Volume 49, Number 15 · October 10, 2002
In the Garment District
By Richard Dorment
Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715–1789
by Aileen Ribeiro
Yale University Press, 318 pp., $55.00
Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting
by Anne Hollander
London: National Gallery,207 pp., $39.95 (paper); distributed in the US by Yale University Press
Robert Bateman, a little-known disciple of Edward Burne-Jones, exhibited his full-length portrait of his wife, Caroline, at London's Grosvenor Gallery in 1886. She is shown walking in an autumnal landscape, by implication in the park or garden of an English country house—indicated by the ornamental urn behind her and the sweeping view over the valley in the distance. Immediately striking is the almost Pre-Raphaelite obsession with minute details of dress, accessories, and landscape, all the more surprising at the height of the Aesthetic Movement in England when a generally freer handling of paint had superseded the tight linear clarity found here.
Review, 3589 words
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