Displaying Art and Fashion: Ladies' Pocket-Book Imagery in the Paper Collections of Sarah Sophia Banks

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgementsI am grateful to Prof. Mark Hallett, Prof. Harriet Guest, and Dr. Stephanie Miller for their careful readings of this essay at different stages. I also wish to thank Prof. Peter McNeil and Dr. Patrick Steorn for inviting me to read this paper at the Fashioning the Early Modern conference, and for their editorial guidance and support for this project. Many thanks to Sheila O'Connell at the British Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings for her expertise and assistance with images.SummaryThis article will analyze the intellectual and cultural richness of Sarah Sophia Banks's collection as an instrument for eighteenth-century sociability as well as contemporary practices of collection and display. It will focus on one of the principal manifestations of fashion in her collection of ephemera, ladies' pocket-book imagery. Despite the likely centrality of printed images to women's pocket books, the visual material is rarely subjected to detailed analysis. Through the interpretation and evaluation of a select group of images, this article will demonstrate how pocket-book readers learned to discern esthetic value, both artistic and fashionable.