Beautifully-framed 18th century French fashion plate #3

This very fabulous image is from the 1780’s or possibly slightly earlier, certainly pre-Revolution, and depicts a very fashionable lady with extreme hair à la Marie Antoinette when her head was still on. The caption tells us that this is an elegant small robe (I’d hate to see a large robe!) in striped Indian taffeta embellished with poufs (search me! No I think they are little puffs, like unstuffed quilted shapes) made from the same taffeta. There is something rather wonderfully absurd about this image!

She has been most beautifully framed with a proper mounting board, in a wooden gilt frame. I have a series of these pictures, all framed seemingly by the same framer, and one of the smaller pictures has the label on it which tells us that this was framed by the artist’s supply shop Dupré in rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris. The fact that the label says only Dupré and not Dupré et Cie (Dupré and Company) seems to indicate a date of framing between 1888 and 1919, which corresponds to my own thoughts that this was framed around 1910. There is a small damage to the frame at the top centre and one corner- you could touch them up a little with gilt paint and they would blend in. At the back there is a little eye-screw to hang this to a picture-hook. At some point it looks as though the original glass in this may have cracked, letting in possibly the fumes from a gaslit room or a coal fire, which have discoloured the mounting board a little in some strange lines. At least this is my guess. The glass currently in the frame is not broken.

The framed image measures 33x40.5; the image itself is 20.1x27cm.

Please click on the photos to open them up full-sized.

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