Shady Ladies

21 Aug

Posted at 09:22h in art history, nasty women, Shady Ladies, Women's History by
Emily Mary Osborn was one of the most important artists associated with the campaign for women’s rights in the nineteenth century. The daughter of a clergyman, she was brought up in Kent and Essex until 1842 when the family moved back to London. It was here that she trained as an artist at Dickinson’s academy in Maddox Street and then at Leigh’s in Newman Street. During the 1850s Osborn established a reputation as a genre painter specialising in figurative subjects of ‘unpretending character’ – the most significant of which were pictures of modern women in pathetic situations, similar to works by Richard Redgrave and Rebecca Solomon. Home Thoughts, which was painted in 1856 and exhibited at the Royal Academy that same year, was followed by her most famous work Nameless and Friendless in 1857. A full-scale, squared-up preparatory design for the latter exists in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and a smaller version in oil in York Art Gallery.

08 Aug

Posted at 11:07h in art history, fashion, Metropolitan Museum, Shady Ladies, Women's History by
People often ask if our tours change over time, and the answer is absolutely yes, they change—both because the museum's displays change, and because we discover things about the artworks. Here for instance is a portrait of a royal mistress that just came onto display at the Met. It isn't certain who the artist is, but the subject is clearly Anne de Pisseleu, the Duchesse d'Étampes, who was one of the most important mistresses of François I, France's most important Renaissance king. Anne was a typical Shady Lady: she was famously beautiful, but also famously intelligent. In fact, she was called "the most beautiful of the learned, and the most learned of the beautiful." It was also typical of the French court that François married her off and gave her husband a title: the French always wanted their royal mistresses to be titled and married (perhaps to prevent their children from making claims on the throne). Want to know more about the Shady Ladies of art and history? Come on our Shady Ladies tours!

14 Dec

Posted at 22:42h in art history, beauty standards, courtesans, fashion, fashion history, Metropolitan Museum, Shady Ladies, Women's History by
We have been giving fashion history tours at the Metropolitan Museum for several months now, and the more we work on them, the more we see that fashion history is probably the biggest theme in the entire museum.  If you think about it, you might think thathttps://shadyladiestours.com/fashion-and-beauty-tour/beauty—human beauty—is the biggest theme in the art history.  But if you look carefully at the beautiful people in the museum, you will see that (aside perhaps from the Greek male nudes), the person's features are only a secondary aspect of the images.  It isn't their natural beauty that makes people beautiful in art.  Instead, the artworks focus on many other aspects of the beautiful person:  on hairdos and make-up and jewelry and clothing and accessories and shoes.  In short, human beauty in art consists not of beautiful features, but of costume or fashion.

12 Sep

Posted at 19:14h in art history, Metropolitan Museum, Shady Ladies, Women's History by
This painting portrays Saint Justina of Padua as a Renaissance fashion plate. The pearls, rubies, and emeralds sewn onto her clothing, cap, and hair tie were the mark of an aristocratic lady; her embroidered stomacher (the triangular piece covering chest and stomach) was the height of fashion, as were her elegant green sleeves (as in the song!), separate from her bodice, with the blouse pulled through the gaps in a style called 'slashing'. Most noticeable to a modern eye is her amazingly high forehead.

01 Sep

Posted at 01:12h in art history, courtesans, Metropolitan Museum, Paris tour, Shady Ladies, Women's History by
Elegant women are a huge theme in art history, and people mostly assume, as they stroll through art museums, that they are looking at queens, duchesses, and the wives of the wealthy. But often enough, they aren't. They are looking at royal "favorites," mistresses, and courtesans. Courtesans are in fact a particularly large theme in art, probably bigger than queens and duchesses.  But people today pass by them without realizing who or what they were, because courtesans, if they exist today, are not important in our culture, so we're unaware of them.

07 Aug

Posted at 02:13h in courtesans, Paris tour, Shady Ladies, Women's History by
One of my favorite things to do in Paris—really—is explore the cemeteries. The most famous one is Père Lachaise, where a host of celebs are buried, including most famously Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. But it is also a great place for learning about the great courtesans of the Belle Epoque. As an example, Chopin is buried there, the lover of George Sand—a scandalous lady if ever there was one—and so is Colette, in whose novels, such as Gigi and Chéri, courtesans are a major theme. But the great cemetery for Paris courtesans is really Montmartre, which is also a lovely place to take a shady, quiet walk in central Paris—right around the corner from the Moulin Rouge —so we take our Shady Ladies Tours Courtesans of Paris tour there, as you can see in the feature photo.

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