Patent Bolsters

This is one of several satires of women's fashions featuring well-known society women produced by Gillray in the fall of 1791 after Parliament had adjourned for the season. They include The Finishing Touch satirizing the over-use of rouge with Lady Sarah Archer, La Derniere Ressource, or Van Buchells Garters deriding the pointlessness of wearing the latest spring-band garters shown on the oversized leg of the Honorable Mrs. Albinia Hobart, and Patent Bolsters spotlighting the (in this case) unnecessary addition of pads to bolster a woman's "embonpoint."

The full-figured lady in question is Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert, since 1785 the not-so-secret wife of the Prince of Wales. She is identified by her prominent hook nose (seen earlier in Gillray's Dido Forsaken (1787), her conspicuous decolletage (seen in Wife & No Wife, or a Trip to the Continent) and by the portrait of the Prince of Wales above her vanity, with its crown and motto "ich dien," matching the words on her own triple-plumed tiara.

But even in a simple, even trivial, caricature like this one, Gillray, the artist, can't help but add a few sophsiticated touches. He unifies the overall design by repeated curves: the curve of Mrs. Fitzherbert's plumes, the curve of her nose, the curve of her breast, the curve of her skirt, and the curves in the pattern of the carpet at her feet. And as she stands before her vanity, Gillray causes her image to be reflected in the mirror so that we get two images of her—one in profile and one face-forward—a technique used by the "serious artist," Johan Zoffany in his formal portrait of Queen Charlotte with her Two Eldest Sons (1764).

Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on Patent Bolsters.
• "Maria Fitzherbert," Wikipedia
• Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #385.