The art of dress

My eyes follow the fall of fabric over a shoulder, the meeting of a cuff at the wrist. In the arrangement of a dress, the artist employs the language of fashion to convey an idea of the sitter. As she looks across the picture plane, it is her costume that announces the world she inhabits.

In Frances Samuel’s 1840 portrait, painted after her arrival in Gadigal land/Sydney by Maurice Felton, she wears an off-the-shoulder bodice shaped with deep pleats accentuating the wrapped front design, and white lace tucker across the bust. While there is an overall lack of surface decoration consistent with American and European fashions of the period, the ornamental build and fit of the sleeves is rather fabulous. The volume of Samuel’s bishop sleeves sits at the elbow, with horizontal rows of puffed shirring at the upper arm and tapered cuffs. A ferronnière decorated with seed pearls is worn over Samuel’s dark hair, a Renaissance fashion revived in the late 1820s and often worn to enhance a high forehead. Her black gown provides a rich backdrop to the paired gold bracelets, brooch and guard chain of alternating bar links on which hangs a quizzing glass held loosely in her left hand. This opulent and conspicuous arrangement of jewellery is a cogent signifier of wealth and a statement of her status as a member of early Sydney’s most prominent Jewish settler families.

Outfits such as this, worn by the elite to the theatre, weddings, balls or races, were chronicled in detail by the press. Consideration was given to whether a garment had been imported, new colours and silhouettes, ornamental trims and fabrics. The business of fashion in Australia gained currency as the 19th century progressed, spurred on by a growing market for readymade fashion, department stores, and the domestic sewing machine. Its enthusiastic consumption was sustained by women’s magazines and newspaper columns offering guidance on seasonal trends, costume etiquette for hosting and attending events, and wardrobe arrangement.

Describing the social carnival on display at the 1886 Melbourne Cup, a writer for Melbourne Punch observed, ‘The lawn was well patronised as promenade, and occupied throughout the day by a fashionable attendance of ladies’. The day’s parade of bustles, box pleats, bonnets and parasols was lavishly detailed in Carl Kahler’s The lawn at Flemington on Melbourne Cup Day. Not a horse in sight. The first of three paintings in Kahler’s Melbourne Cup series, the scene reached a broad public audience as an edition of black-and-white photogravure reproductive prints by Goupil & Cie. The brilliant reds and pinks, yellows, blues and various purple hues captured by Kahler had gained popularity from the middle of the century with the rapid commercial availability of aniline dyes. Following the discovery of mauvine by William Henry Perkins in 1856, the industrially produced synthetic textile dyes changed the way colour was worn across classes and influenced social convention and attitudes. In placing these colourful frocks to balance the composition and allow the viewer to negotiate the social body presented, Kahler was also arranging distinct personages as separate from the race day crowd. A key accompanying the photogravure print identifies 73 individuals, including Governors of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, sporting identities, businessmen and politicians, and members of Naarm/Melbourne’s Anglo-elite.

Newspaper articles read alongside the key and Kahler’s vibrant canvas, now held in the Victorian Racing Club Collection, reveal the artifice of the composition. While a Table Talk report suggests an accurate rendering of Lady Loch’s race day ensemble in ‘plum bloom Sicilian, with a petticoat of cream and mauve striped brocade’, the artist’s selection of colours for other dresses generally did not match descriptions in print. For example, Miss Thompson, who appears at far right in warm yellow with rich gold banding at the hem, was recorded as wearing ‘blue silk covered with a mist of cream muslin’. In monochromatic reproduction however, the importance of such contrivance is perhaps moot.

Working from life and photographs submitted by society ladies for inclusion, Kahler created an image of a booming colonial city described by the Sydney Morning Herald in 1889 as a ‘national subject’. Long before the founding of ‘Fashions on the field’ in 1962, race day wear was a signifier of social stratification. Through visual cues in each woman’s arrangement of costume and accessory, this group portrait of the privileged class reveals much about the way in which intricacies of dress underscore social rituals that played out in both the public and private spaces of the 19th-century portrait.

Some 60 years before Kahler’s series of racing pictures, in 1824 Richard Read Snr painted a full-length portrait of Julia Johnston against the backdrop of the family estate ‘Annandale’ in Gadigal land/Sydney. As part of that first generation of non-Indigenous Australian-born free settlers, we read in the details of garment and accessory something of her economic status and the social circles in which she would have moved. Due to the significant costs associated with commissioning portraits, the watercolour follows a pattern well established throughout the 19th century with subjects drawn largely from the privileged classes – wealthy or well-connected. Unlike studio photography from this period, images of poverty or the working classes were largely restricted to genre paintings.

The Empire silhouette of Johnston’s blue day dress was made popular across Europe during the First French Empire (1805–15) by Empress Joséphine. Gored panels fall vertically from a fitted bodice that ends below the bust at the high sashed waistline. This created a streamlined silhouette by allowing width to be added to the skirt length with minimal bulk at the waist. Framing a broad square neckline edged with white lace netting, ornate mancheron sleeves reveal loosely draped white undersleeves fitted at the wrist. The double frill in contrasting bands of white at the hemline follows fashions in both day and evening dresses of the 1820s. At the same time, hemlines were raised to ankle length, providing the opportunity for a laced satin slipper to delicately point out from beneath the skirt.

