Top and Tail

Mr. Perwig|Miss Heel|Anonymous, British, 18th century

1777 · Hand-colored etching with stipple · Drawings and Prints

To modern eyes this design looks surreal but it is actually a fashionable, erotic variant of a seventeenth-century print type. Known as Nobody prints, these featured figures composed only of legs and heads, with nothing in between, and the resulting verbal-visual pun was aimed critically at specified target. Here, the elegant female "no-body" is composed of a huge, elaborately dressed, wig sitting atop a bare derriere, with her lower extremities clad in white silk stockings, red garters, and high heeled pumps. Like other fashion satires that mocked the latest trends, this example took aim at the enormous hairdos and wigs that women favored in Britain and France before the French Revolution. The title and partial nudity frankly acknowledges the sexual appeal of the fashion while simultaneously suggesting that those who followed it were literally brainless.

Artist

Mr. Perwig|Miss Heel|Anonymous, British, 18th century

Date

1777

Medium

Hand-colored etching with stipple

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959