Isabella Bradford's Blog, page 40

Alexander Hamilton's Powdered Hair, c1796

Susan reporting,

Yesterday I wrote here about how Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (the heroine of my new historical novel, I, ELIZA HAMILTON) followed the latest fashion for hedgehog-inspired hair, a style made popular by Marie Antoinette. Curled and frizzled, pomatumed and powdered, the hairstyle would have been the work of a skilled hairdresser, and probably taken considerable time to achieve, too.

For her husband Alexander Hamilton, that same powder and pomatum was a near-daily ritual. Today we look at portraits of the Founding Fathers and think the American Revolution was the work of a bunch of old men. This wasn't the case: many of the members of the Continental Congress were in their thirties, or even their twenties, and the soldiers fighting in the army were even younger. Even George Washington was only in his early forties when he became the Commander-in-Chief. However, many of the portraits of the Founders that we see today were painted when these men were much older and more venerable. In addition, many of them powdered their hair, which made them appear prematurely grey.

While many 18thc gentlemen wore wigs - signs of status as well as fashion - American military men often took their cue from Washington, who always wore his own hair instead of a wig. Washington's hair was naturally reddish-brown, but always hidden under a thick coat of pomatum and white powder, exactly as used by the ladies (more about powder and pomatum here .) But while the ladies were hoping for plenty of big-hair-volume, Washington expected his pomatum regimen to hold his hair neatly in place and out of the way, sleeked back from his forehead, clubbed, and bound in a queue at the nape of the neck with a black silk bow. He expected his officers to do the same, a show of military uniformity and neatness, and many of the men continued to wear a variation of the style long after the war was over and their military days done, or at least as long as they still had the hair for it.

Among these officers was Colonel Alexander Hamilton. Washington's most trusted aide-de-camp during the war and a bonafide hero in battle, Hamilton always enjoyed the display of a well-cut uniform, and was proud of retaining his military bearing throughout his life. By the 1790s, many American men had already abandoned wigs and the now-old-fashioned pomatum and powder except for the most formal occasions. Younger men were cutting their hair short, too. But Hamilton preferred to retain the smart military look of well-dressed hair from his days as a young man in the Continental Army, much the way some modern former soldiers continue to wear very short or shaved haircuts even after returning to civilian life.

Hamilton's hair was serious business, with payments to his barber listed in his cash books. His third son, James Alexander (who was born in 1788, making this recollection likely from the late 1790s, when Hamilton was working as an attorney in New York City), recalled his father's ritual with the barber:

"I recollect being in my father's office in New York when he was under the hands of his hair-dress[er] (which was his daily course). His back hair was long. It was plaited, clubbed up, and tied with a black ribbon. His front hair was pomatumed, powdered and combed up and back from his forehead."

The profile drawing, above, was a portrait that the Hamilton family regarded as one of the best likenesses, showing his elegantly pronounced nose and half-smile. It's also a splendid view of that well-dressed hair tied with the black ribbon. It appears to cut shorter and fuller in front, with the back long (I'm resisting mullet references.) I especially like how there's a dusting of hair powder on the collar of his black coat - once the sign of a well-groomed gentleman.

Fun fact: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette were all described by contemporaries as having various shades of red hair. Who knew, under all that powder?

Above: Alexander Hamilton by James Sharples, pastel on paper, c1796, New York Historical Society.

From Paris to New York City: Hedgehog Hair, c1785

Susan reporting,

It's a still-too-popular myth that early Americans were unfashionably plain and self-sufficient, wearing simply braided hair and clothes of homespun fabric. In this unrealistic vision of 18thc life, women not only tended the sheep, but spun the wool, wove the thread into fabric, and then cut and sewed all the clothes for their family.

Well, no. Very little fabric was produced at home, and nearly all of it was imported. People who lived along the coast were eager to follow the fashions of Paris and London, and the latest styles were imported along with fine woolens, silks, cottons, and linen. Even settlers and Native Americans living on the frontier traded for woolen cloth made in England. European visitors were surprised by how fashionable Americans were, and how the ladies in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New York followed the same trends as their sisters abroad.

