The Sunshade, the Glove, the Muff - Octave Uzanne

So, too, may be seen in the collection of Madame la Baronne Gustave de Rothschild, a very curious Sunshade which belonged to Madame de Pompadour. It is of blue silk superbly decorated with wonderful Chinese miniatures in mica, and ornaments in paper very finely cut and affixed to the background. Fortified probably with such a Sunshade as this, the pretty favourite, at the time of the rage for pastorals, which followed the appearance of Bouffier’s story of Aline, betook herself to the shady walks of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, with her female friends, to see the white sheep milked, and to steep the carnation of her lips in the warm milk, of which the young Abbé De Bernis—who gathered so willingly madrigals and bouquets for Chloris—compared the whiteness to that of her peerless bosom.

A great progress was realised in the eighteenth century in the manufacture of Sunshades for ladies. The small ordinary Parasols became exceedingly light, and charmingly decorated. In a picture of Bonaventure Delord, in the Louvre, we find the exact type of these coquettish Sunshades of the last century. One, which is held by a laughing beauty in the midst of a picnic, is mounted on a long stem, and the top, made of yellow buckskin, appears to have four sides; a cap of turned copper, and of a very pretty shape, profiles its tiny Chinese gable on the grass.

Everywhere, in the pictures and engravings of the century we catch a glimpse of these same light Sunshades or Umbrellas which approach so nearly those of the present day. We see the one or the other in the Prints of Moreau the Younger intended to serve as a Companion to the History of Fashions and Customs in France, in the Crossing the River, after Gamier, in public festivals, as well as amidst the hubbub of the crowds, which Moreau shows us in the Great Court Carriages in 1782, as in the minor popular rejoicings, like The Ascension of a Fire-balloon, after the engravings of the period. The Sunshade introduces also a little touch of gaiety into the large pictures of Joseph Vernet; in his View of Antibes and his Port of Marseille the painter has placed in the hands of pretty promenaders adorable little pink Sunshades, through which the light seems to filtrate, in the silk’s transparency. Later on, lastly, before the royal sitting of 23d June, 1789, the Umbrella plays its historic part in the Revolution, by protecting the gentlemen of the Third Estate, left at the door of the Assembly under a pelting rain, not very well disposed to receive the King’s order, “Gentlemen, I command you to disperse yourselves at once!”

Strange! at a time when the Parasol was generally adopted in France, it was yet very little known in England and among the peoples of the North. At Venice even, where we have made our researches, the first person who used a Sunshade, about the middle of the eighteenth century, was Michel Morosini, “a senator of high rank,” who, braving all prejudices, appeared one day in his gondola, bearing a small green Sunshade, unarched, of a quadrangular form, surmounted by a tiny copper spire, of very delicate workmanship. The fair ladies of Venice adopted this “indispensable” after this manifestation of the noble Michel Morosini, but the Sunshade, nevertheless, appeared not in all patrician hands in the gondolas of the Great Canal, and on the Piazza of Saint Mark, till about the year 1760.

In England, in the first half of the last century, the Parasol and the Umbrella were hardly ever used; however, in a passage of the Tatler, Swift alludes to one of them in 1760, when he describes for us a little sempstress, with her petticoats tucked up, and walking along in a great hurry, whilst the rain trickles down from the Umbrella:

The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides,

While streams run down her oiled Umbrella’s sides.