Tight Lacing, or Fashion Before Ease,
Fashion Earlier Ease, or a Good Constitution Sacrificed...
Fashion Earlier Ease, or a Practiced Constitution Sacrificed for a Fantastick Grade is one of two prints with different titles using the same image published by Gillray on January ii, 1793. The other is Britannia in French Stays, or Re-Form, at the Expence of Constitution. Both play upon the political and physical meanings of "constitution" and "grade." And both suggest that reform on the French model is NOT a skillful idea.
© Trustees of the British Museum
Thomas Paine, author of the influential The Rights of Human is shown forcibly tightening the laces on Britannia's stay or corset, presumably to give her form a more French Parisian manner. He wears the bonnet rouge and tri-color cockade of a French revolutionary, making his objectives that much clearer. A tailor'due south measuring record with the words "Rights of Human being" hangs from his pocket. Before Paine became a political pamphleteer, he was reputed to be apprenticed as a stay maker in his father's shop in Thetford as the sign behind him suggests. The alternate spelling of Paine's name on the sign may exist another pun, pointing to the discomfort already being endured equally Paine tries to re-shape Britannia in the French mode.
The English and French constitutions had been a frequent topic of give-and-take since 1790 when Burke wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in French republic and Paine replied in his The Rights of Human the next year. Paine had argued that U.k. could benefit from from reforming the British constitution in ways similar to those in France and America. Britannia'southward shield and lance have been temporarily laid aside with an olive co-operative. But information technology was merely a few weeks later on, that they were taken up again when Louis the XVI was guillotined, and French republic subsequently declared war on Slap-up Britain.
There are two possible "sources" for Gillray's pattern. The get-go was noted by 1000. Dorothy George: Tight Lacing, or Mode Earlier Ease a mezzotint based on a John Collett painting of 1777. Britannia looks back over her left shoulder at Paine much every bit the young lady does in the Collett mezzotint. The gentlemen in both prints are pulling hard on the laces of her corset. And Gillray clearly borrows Collett's subtitle, "Mode Before Ease," for the title of at to the lowest degree one of the two versions of this print.
Tight Lacing, or Way Before Ease [1777]
© Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
Simply there is another, maybe before, print that Gillray may have seen that served as a model or source. Published by William Humphrey while Gillray was creating other prints for him in January 1777, it is called simply Tight Lacing. It shows an ugly woman, feet planted next to 1 some other, property on to the bedpost much as the cute young woman in the Collett print does. Her maid, however, plants her left pes on the lady's bottom the ameliorate to pull harder every bit Paine does in Gillray'south print. Tight Lacing is signed with the monogram RS which Dorothy George elsewhere attributes to Richard Sneer, a pseudonym for Richard Brinsley Sheridan. But information technology is not unlikely that Tight Lacing is, in fact, an early print by Gillray himself, like The Captain's So Kind (1777) imitating some of the mannerisms of RS.
Tight Lacing [1777]
© Trustees of the British Museum
Gillray created at least two other prints in which Paine was featured: The Rights of Man. . . (1791) and Tom Paine's Nightly Pest (1792). But Fashion Before Ease . . . is the outset ane, to provide a credible likeness of Paine himself. Since the portrait of Paine most resembles the 1793 William Sharp engraving based on a 1792 George Romney painting, information technology is probable that Gillray saw the painting in Sharp's studio while Sharp was working on the engraving.
Thomas Paine [1793]
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Sources and Reading
- Commentary from the British Museum on Fashion Before Ease. . .
- Draper Colina, Fashionable Contrasts, 1966, #vii
- "Thomas Paine," Wikipedia
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