The Beautiful Woman in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

In English literature Lady Mary Montagu occupies a prominent place in which perhaps no one rivals her but Horace Walpole. After the two of them, letter-writing became a part of literature that cannot be passed over, lest a golden link be lost from its chain. It was our good fortune that Lady Mary traveled through most of the countries of Europe and left behind, in her abundant letters, a description of what she saw, in which she touched on the women of the various lands she visited.

In 1716 Lady Mary was in Vienna. It appears that the beauty of the Austrian women did not please her eye. She wrote:

"They build upon their heads fabrics a yard high, of three or four stories, and reinforce them with heavy ribbons of measureless length. They have taken this fashion from what milkmaids put on their heads to keep the pail from falling... Then they dress these fabrics with their hair, adding false hair to it, since they measure beauty by the quantity of hair upon their heads — enough to fill a whole bathtub... They are lavish in their use of powders, to hide the false hair from the true, and lavish in their use of jewels."

Her description of the women of Hanover is no less critical and scolding than the one before. She said:

"These women all have rosy cheeks — truly rosy — foreheads and bosoms the color of snow, crimson lips, and hair black as coal. They are, in this, perfect, and this perfection does not leave them until the hour of their death; but I could wish their beauty knew how to clothe itself in varied fashions instead of monotonous ones..."

In another letter she says that those women take care, when they sit, not to draw near the fireplaces, for fear the flame should melt what they have painted their faces and bodies with...

In 1718 she wrote from Paris, describing its women:

"In their clothes they are absurd to an unbelievable degree, and in the paints and powders they use, utterly unnatural. They cut their hair, shorten it, and curl it round their faces, then fill it with powders, so that it looks like white wool... They paint their cheeks down to the chin with a glaring red paint, till they seem to have no connection with human faces... I fancied they had borrowed their notions of beautification and dress from a fair-haired she-goat..."

Nor is Lady Mary the only one from whom we draw our first information about the women of the age and their beauties. There is William Alexander, who wrote:

"In the early eighteenth century women believed that God had created their waists far wider than they ought to be. So you would see them using the harshest of stays, tightening them as hard as they could, for fear their waists should look wide and they be charged with ugliness. But half a century later women began to feel that, besides the pain there is in the use of stays, they led to the opposite of what was intended, and doctors and philosophers began to attack their use. The women discovered that their mothers had been mistaken in their belief, and that God had created waists narrower than they ought to be... So they all set about remedying this deficiency, and took to using padding in their dress, so that in 1760 you might see women, old and young, all looking as though they were with child... And hardly ten years or thereabouts had passed before the first belief regained its mastery over minds; and you see our women now employing, to narrow their waists, means their grandmothers at the beginning of the century never knew."

Among the beauties of the age in France was the Marquise de Pompadour. She was born in 1721, and the marks of beauty showed upon her in her childhood, which led her mother to say: "That is something fit for His Majesty..." One of the writers of the age described her thus:

"There was in her more charm than there was beauty. Most striking in her were her regular, rounded features, her captivating complexion, her superb arms and hands, and her eyes that spoke of intelligence. When illness befell the Marquise in 1764, the court neglected all the other affairs of state and gave its whole attention to the ailing Marquise."

Another writer relates that the Marquise "began to lose her beauty by way of her mouth. From her childhood she had been accustomed to biting her lips in order to hide her agitation, and by the time she was thirty her mouth had lost its beauty. She was obliged to make it up afresh after every meal and after every kiss."

The same writer says:

"In the late eighteenth century a revolution took place in the dress of Frenchwomen: bosoms, which had formerly been covered with a thick covering, were permitted to appear to the eye, to bare themselves and look out from behind the gown — that loose, open gown beneath which a woman wore nothing but a thin petticoat."

As for England, Lady Hamilton occupies the throne of beauty in the period extending from the late eighteenth century into the first part of the century that follows.

There is no doubt that among all the women of history there has been no woman to rival this Emma Hamilton in her union of captivating bodily beauty and a sweet, serene disposition. Fortunately it was granted this woman to play a romantic role such as few have been granted.

Her husband, Sir William Hamilton, having observed that "when she is unadorned, she is at her most splendidly adorned," said to her:

"Take my word for what I tell you: the more simply you dress, the more your beauty shows. And your beauty, in its entirety, is the most perfect beauty my eyes have ever fallen upon."

And Horace Walpole said: "Sir William has married his gallery of statues..."

As for Romney, who immortalized her in his collection of paintings of her, he was infatuated with her to a far degree. He wrote of her: "She is a young woman of a playful character without affectation; her grace is boundless, and her figure perfectly proportioned. Very beautiful, overflowing with health and life."

And the foremost German poet, Goethe, wrote: "She is surpassingly beautiful, harmonious of feature. She wears a Greek gown that becomes her and makes her perfect. She lets down her tresses, or puts on her cloak, or changes her adornment or her attitudes, and makes you feel that you are in a dream. There is in her, with a strange clarity, perfection, and variety, everything that so many artists have striven to fix and to display — and fallen short..."

This is a little of the much that has been written about Emma Hamilton, who was, in truth, the central jewel in the necklace of English beauty. One is therefore seized with bewilderment on recalling that in her later days, after the death of Nelson, she grew fat and careless of her appearance, and became a subject of mockery for the caricaturists.