I write about all sorts of strange things on this blog but can’t think of much more obscure than this week’s starting point which is a Georgian firescreen which turns out not to be just a firescreen but part of a  panel for a dress.   If you’re wondering why then take a careful  look at the workmanship.  It was so fine that when the owner died her heirs took the dress apart, divided it up and framed the best sections.

But what’s that got to do with garden history?  Quite simply the dress was designed by Mary Pendarves [later Mrs Delany], the heroine of a recent post about her botanical art in cut paper form, and the dress – strictly speaking a petticoat  for a court mantua – shows that her botanical knowledge and craft skills were immense, so the dress has, according to garden historian Mark Laird,  “the most accurate horticultural detailing of any work I’ve seen from this period.”

Images are, unless otherwise stated, taken from Mrs Delany and Her Circle, the catalogue of an exhibition of the same name, edited by Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Yale Centre for British Art, 2009

In fashion terms it’s also quite unusual, since most historical textiles that survive, particularly clothing, are anonymous so no-one knows who made it or usually who owned and wore it. But bits of the petticoat,which dates from about 1739/1740, have been preserved in an almost pristine state and been passed down the generations. Clothes defined status and social standing, and in this case, in conjunction with Mary’s many letters, give an insight into not only how fashions change but importantly how flowers and plants were perceived and appreciated.

Anyone who knows me  will know I’m not a fashion guru [how’s that for understatement]  and I know very little about the intricacies of women’s clothing, especially from the 18thc, but as far as I understand it  the petticoat was part of a formal Court dress and worn with a mantua or loose robe.

The  style was introduced at the Restoration and gradually became the accepted  formal wear for court and high-status formal occasions.

The mantua was made almost ludicrously wide – up to 2 metres – by being stretched over with whalebone hoops. The ensemble had a fitted bodice, that was closed  at the front by a stomacher – usually a highly decorated v-shaped panel,  and extended at the back into a train which was sometimes worn hitched up.

[For more images of embroidered stomachers see this page at 18th Century Notebook]

The whole thing was highly contrived and required practice to put on, wear and certainly to manoeuvre elegantly or even sit down let alone dance in, yet that was what was expected. Perhaps as a result by the 1740s, the mantua was worn only at court, although as a gown style it continued to evolve slowly  through the rest of the 18th century. Although totally impractical, one of the reasons it was fashionable was because it ostentatiously displayed  the enormous quantity of rich and expensive cloth that was needed to create it.

Research undertaken for an exhibition about Mrs Delany and her network of friends at the Yale Center for British Art and the Sir John Soane Museum in 2010 suggests that she probably wore  this particular dress at a grand birthday ball given by Frederick Prince of Wales in 1741.  The fabric is satin with the embroidery of naturalistic flowers worked in coloured silk thread.

Black was an unusual colour choice, because the fashion was definitely for pale coloured fabrics which were thought to allow for greater contrasts between light and shadow in the fabric’s drapery as it moved.   Although it’s usually associated with mourning, in Mary’s case her unlamented husband had been dead for about 15 years so its much more likely wearing something this ornate, probably with a lighter coloured gown on top was simply a bold fashion statement.  She adopted the same technique when in later life she created her botanical collages, laying them out on a black background.

There’s no doubt that Mrs Delany was  interested in fashion, and her correspondence includes many comments on what people wore, and sometimes includes a description of what she herself wore, and there are often floral elements included.  In 1734, for example, she wrote an account of her outfit for the wedding of Princess Ann  to the Prince of Orange: ” Tis a  brocaded lutestring, white ground with great ramping flowers in shades of purples, reds and greens… it looks better than it describes, and will make a show.”

There’s obviously a very long history of connections between garden design and textile design.  The late 17thc French fashion for the parterre de broderie – elaborate patterning in box or other plants – being the most obvious contemporary reference – designs for which are completely interchangeable with embroidery patterns.

By the early 18thc this was giving way to parterre a l’angloise – or parterre a gazon [or lawn] which was much simpler patterns cut in plain grass.  It was one of the first steps in the general slow but steady switch away from geometric formal gardens to more “irregular” styles.

Inside the garden formal flower beds had long been “enamelled” with flowers, [to see an example of this look at the Stoke Edith hangings] but a certain wildness was slowly creeping up there too. Mrs Delaney wrote of her garden at Delville near Dublin in 1748:  “my flower-garden…is a wilderness of flowers, the beds are overpowered with them and although the enamelled look they have is rich and pretty, I belive it will be advisable to have the different sort of flowers appear rather more distinct.”   Elsewhere she described it as “now a wilderness of sweets.”

A similar trend can be seen in the use of  more naturalistic floral depictions in fabric designs as the stylized crewel-work of the 17thc gave way, post-Restoration to more accurate and realistic representations of plants. This  trend reached its height in the 1740s, as is shown in a current exhibition at the V&A: Fashioned from Nature.

This does not mean it was universal. Some surviving fabric and dress designs from the early 18thc, especially woven fabrics where realism is obviously much more difficult to achieve, were even in the 1730s and 1740s still highly contrived in their portrayals of plants.

 

 

In some hand-embroidered pieces there coud also be a tendency to over-elaborate so the natural form of the flower was maintained in some ways but lost in others.  For example in the court dress above different kinds of flowers are naturaistically depicted [amidst the silver thread]  but shown growing on the same stem.  Mary’s petticoat shows the opposite end of the design range: the  flowers, apparently freshly picked, just artlessly scattered over the background. She captures nature rather than merely deriving her subjects from it.

She describes some of the other dresses at the Norfolk House ball. “My lady Scarborough was in violet satin, the petticoat embroidered with clumsy festoons of nothing at all’s, supported by pillars no better than posts…”  Clearly Lady Scarborough’s flowery dress did not reflect Mrs Delany’s idea of botanical accuracy.

Meanwhile “Lady M Tufton [was] in white embroidered with garlands and flowerpots of flowers mixt with a great deal of silver.” Both costumes seem architecturally  as well as horticulturally  inspired.