These two portraits show how swiftly and thoroughly fashion came across the Atlantic. The portrait, left, of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, was painted by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun in 1785. The queen wears her hair in the latest style, a la hérisson, or the hedgehog, devised by her hairdresser Léonard-Alexis Autié. Monsieur Léonard (as he was known at court) cut the front of the queen's hair shorter, brushed it with a scented "hard" pomade made from beeswax, curled it on narrow rollers or with heated tongs, and frizzed it for extravagant volume. Unlike today, frizz was an 18thc lady's best friend, and the more, the better. Loose falling side curls towards the back soften the effect. Finally the entire hair is dusted with a starchy powder to whiten it. (See here , here , and here for more about 18thc hair powder and pomade.)

The queen not only favored this hairstyle, but found it was a good "support" for the oversized turbans, plumes, and poufs she liked to wear during this period. While white-powdered hair was beginning to fall from fashion - it disappeared for good with the French Revolution - the queen continued to powder her fair hair to an even whiter pallor, the better to show off her complexion in contrast.

Variations on the hedgehog style were popular throughout the 1780s. Many of the ladies in portraits by Thomas Gainsborough sport hedgehog-inspired hair, and the hairdressers of the recent movie The Duchess gave Kiera Knightley wigs with stupendous hedgehogs.

In 1787, the style was being worn in New York City, too. The second portrait, right, by American artist Ralph Earl, is of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, wife of then-member of the Continental Congress Alexander Hamilton; she's also the heroine of my upcoming book I, ELIZA HAMILTON. The Hamiltons were a fashionable young couple in Federalist New York City and in Philadelphia, attending the theatre, balls, and dinners with equally fashionable friends, and would have been very aware of European styles in hair and dress.

In her portrait, Eliza has clearly followed the royal trend-setter. Some historians (male, and dismissive of fashion history) describe her as wearing a wig, but that's her own hair, frizzed and powdered into an elegant hedgehog. It's a surprisingly close copy of the queen's hair, down to the horizontal falling curls at the back, although Eliza chose a simpler headdress of fine linen or silk gauze instead of Marie-Antoinette's plumed turban.

That snowy white hair must have taken a considerable amount of powder to achieve, too, for beneath it Eliza's natural hair color was described as a very dark brown, almost black - you can see it showing through the powder. So much powder made a statement of affluence as well. Hair powder was considered a luxury good, and while flour could be substituted as a low-cost alternative in a pinch, the best powder was imported, a finely ground mixture of starch, bone, and orris root for scent. It's likely that Eliza wore her hair this heavily powdered only for special occasions, and by the time she sat for another portrait in the 1790s, she'd given it up, and is shown wearing her own dark hair. There is, however, a record of Eliza receiving a gift of hair powder in 1780 from Martha Washington - a thoughtful present from another 18thc lady who enjoyed a good powdering.

Above left: Marie Antoinette with a Rose by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, 1783, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Lower right: Portrait of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (Mrs. Alexander Hamilton by Ralph Earl, c1787, Museum of the City of New York.

The Amazing Angle Lamp

Loretta reports:

As well as going under the Mound House of Estero Island , I entered the house itself , which has been lovingly restored to one of its earlier incarnations. Indoors included an immense bathroom (from a later period), which holds some fascinating exhibits for both children and adults.

But what caught my Nerdy History Girl attention was the lamp in the restored living room. A guide told me it’s an Angle Lamp, and showed me an old advertisement for it. Turns out this was a well-known type of kerosene lamp, which was around for quite a long time, and whose advertisements appeared in numerous periodicals.

Many of us tend to assume that, as soon as a new lighting invention came along, the old ones went away. But of course not. Just as today, we don’t always have the latest model refrigerator, people in the past, for the most part, kept their stuff until it didn’t work anymore and couldn’t be fixed. I exclude, naturally, the people who always have to have the latest thing, because they were around too, needing the most up-to-date caves, I’ll bet.
Angle Lamp 1907 ad
With lighting, it’s not necessarily a matter of making things last, though this is part of the story. People continued to use older types of lighting because the newfangled inventions were either suspect, e.g., for safety reasons, or simply for practical reasons. Thus gas began lighting the streets of London long before it lit private houses. In between, it blew up some buildings. Electric utilities came into being in the early 1880s, but it was a while before they became ubiquitous. And it was another while before many people deemed electric light safe, healthy, and/or not hideous.

