Revolutionary woman with a headscarf on a white background

Madame Revolutionary Tea Towel

Cotton-Linen - 95% cotton 5% linen
$59.44
$59.44
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Revolutionary woman with a headscarf on a white background
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  • Revolutionary woman with a headscarf on a white background
  • Madame Revolutionary Tea Towel
  • Revolutionary woman with a headscarf on a white background
  • Madame Revolutionary Tea Towel
Madame Revolutionary Tea Towel

Madame Revolutionary Tea Towel

$59.44
$59.44
Description

The white muslin bonnet with its lavender ribbon, the dark dress, the white fichu pinned at the throat with a single gilt button, the auburn curls falling loose against a near-black ground: this is a young Frenchwoman of the 1790s, painted in the direct, composed manner that replaced aristocratic hauteur as the mode of bourgeois self-presentation after 1789. She is a citizen of the Republic. Her dress says so clearly.

The Revolutionary decade produced an enormous quantity of portraiture at every level of French society. The collapse of the Académie Royale, the dispersal of court patronage, and the urgent need of the new bourgeois class to document itself created a market for portraits that painters of every ability supplied. These faces are the visual record of a generation that lived through one of the most consequential decades in European history and dressed, deliberately, to show which side they were on.

Printed in full color on quality cotton at 27.6″ × 19.7″. The portrait reproduces across the full face of the towel with the dark ground extending to the edges and the face occupying the center. On a hook or over a rail it reads as a portrait in the room, which is exactly what it is. Part of La Révolution.
A Note from Jeff

The dress here is precisely legible to anyone who knows the period: the white muslin bonnet, the dark dress, the plain white fichu are the respectable costume of a woman who lived through the Revolution and embraced its new social order. The powdered wigs and elaborate court dress of the ancien régime had become not merely unfashionable but dangerous. What replaced them was simpler, cleaner, and in its own way just as deliberate.

The French have always understood that the kitchen deserves the same visual attention as any other room. Putting this portrait on a tea towel is, I think, exactly the kind of choice that the woman in it would have appreciated.
Tea Towel Fabric