A Desert - Imitation of modern Fashion! by (FASHION). [HEATH,…

Hand coloured etching (375 x 260 mm, trimmed to plate). Pasted at corners to an album leaf.

A wonderful satire on contemporary women’s fashion. The 1820s had seen considerable change in women’s fashions, with neoclassical straight lines and sparse adornments giving way to a more exhuberant and romantic style with more emphasis on curvaceous shapes, cheekily satirised here with wine glass and fruit.�
An inverted wine-glass (claret shape), partly fluted, represents a woman; the bowl is a bell-shaped petticoat, the stem a pinched waist and bodice; the wide base forms the brim of her plateau-hat on which stands a cork with a metal rim and upstanding ring to form the narrow jam-pot crown. On the base (or brim) are bunches of grapes from which hang trails of vine leaves. Tied symmetrically to the stem are two pears, representing inflated sleeves, the stalks serving for wrists and hands. Below the design: ‘Turn a tumbler up side down / The foot for a hat and a cork for the crown /Some grapes for trimming, will give an air / And as for Sleeves have ready a pear /When join'd to gather tis sure to tell /A picture true, of a modern belle’.

The 'P. P.' of the signature reads: ‘what have we got here by Jove what we are all fond of a Lass & à Glass my service to you Gents tis but a frail fair after all’. BM Satires 15611.