Femme d'Officier

Object Name
Category
Photographs
Prints
Date
1863-1866
Medium
albumen print, hand-tinted
Credit Line
Malcolmson Collection. Gift of Harry and Ann Malcolmson in partnership with a private donor, 2014
Object Number
2014/481
Location
Not currently on display but Available for viewing on Wednesdays from 1-4:30 in the Prints and Drawings Study Centre
Sheet: 25.3 × 21.4 cm (9 15/16 × 8 7/16 in.)
Mount: 30.8 × 44.3 cm (12 1/8 × 17 7/16 in.)
Mat: 40.7 × 50.7 cm (16 × 19 15/16 in.)
Inscription
Inscribed in graphite on mount verso TLC: 406/510; TR: [illegible/erased ..105.30]
Markings
Recto of mount, printed below image: Femme d'Officier
verso of mount, letter press printed in black ink, on piece of paper adhered to the verso: The Original "Grecian Bend." / Japan, isolated though she has long been, has taught Europe a few things besides the mere art of "japanning" / and the dwarfing of plants. / On the occasion of the first embassy from the Tycoon:- "No doubt they (the foreign Courts), felt too much / "honoured in receiving Japanese, who,although not high born, are respectable persons, and who must have given / "a lesson in politeness and diplomacy to those nations who are not yet formed." / It would be surely very pleasing to those princes to see the adoption by fashionable world of Paris, / of the original "Grecian Bend," copied from the Japanese moos'mies who waited on the visitors to the Tea house / erected at the "Exposition Universelle" of 1867. Our artist has caught it exactly; and connoisseurs in the poetry / of posture will easily trace the graceful wave named by Hogarth the "line of beauty." The difference between / the Japanese Moos'mie and her Parisian sister, is, that what the latter attains by much study and practice, the / former grows into naturally, from politeness inculcated from earliest childhood.
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