It often conveys a sense that the man in question deviates from traditional norms of masculinity, particularly by being overly invested in his appearance. One clue to the reviewer’s objections came in the curious word “coxcomical.” Literally meaning a rooster’s crest, “coxcomb” has also been used since the sixteenth century to refer to vain and affected men, as in “an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb” from Shakespeare’s Henry V. By these Means, a Bouquet of Flowers, or a Lady’s Ruffles, become the principal Object and his productions acquire a coxcomical and ridiculous air.Įven by the standards of the eighteenth century, this seemed like a very harsh response to an innocuous painting of a young woman playing a harp in her dressing room. The Portraits of this Artist are drawn with Precision, and finished with a painful and minute attention to little Circumstances. James’s Chronicle, who saw the portrait when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy: Sure enough, I soon came upon these lines penned by an anonymous critic for the St. One of my first steps in studying the portrait was to consult the Burney Newspapers Collection, a vast digitized archive of early British periodicals, to see if any contemporaries had responded to Cosway’s vivid evocation of an upper-class woman’s private rituals. Haggin, 1969 (69.104)īecause much of my research has centered around portraiture, gender, and sexuality, this painting, which has been at The Met since 1969, was of particular interest to me when my colleagues and I began the process of rethinking the Museum’s permanent galleries of European painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Marianne Dorothy Harland (1759–1785), Later Mrs. Miss Harland’s clothing, a white morning dress and mantle, indicates that her hair has just been arranged and powdered. The sitter occupies a fashionable interior that contemporaries would have recognized as a private feminine space through such features as the dressing table bearing a pincushion, scent bottles, and powder puff, objects associated in eighteenth-century Europe with the grooming rituals of elite women. The painting shows Miss Harland in her dressing room, playing the harp while a lapdog sleeps at her feet. In the spring of 1779, the painter Richard Cosway exhibited a portrait depicting Marianne Dorothy Harland, the daughter of a British vice admiral, at London’s Royal Academy.
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