Personal Things: Patch Boxes

In Berthe Morisot’s Woman at her Toilette (1875/80), we see a woman in a state of undress, perhaps preparing for a ball or having returned from one. Her chemise gracefully falls off her shoulders as she fiddles with the pins in her hair. She turns away from us, making this rather intimate view unto her dressing room a bit awkward for the uninvited viewer. Nevertheless her toilette is spread before us for our perusal. A glass jar for cotton balls, a box for powders and a puff to dust those powders onto the body. These personal things and their reflection in the mirror are the only details Morisot gives us when we want so badly to just see her face.

Items of the toilette are some of the most intimate since they come in contact with the naked body, the body which is not yet dressed for social appearance, yet they play a very public role as well. Consider the painting by Francois Boucher of the Madame du Pompadour at her Toilette, a place where she frequently received guests and if one could use the phrase, held court. Thus these boxes, jars and cases not only held expensive mineral powders and scented oils but they themselves were items of luxury.

There is a poem, written around 1700, by Mary Evelyn in which she writes a humorous travel guide through a lady’s boudoir. As to the accoutrements of the dressing table she writes:

A new Scene to us next presents,
The Dressing-Room, and Implements,
Of Toilet Plate Gilt, and Emboss'd,
And several other things of Cost:
The Table Miroir, one Glue Pot,
One for Pomatum, and what not?
Of Washes, Unguents, and Cosmeticks,
A pair of Silver Candlesticks;
Snuffers, and Snuff-dish, Boxes more,
For Powders, Patches, Waters store,
In silver Flasks or Bottles, Cups
Cover'd, or open to wash Chaps;

You can access the whole poem here and I would very much recommend it (and don’t miss the introduction and “fop dictionary”!)

I want to occupy my thoughts with the “patches” with which Mary Evelyn mentions in her verse. There are two Patch Boxes on view in the American galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, both of silver and about the size of a pill box. These were made for holding patches, one of the most fascinating things about the 18th century face. One is pictured below, the oval about the size of a half-dollar.



Patches were part of an elite woman’s cosmetic attire. They were cut from black silk, velvet or luxury papers from Spain and placed in various places on the face. Their origin was in the courts of Louis XIV, on the faces of youths with blemishes to hide. But what fun and fantastical ends patches attained when they became the height of courtly fashion! Far beyond the simple circle or oval, patches came to resemble comets, moons, and stars. It was even reported that women could have silhouettes of their dear friends made and pasted onto their bosoms. One satirical print shows a woman with a full carriage with six horses across her forehead.

And what is in fashion in France is in fashion in New England. The wives of Whigs wore their patches on the opposite side of the face than those of Tories. During the Great Awakening, a time of religious fervor, moralists cried out against the use of such vain foppery. In the case of one patch box, it was found buried in the garden, an attempt to hide the precious item by the wife of a preacher who came under critical fire. This patch box was made by the silversmith, John Dixwell, the same maker of the patch box pictured below, on view in the American galleries of the AIC (look for something the size of a quarter).



With a folksy tulip pattern on the cover, this may have been given to the owner by the time she reached adolescence. In fact we are able to trace the owner quite easily because her name, Abigail Taylor, is engraved on the bottom. As if that wasn’t enough to stake her claim, she scratched “AT” right over her name. Patch boxes must have been quite cherished by their owners as most all of them are inscribed with their name and are always mentioned in surviving household inventories.

As I powdered my face today, it occurred to me that our make up and cosmetic cases still play a very public role today. Except that historians centuries from now might wonder as to why so many of them were owned by “CG” or “M.A.C.”