Normally, when you look at portraits you feel obliged to focus on the sitter. But quite often you’re thinking, ‘Ooh, what a lovely frock.’ Or, ‘Fabulous breeches!’ Here it’s the costumes that take centre stage. The point that this exhibition makes is that costume spoke volumes about society, particularly in the long 18th century, over the course of the reigns (and regency) of the four Georges. Compare the flounces and silk of a portrait of Queen Caroline in 1771 with the simple classical white muslin cotton of Princess Sophia in 1796 and you find nothing less than a revolution. The change resembles what happened in dress after the Great War: bye-bye Edwardian hourglass, hello flapper. Here cotton, a fabric inexorably associated with slavery, tells a larger story.
Something similar happened with men’s dress: when you see the portrait of Lord Byron in actual trousers (previously a sailors’ or boys’ thing) in 1807, you feel a transformation under way. Indeed one of the themes of the exhibition is how the upper classes slowly appropriated the style of the lower orders – if less dramatically than Marie Antoinette in shepherdess mode.
The show starts with a glorious picture of the goings-on at St James’s Park in about 1745. Royalty is to the fore with Frederick, Prince of Wales, in elegant Garter decoration. But look hard, and you see a man peeing against a tree, a milkmaid handing a cup to a nursing mother, a lady chasing a man across the green, a woman cowherd, a group of elegant young ladies – one black – soldiers with fabulous tall hats, a couple of clergymen and a woman in fashionable dress tying up her stocking, a red ribbon clenched firmly in her mouth.
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