gillray arrives late to an idea or a story, he invariably crushes the competition with his design. In this case, the first thing he does is to change the orientation from landscape to portrait thereby increasing the sense of height. Then he makes the legs of the chair men more believable—like they are really bearing the weight of the sedan chair. He adds a cobbestone street and a tall background building, with black sooty smoke pouring from the chimneys providing another reason why the lady's plume might need protection. And finally he makes each figure in the print thoroughly individualized, including the stupid, bulbous-nosed rear chair man, the beautiful and demure young lady with her fan, and the clearly disgruntled chair man in the lead.
Sources and Reading
- Commentary from the British Museum on A Modern Belle Going to the Rooms at Bath.
- Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #414.
- Thomas Wright and Joseph Grego, The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist; With the History of His Life and Times, p. 209.
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