Womenswear

Womenswear is a subject in art. The gallery holds 200 works in this subject in art, including works by Eugène Louis Boudin, Jacques Callot and Edouard Eckman.

"Womenswear" as a subject in art encompasses the depiction of clothing worn by women and girls — gowns, coats, collars, crinolines and accessories — treated not as mere background but as the very subject of the image. It is among the oldest of artistic preoccupations: from the Renaissance onward, female portraiture often celebrated lavish clothing and jewellery as much as the sitter, since dress was the clearest signal of status, virtue and identity. The theme crystallised as a distinct genre in the seventeenth century with the rise of the costume series and the fashion plate, and it has tracked the changing silhouette of women's dress ever since.

The defining works are studies of garments rendered with documentary precision. In the etched costume series — such as Jacques Callot's twelve-plate "La Noblesse" (c. 1620–23), recording the courtly fashions of the duchy of Lorraine with its plumed hats, layered lace collars and pearl garlands — the figure exists chiefly to display the cut and ornament of the dress. Wenceslaus Hollar pursued the same aim in England: his "Ornatus Muliebris Anglicanus" (1640) and a second collection of 1643 catalogued the masks, ruffs and fur muffs of women across the social classes, the intaglio line fine enough to register a Vandyke collar's lace or the rose on a shoe.

Our catalogue holds several variants of Callot's "Lady in a Large Coat," together with Edouard Eckman's "Standing Woman in a Great Coat" and an "Eventail à système" — a mechanical folding fan whose intricacy underscores how accessories belonged to this subject as fully as the gown itself.

By the nineteenth century the theme migrated into painting proper. Eugène Boudin, a native of Honfleur, made fashionable womenswear the heart of his Normandy beach scenes from the early 1860s; works like those gathered around "Four Women at Trouville" record affluent holidaymakers in fluttering crinoline skirts under grey coastal light, the artist's "little ladies on the beach." James Tissot pressed further, painting figures inseparable from their elaborate toilettes, while portraitists such as Adélaïde Labille-Guiard exploited dress to demonstrate the rendering of luminous, reflective fabric.

The genre links the documentary impulse of costume history to the high portrait tradition, and its descendants run directly into modern fashion illustration and photography — a lasting record of how women dressed, and how art chose to look at them.