You can read more ads and some fascinating claims (e.g., white light causes blindness!) via these links
The Mayflower, Volume 20, Issues 10-12 1904
 
The Medical Brief 1899

Watson’s magazine Vol 6 (1906)

Floral Life Vol 5-6 (1907)
—and many more by simply Googling "Angle Lamp"

Advertisement Image
American Monthly Review of Reviews Vol 36 (1907)

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

A Parade of Potential Nursemaids, 1827

Susan reporting,

I recently spotted this amusing illustration on the Instagram account of Patrick Baty, an expert on the history of paint and colors (and a good friend of this blog), and he has graciously permitted me to share it with you here. It hasn't appeared anywhere else, because it's from his family papers, a drawing done by one of his ancestors to amuse the rest of the family. As always, click on the image to enlarge it.

The illustration is entitled Preparations for the Grand Review December 1827. Patrick describes it as a "piece of family satire. Drawn as a result of a letter from my 3rd great-grandmother, Anne Margaret Polhill (née Graham) from Hove to the housekeeper at their London house. 'Get as many nurses as you can collect against our coming up' [was the order.] As Madame la Générale, she orders: 'Fall back there - eyes right.'"

To explain a bit more: moving a large family from one house in the country to another in London must have been a considerable challenge for Mrs. Polhill in 1827. Here she stands, sword in hand and a feathered turban on her head, reviewing the possible nurses that have been gathered. Another lady (whose name I can't make out, but who is wearing an equally formidable hat) beats the drum and says "Rub a dub, rub a dub, who'll enlist?"

The nurses are a mixed assortment of women, wearing equally assorted attire. The caption in the upper left gives them each a brief statement, ranging from "I have a sweet voice & good lungs" to "I speak grammatically." Most poignant is the statement of the elderly woman who's first in line: "I have lived 50 years in my last place."

Whichever of the nurses is finally hired (perhaps all!), it's clear that there will be certain strict standards to maintain. The family carriage is fast approaching in the background, filled with heads that likely belong to the children, and flying a standard that proclaims "Perfection or death." I feel sorry for those nurses. . . .

Many thanks to Patrick Baty. His new book, The Anatomy of Color: The Story of Heritage Paints and Pigments, will be published this July.

Breakfast Links: Week of March 13, 2017

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• The tale of an unusual portrait: President John Quincy Adams painted as a hornpipe dancer?
• Noble squares and charming cheesecake: a Regency tourist's London diary.
• Who knew that corset rust was a serious washday problem?
• The cheapest bookstore in the world: James Lackington and the creation of modern bookselling in 18thc London.
• Tattoos as memory-prompts: the introduction of Social Security numbers brought with it a very modern anxiety.
• Image: Mourning bonnet with skeletal black lace leaves and mauve poppies, c1885.
• Fashionable blues of the 18thc.
• A tough place to work : in a box, submerged, digging out dirt from a river bed, 1873
• Radical motets from a 16thc nunnery by the youngest daughter of Lucrezia Borgia.
• Martha Washington's diamond ring , a rarity in 18thc America.
• From immigrant shopgirl to multi-millionaire: how Clementine Cahn built a real estate empire in 19thc New York City.
•  Erica Wilson,  the Julia Child of needlework.
• How to bathe like an 18thc queen .
• Image: Locket engraved on the back: "Hair of Mary Tudor, Queen of France, cut from her head Sept 6 1784 when her tomb at St Edmundsbury was opened."
• The art of silhouette (and courting) in Winslow Homer's illustrations for James Russell Lowell's The Courtin', 1874.
• A guide to choosing the right kilt .
• How preserving a 19thc opera house in Leadville, CO became one family's obsession.
• Katherine Parr, Henry VIII's sixth wife, collaborated with Thomas Tallis to compose music to rally her husband for war.
• Image: Ola Brooks  of Mount Carmel, TN, placing index tabs, 1933.
• The unsung delights of a well-designed endpaper .
• Robertson's fantastic phantasmagoria , an 18thc spectacle of horror.
• On-line exhibition: postcards from early burlesque performer Miss Kitty Lord , chanteuse excentrique Anglaise, and her tour of Egypt, 1908-12.
• The advertisement of a tailor in Portsmouth, NH, 250 years ago.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection

Friday Video: A Golden Music Box with a Rope Dancer, c1785

Susan reporting,

Loretta and I both have a well-documented ( here , here , and here ) weakness for automatons and other mechanical trinkets for the very wealthy in the 18thc. Automatons were often made as a collaboration between jewelers and watchmakers,  and it's difficult to say whether this luxurious little beauty is a music-box masquerading as jewelry, or an ornament that makes music. Imagine a gentleman taking this from the deep pockets of his coat to entertain his friends, or a lady keeping it among the other amusements on her bedside table, ready to wind up and play for a special child.

