Satire of 18th Century Style
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Johann Martin Will (1727-1806) (engraver) |
| Satirical genre print from the viewpoint of
Europeans making fun of the 18th-century version of American women with
"big hair." The pretensions of provincial nouveau riches attempting
to emulate chic European aristocrats are lampooned in the accompanying
poem.
Two women wear lavish gowns that are only outdone by their enormous headresses - one carries a small palm tree on her head and the other a sweeping arrangement of bird plumes with beads dangling from it, surmounted by ribbons and shells. They are accompanied by a dark-skinned male servant and a crouching aristocratic man, both wearing smaller, but equally ludicrous, powdered wigs. An elephant stands with them. The poem alludes to the use of tusks and trunks for decoration -- the servant and one of the women have tusks extending from the backs of their heads and the other man has an elephant's trunk corkscrewing from the back of his head. The raw materials for these fashion accessories lay piled on the ground: more tusks, seashells, coral, a scorpion and tropical fruit. The plate is numbered in the lower center, and so may have been part of a series or collection. A poem in French along the top and German at the bottom accompanies the illustration: Et l'Amerique aussi recoit les modes nouvelles, L'Amant se pique une fois d'en decouvrir les fautes, [And America also receives the latest styles, Where the vexed lover once found flaws, Johann Martin Will was a German artist, engraver and printmaker, who
was born and died in Augsburg, a major European center of publishing
and engraving during the 18th century. |