Grace Dalrymple Elliott was a very fancy lady, and that, I think, is apparent in this painting. She's wearing a gown of cloth of gold, trimmed with silver thread, with elaborate silver embroidery at the hem of her petticoat. In fact, on the whole she seems to be dressed for the court in France, which is interesting because she did live in France for a long time, although at this time she was still in England. She's also wearing a hairdo about a foot high, if one can judge proportionally.
This style, called the ‘pouf’, was developed and promoted by Marie Antoinette. Most people think that these are wigs, but in fact, they were generally made of the woman’s own hair, and that seems to be the case here, as you can see the way it's pulling back off her forehead.
Ultimately, this isn't that different, in some ways, from hairstyles that were common in America in the 1970s--what we used to call “big hair”. But, of course, they didn't have hairspray in the 18th century, so it was harder to get your hair to stay up. What Grace has here is a wire structure on her head, with her hair wrapped around it in various ways. The hair is then slathered with some kind of grease (possibly bear fat) and then powdered. That is to say, you sit in a little room in your house-the powder room, which is where we get that expression--with a mask on, and your servants pump flour, the same flour with which bread is made, out of a kind of bellows-like tool, onto your hair.
This style could be much more elaborate. People wore ships and indeed all kinds of decorations up at the top. If you had flowers in your hair, you might have vases of water embedded in your hair to keep them fresh! Grace just has some kind of ribbon. People also often think that these hairstyles were very dirty, and that you kept them for a very long time. Evidence is actually contradictory about that. People who recreate historic hairdos say that the combination of things in them actually acts rather like a dry shampoo, and that it’s OK if you keep it for up to a week. On the other hand, the implement which we call a back scratcher, was in fact not developed for your back but rather so you could scratch underneath these hairstyles.
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5 окт 2024
