Exhibition

Of Men & Their Elegance
Higbee Gallery
Second Rotation: April 25 to November 23, 2003
First presented: July 3 to November 17, 2002
Anne Bissonnette & Dr. Debbie Henderson, Curators

Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century
Paintings

The painter and archeologist Gavin Hamilton drew inspiration from the classical past and lived in Rome much of his life. He met the architect Robert Adam while on the Grand Tour and later became associated with the entourage of Lord Elgin. Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin (1766-1841), also had experienced the so-called Grand Tour of Europe, which was part of a nobleman's education. This tour could last from a few months to a few years and installed in many a love of classical antiquities, which, in the case of Lord Elgin, was to prove controversial to this day.

A career diplomat, Lord Elgin was appointed British ambassador to Constantinople in 1799 and, between 1801 and 1810, arranged for the removal of the relief sculptures from the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens, which was still under Ottoman rule. During this period what came to be known as "The Elgin Marbles" were shipped from Greece to England where they were eventually purchased by the British Government in 1816 and housed at The British Museum. From the beginning of this disastrous enterprise cries of dissent were heard which have not been silenced.

This portrait predates the events but nonetheless conveys Lord Elgin's love of antiquities. Although in an allegorical setting, all three men portrayed are wearing the newly fashionable English country style. Marked by sportsmanship and informality, the wearing of riding coats, breeches and boots might have been appropriate to generations of English gentlemen on their country estates and in their stables, but their adoption indoors and in polite company was considered an outrage. The battle between what was considered "undress" (informal) and "full dress" (formal) had entered a new chapter. In menswear, the English style gained great popularity in the 1780s and, within a decade, spread to the fashion conscious of Europe and America.

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John Russell was a reputed pastelist who learned his trade under Francis Cotes (1726-1770), one of the founding members of London's Royal Academy founded in 1768. Russell ventured on his own in 1767 and began to exhibit his work at the Society of Artists in 1768 and annually at the Royal Academy from 1769 to 1806. In 1770, he entered the Royal Academy School and won the silver medal for figure drawing. In 1772 or 1780, his treatise The Elements of Painting with Crayon was written to explain Cotes' pastel technique. He became an associate of the Royal Academy (A.R.A.) in 1772 and a member (R.A.) in 1788. That year, he became "Crayon Painter" to King George III and to George, Prince of Wales.

In this portrait, the sitter wears fashionable dandy attire with a coat style associated with Charles Fox, a member of the British Whig party and a most fashionable and controversial man about town. The sitter's buff-colored breeches and his white double-breasted vest, shirt and stock are typical of the tight and light-colored neo-classical styles described by some authors as "the naked look." The blue wool frock coat was a political statement for Fox. According to author Diana de Marly, "Fox annoyed the government by wearing of a blue coat and a buff waistcoat, the colours of the American rebels…" Fox denounced the taxation of the Americans without their consent before the war broke out and opposed Britain's Prime Minister, Frederick North, in his policy towards America. As for the frock coat previously worn in the countryside for riding horses, the wig the sitter wears is more disheveled and, although still powdered, reflects the growing informality in menswear.

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Portrait of Farmer Jessop
Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), Ireland or United States of America, c. 1790-1810
Oil on canvas
Silverman/Rodgers Collection
KSUM 1983.004.0554
24 ¼" x 20 ¼" framed

Gilbert Stuart painted some of the most famous portraits of key American figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail Smith Adams and John Adams. Born in Rhode Island, Stuart was trained in America and Scotland and worked in London between 1777 and 1782 and in Dublin between 1787 and 1792. He established himself as a portrait painter and, upon his return to the continent, became one of the most prominent artists of his genre in the country's Federal period.

In this portrait the sitter known to us only as Farmer Jessop wears the fashionable attire of the last decade of the 18th and first decade of the 19th centuries. His brown wool coat, double-breasted tan vest with metal buttons and white shirt and stock are consistent with the period. Most importantly, it is his large beaver hat that places him between 1790 and 1810, a time of great experimentation in the development of the top hat.

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A fashionable pair, the individuals in these portraits are dressed in the emerging neo-classical style. What came to be known as the empire style was also linked to the emergence of "undress" (informality) in womenswear. France's queen, Marie-Antoinette, was painted by Elizabeth Vigée Lebrun in 1783 in a white muslin gown that came to be known as a "chemise à la reine." This portrait was the source of much scandal as it depicted royalty in what people saw as an undergarment. Like the informal English country style for men, this empire style echoed the new ideal of nature and blossomed across Europe and America by the 1790s. The sitters in these portraits are wearing the new informal styles. The woman wears a light blue dress with a high waist construction, a bonnet with matching blue ribbons, a shawl and necklace. The man is wearing a teal wool double-breasted riding coat, white vest and stock. He no longer wears a wig or powders his hair, which is worn straight and with sideburns.

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The sitter is understood to be a ship's captain because he is holding a telescope and is depicted with the sea and a ship in the background. He wears a dark wool coat with a very high collar, a style worn both in and out of doors as well as in formal events by the early 19th century. This was a drastic change from earlier customs where any nobleman of rank would have thought it inappropriate to walk on the street, let alone in a drawing room, in anything but silk.

What was once "undress" and worn by the young and fashionable became the norm and would eventually be seen as full or formal dress. This would not happen without some degree of discomfort. Leading the way was the Englishman George "Beau" Brummell who took the new style out of the stables and into a clean and structured system of personal grooming much in keeping with the purity of neo-classical ideals.

Much attention was given to cut and proportion. Like the very high turned collar of the coat, which became fashionable in the late 1780s, the shirt underwent much transformation: soft at first, it became heavily starched. Its collar rose in height until it reached the ears and chin and became secured to the neck by increasingly complex ways of draping the neck stock. Wigs and powder were abandoned and the hair was now worn short and combed forward "à la Titus," following the style of the Roman emperor.

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