Cap

Cap is a subject in art. The gallery holds 70 works in this subject in art, including works by Thomas Eakins, Jean Honoré Fragonard and Francis William Edmonds.

In the vocabulary of art, the cap denotes a soft, close-fitting head covering—usually brimless or only lightly framed—that artists have recorded across portraiture and genre painting for more than four centuries. Distinct from the structured hat, the cap of early modern Europe was most often a white linen or muslin garment: the caul covering the hair, a frilled or pleated brim around the face, and a ribbon or drawstring at the nape. Worn chiefly by married and working women indoors, it signified modesty, domesticity, and social station, and its near-universal presence in everyday dress made it an indispensable marker of character and class for painters of ordinary life.

The so-called mobcap came into fashion in the early eighteenth century and persisted into the nineteenth, migrating from informal wear to high fashion as the period's taste for simple "country" dress took hold. Painters prized the cap as a compositional device: its bright linen caught and reflected light, threw the sitter's face into relief, and lent a crisp geometry of folds and frills. In genre scenes it instantly signalled the laundress, nurse, or matron; in portraiture it framed respectability. François Boucher's Washerwomen exemplifies the Rococo delight in such caps among working figures, while in Federal-era America the cap became a badge of sober virtue.

The theme is well represented in canonical works. Francis William Edmonds's The New Bonnet (1858, Metropolitan Museum of Art) turns a woman's millinery purchase into a small moral drama of vanity and thrift. Ralph Earl, the Connecticut portraitist of rural landowners, rendered the lace cap and fichu with documentary precision in Lady Williams and Child and Mrs. Noah Smith and Her Children. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard's grand Self-Portrait with Two Pupils (1785) and John Bradley's folk likeness Emma Homan extend the motif across French academic and American naïve traditions alike.

Running parallel is a wholly symbolic lineage: the Phrygian or liberty cap, derived from the Roman pileus given to freed slaves and adopted as an emblem of freedom in the American and French Revolutions. Painters made it the crown of national personifications—France's Marianne, America's Columbia—most famously atop the figures of Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830). Thus the cap unites two threads of art history: the intimate social record of dress and the charged iconography of emancipation.