Automated music-box, gold, Geneva, c1785. Victoria & Albert Museum.

If you receive this post via email, you may be seeing an empty space or a black box where the video should be. To watch, click here.

The Mound House of Estero Island

Loretta reports:

I guess this is the week Susan and I blog about houses .

My subject, in Florida, is by far the younger structure, dating to the early 1900s. Surrounded by a beautiful garden, the Mound House overlooks Estero Bay.

What makes this place remarkable are the ancient foundations on which it’s built: a shell mound 2,000 years old. Native American coastal people known as the Calusa built it between 100 BC and AD 700. Here they lived, fished, worked and played. Then, for reasons unknown, they stopped living here in AD 700. They would come by to the edges to repair nets and clean fish, but otherwise stopped using it. What we know of them indicates that they weren’t driven out—not that early, at any rate, because they were apparently the most powerful people in South Florida, to whom other tribes paid tribute. Centuries later, in 1513, they attacked Ponce de Leon the first time he stopped by, and are believed to have fatally wounded him on his second visit, eight years later.

May I add that every sentence here could easily be expanded into a blog post—and that’s only before 1600. The 20th century alone is filled with Mound House incident. The place, in short, has quite an exciting and not always peaceful history. But let’s stick to the shells, millions of them, in distinctive layers, which archaeologists have used to piece together the site’s history.

Ironically, we wouldn’t know as much as we do (and as archaeologists continue to learn), if one of the house’s owners hadn’t engaged in wanton destruction, bulldozing the site for a swimming pool. When, years later, the Town of Fort Myers Beach acquired the site and the pool was removed, archaeologists could study the mound site in detail.

Searching “Mound House, Estero Island” online will bring you to a number of articles about the site. You may also want to check out their blog , which includes a video of the demise of the swimming pool and what was revealed.

Note: The image of the Calusa is part of an immense mural that covers a wall of the information center.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

A Little House that Survived a Major Battle, 1777

Susan reporting,

One of the best parts about writing I, Eliza Hamilton is that I've been able to visit so many of the places that were familiar to my characters. Alexander and Eliza Hamilton lived most of their lives in New York and Pennsylvania, with some months spent also in New Jersey during the war. As a young man, Alexander served as an officer in the Continental Army, and was the senior aide-de-camp of Commander-in-Chief General George Washington. For obvious reasons, Eliza wasn't there on the front lines with Alexander, and since this is her book, not his, I've only now been playing catch-up and visiting "his" battlefields.

This past weekend, I braved the cold to traipse across the Brandywine Battlefield, located in Chadds Ford, PA. The Battle of Brandywine was fought on September 11, 1777. It was the largest battle of the Revolution, involving the most troops (over 30,000 men between the two armies), and the longest battle as well, with fighting that ranged over 11 hours in ninety-degree heat. It was not a good day for the Continental Army. Not only were they soundly defeated with significant casualties, but their retreat also permitted the British Army to capture Philadelphia (then the country's capital) virtually unopposed. And yes, twenty-year-old Alexander Hamilton was one of those soldiers in the retreat.

There is, of course, few signs of the battle left today. Housing developments and highways close in around what remains of the battlefield, a fraction of the long-gone open space of 1777. The word "battlefield" itself has always struck me as something of a misnomer, sounding as it does like some carefully designated and set-aside place for war. The Battle of Brandywine took place across farms and around homes, river fords, and meeting houses, and as wars always do, changed forever the lives of those caught in the middle of it.

The house of farmer Gideon Gilpin (shown here) still stands, and it is open to visitors as part of the Brandywine Battlefield historic site. Gilpin was a prosperous wheat and dairy farmer whose family had been among the first English settlers of the region. He lived with his wife and six young children in the two-story, four-room stone house shown here (the ell with the porch is a later addition.) Like most of his neighbors, he was a Friend, or Quaker. Quakers believed that war and conflict went against God's wishes, and refused to choose sides or fight during the Revolution.

