MONOFATTO

White shirt - red tie

For two years I have been meaning to hang some pictures on the walls of my apartment. It’s not that I don’t have anything to hang. I have some nice photographs and artwork. Framed, even. But they stay propped up in the corner, waiting for the elusive combination of free time and initiative required to vault themselves to prominence. By the anti-logic that characterizes my planning process, I decided that the best way to motivate myself to hang my pictures is to get some new ones.

I had been considering looking for some Cruikshank or Dighton illustrations, such as the one featured at the top of this post. These cartoons ridicule the self-obsessed English dandy of the early 19th century Regency period. Looking at them daily might serve as a useful reminder of one’s own pompous vanity. 

But perhaps I could also indulge in a little bit of self-respect with one of Bernard Boutet de Monvel’s prints, such as the one above. While the English began ridiculing the prissiness of the dandy nearly as soon as he arrived, the French revered him, as indeed they revered all things English in the aftermath of Waterloo. French literary figures such as Baudelaire and Balzac viewed dandyism as a serious and noble enterprise. 

De Monvel’s early 20th century prints offer the dandy this same homage. An fashionable dresser in his own right, De Monvel published many of his works in the Parisian fashion journal Gazette du Bon Ton, a loose translation into French from the Latin “vox sartoria”. The above image, titled Les Manteaux, which I saw for the first time at RISD’s Artist, Rebel, Dandy exhibit, shows a man and his wardrobe, oblivious to the rest of the world (not pictured). His morning dress assembled, he contemplates his overcoat with the seriousness of a philosopher and the focus of a watchmaker.