Johnston stands before the viewer with her dog at foot, holding a fabric parasol with an ivory capped turned wooden handle and white sun bonnet trimmed with ostrich plumes. The white embroidered shawl with floral border shares similarities with contemporary London designs and points to the influence of the woollen shawls exported from the Kashmir region that featured widely in fashion plates of the period. Alongside examples of early gowns such as those held by the National Trust of Australia and Powerhouse Museum, Johnston’s portrait indicates that by the 1820s such modish designs were arriving in the penal colony from Britain. Dresses, fabrics and trims brought back from overseas would continue to shape tastes throughout the century.

A half-length portrait of Martha Kermode, painted in lutruwita/Tasmania’s Central Midlands by Henry Mundy in the first year after her marriage to Robert Quayle Kermode, shows the sitter attired in a silk satin evening dress. A pointed bodice, popular from the early 1830s in Europe, is trimmed over the neck and bust with lace. The skirt is pleated to the waist, giving the garment fullness. The preceding decade’s turn to romanticism is seen in the broad bateau neckline and details such as the ladder of bows set out along the centre line of the bodice reminiscent of 18th-century eschelles. Using the stiffness of his brush to create texture through a layered application of white pigment over grey, Mundy details decorative lace edging and conveys the drape and sheen of the voluminous double bouffant sleeves set below the shoulder. Considering the way these low set, narrow cut shoulders restricted movement, it’s interesting to reflect on how these 1840s sitters negotiated the fit and feel of these dresses in arranging themselves before the artist.

Dressed in black damask, Jemima sits at the centre of CHT Costantini’s portrait of the Billet family. She is framed by seven of the 12 children she would have between 1836 and 1858. The unconventional placement of a partially concealed child behind the group on her right points to the possibility that she is in mourning. The wearing of dark colours during a period of mourning has been observed in western countries since antiquity, but came into sharp focus following the death of Prince Albert in 1861. While Queen Victoria would wear black for the rest of her life, societal expectations and a responsive fashion market in Australia saw the sartorial expression of mourning observed for up to several years. Women would wear black until half-mourning, when greys and purples were introduced. An older daughter wears a blue fan-fronted day dress with pleated folds descending from the shoulder to an elongated curved waist. Painted before the invention of the crinoline cage in 1856, her full skirt would have been supported by petticoats and falls as tiered gathered flounces. Fashions worn by the younger Billet siblings follow a pattern set by their mother and older sisters, featuring similar trimmings and design though hemlines were raised to create a shortened silhouette. Both boys and girls wore dresses with pantalettes or drawers up until around the age of five, at which age boys were ‘breeched’.

Portraits of children reveal much about the individual sitters and the way each is positioned within the social and cultural frameworks of childhood. The idea of childhood as a distinct life stage took hold by the second half of the 19th century, driving a ready market for children’s fashion. In Tom Roberts’ c. 1890 portrait of Lily Stirling, the portrayal of youthful freshness is set in charming contrast to the cool flatness of the background. The length of her dress tells us that she is probably around five, after which age she would have worn longer dresses closer in style to her mother. Her fur-trimmed winter coat was the height of fashion for young girls of the period, with a slightly lowered waist and bustle. The influence of James McNeill Whistler is evident in the simple elegance of the white ensemble, accessorised with coordinating fur hat and kid leather gloves, set against a green backdrop.

Roberts employed a similar green palette for the background of his portrait of Hilda Spong, with the additional Whistlerian flourish of tall ornamental grass. One of many commissioned society portraits painted by the artist during the 1880s and 1890s, the grand full-length life-size painting depicts the actress raising a large silk fan in readiness to commence a dance. Having made her debut at the age of 14 in Sydney, Spong established her reputation on an international stage. Her theatrical successes both in Australian and overseas were well chronicled, as were the reception of her gowns, which we are told by The Argus ‘women journalists rave over’.

Spong’s gold dress combines an Empire silhouette, with a large bow at the back, and voluminous leg-o-mutton, or gigot, sleeves tapering from the elbow to wrist. What appear as long cuffs are in fact a pair of fingerless gloves in matching gold fabric. The dominant design elements of this garment’s construction, made popular across England from the mid-1820s, had been reimagined and reworked in the 1890s. While the portrait’s title suggests Spong is actively posed practicing a partner dance that first debuted in the 17th century, the minuet, it was with some pleasure that I stumbled upon an 1893 article in The Queenslander neatly linking this new dance trend with the revival of high-waisted designs: ‘The return to old fashions and special preference shown by young ladies for the Empire form of ball dress are probably the reasons … why round dances are being supplanted by the older minuet’.

Looking through a wardrobe of dresses spanning almost a century of fashion, the role each of our sitters played in the picture making process is in part realised through the assembling of costume and accessory. As the shawl draped over the shoulder of Julia Johnston speaks to the global reach of the British Empire, by the 1890s Hilda Spong’s dress tells us of the cosmopolitan circles in which she moved as an emerging actress of 18 or 19, and her up-to-date engagement with European and American styles. A garment chosen and worn is not only indicative of social, cultural and perhaps economic status, but how a subject wanted to be remembered as an individual. Through the selection of a feather trimmed bonnet, white silk evening gown or black damask dress, she holds in space and time a representation of the self.