It was a difficult and unpopular stand to take, especially when the war spilled over onto Gilpin's land. Standing inside the little stone house, I tried to imagine what that September day must have been like for the Gilpin family, who remained inside their house while the battle raged nearby. With shutters closed, the thick stone walls protected them to a certain extent, but considering how seasoned soldiers spoke afterwards of the terrible fighting and steady gunfire from the artillery on both sides, it must have been a horrifying ordeal.

Imagine trying to comfort your small children when you're terrified yourself. Imagine hearing the sounds of war, without knowing exactly what was happening. Imagine wondering if the next round of cannon fire will be near enough to shatter the wall of your home.

The Gilpins and their house survived, but the aftermath of the battle may have been even more difficult for Gideon. His crops - so close to harvest - fields, and trees were destroyed. Worse yet, the British had taken not only the bacon, hay, and wheat he had in storage, but all his livestock: milch cows, sheep, swine, and his yoke of oxen, the 18thc farmer's equivalent to a tractor and a truck. His farm was in ruins, and he was left with no way to feed or support his family. It was enough for Gideon Gilpin. Soon after, he chose to side with the Continental cause - and was read out (or expelled) from his Quaker community for doing so.

I think there could be another book here....

One more quick Nerdy History fact: that enormous sycamore tree in the background of the bottom photo is certified by the National Arborist Association and the International Society of Arboriculture to have been standing at least since 1787, the year the American Constitution was signed. Most likely it, too, is another survivor of the battle.

The Brandywine Battlefield historic site includes not only the Gilpin House, but the Benjamin Ring House, which served as Washington's headquarters. They've just reopened for the season; their website is here. Special thanks to Andrew M. Outten, director of education and museum services, for his first-rate tour of the Gilpin House.

All photos ©2017 by Susan Holloway Scott.

Edward S. Curtis and His Record of Native Peoples

The offering-San Ildefonso
Loretta reports:
Currently I’m in Florida, living around the corner from an ancient Native American site (about which I’ll post later), which has made me conscious of how much has been lost of our history, as native peoples and their cultures were decimated or wiped out entirely, thanks to not only to Europeans, but sometimes, other Native Americans. We’ll never see photos of Southwest Florida’s Calusa tribe members, but thanks to the photographer I’m featuring today, we have thousands of images of other Native Americans.
Edward Sheriff Curtis built his own camera when he was twelve and became a professional photographer in his late teens. In the early 1900s, he embarked on a project of photographing Native Americans that lasted more than 20 years. Lucille The Library of Congress has a large collection of his photographic prints. Above and below are examples from the online image s. But before searching for Edward S Curtis at the Library of Congress, you might want to take a look at these large- scale images at LightStalking , some of which I found deeply moving as well as breathtaking.
Images all by Edward Sheriff Curtis: The offering--San Ildefonso c 1927 Lucille c 1907 Cheyenne Belle c 1904 all courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA Cheyenne Belle Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Breakfast Links: Week of March 6, 2017

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• One woman's Boston Tea Party .
• The Great War, and great changes for women.
• Avis Clarke : a female pedlar, or chapman, 1624.
• Benedict Arnold's phantom duel .
• Did Jane Austen become virtually blind because of arsenic poisoning?
• Image: Pugs are just a millennial obsession: illustration from Strand Magazine, 1892.
• Ada Lovelace, the first tech visionary.
• The ideal American home, c1841 according to Catharine Beecher .
• Taking the waters at Buxton in 1800.
• How dishabille in 18thc portraits symbolized female empowerment.
• Springing forward into Daylight Savings Time with Uncle Sam, 1918.
• Image: Suffragettes outside the Kennington Oval Cricket Ground, 1908.
• How did corsets evolve into girdles ?
• In the years following World War One, women took to the skies, pushing the limits of what was possible.
• Martha Washington, the first First Lady.
• A lazy but tasty recipe for Regency-era lemonade .
• Image: The wallpaper from Emily Dickinson's bedroom .
• Spices for the 18thc kitchen.
• The suffragette and fascist Mary Richardson and the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery.
• An upmarket new suburb for London in the late 17thc: the development of St. James's.
• Image: Just for fun: 1970s men in jumpsuits .
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection