Side Hustles for 19th-century Ladies
This how-to book, Ladies’ Manual of Art, or Profit and Pastime (Philadelphia, 1887), includes chapters on tinting photographs, painting china, making wax molds, and taxidermy in addition to more familiar topics such as embroidery and landscape painting. The front cover presents a clever composition of painting supplies and a stool in a natural setting, with a small landscape painting superimposed on a similar image enlarged. The presumably female reader would have laughed at the book’s frontispiece depicting a man perched atop a fence to escape the bulls who have invaded the bucolic scene he is attempting to paint!
- Connie King, Chief of Reference and Curator of Women’s History
Ladies' manual of art, or, Profit and pastime. [Philadelphia] American Mutual Library Association. Philadelphia Pa. Chicago, Ill., 1887.
