Skip to main content
Advanced Search
1955-62,32, Print
Pretty Mantua Maker
1955-62,32, Print

Pretty Mantua Maker

Date1772
After work by Matthew Darly (ca. 1720 - 1780)
After work by Mary Darly (1760 - 1781)
Engraver M. Darly
OriginEngland, London
MediumHand -colored etching
DimensionsOverall: 8 5/8 × 5 5/8in. (21.9 × 14.3cm) Other: 7 × 4 3/4in. (17.8 × 12.1cm)
Credit LineMuseum Purchase
Object number1955-62,32
DescriptionUpper right corner reads: "6"
Lower margin reads: "THE PRETTY MANTUA MAKER/ Pub according to Act Jan.y 1 1772 by MDarly Strand."
Label TextThe print is plate 6 from volume II of six volumes of Mary and Matthew Darly's "Caricatures Macaronies & Characters by Sundry Ladies and Gentleman Artists &c." This print represents a mantua or dressmaker who carries a bundle. Cindy McCreery argues that this representation, depending on context or lack of context, might have had dual meanings in the 18th depending on the audience. A provincial audience might see it the figure as an urbane fashionable mantua-maker, though a Londoner might have seen it as a prostitute or woman with potential for that profession. According to McCreery: "Milliners had the rare opportunity both to dress fashionably and to walk around London on their own to measure customers and deliver items. This provided a perfect cover for illicit activities, but it also drew unwanted attention to innocent women. Most prints assumed milliners were also (or indeed, only) prostitutes. Prostitutes also dressed as milliners (by carrying the trade-mark bandbox) in order to attract customers." (1)

The Darly's were a husband-and-wife team who capitalized on the craze for caricatures -- the practice of making a likeness with exaggerated mannerisms or features to create a comic effect. This form was brought back by aristocratic Britons who visited Italy on the Grand Tour. The Darly’s catered to this audience by publishing a prolific assortment of caricature prints during the 1770s. Many of the Darly's satirized the manners and fashions of the macaroni, a term used to describe a sub-culture of fashionably dressed men during the period, and subsequently, regardless of subject, the Darly's prints were known as "macaroni prints."

Their most famous work was their encyclopedic "Caricatures" which included prints of macaroni’s as well as other interesting characters, such as macaronis, all based on their own drawings and those submitted to them by amateur artists lambasting their friends, artists, and other figures in London life. The front page of Volume I describes them as “…a Series of Drol[l] Prints consisting of Heads, Figures, Conversations and Satires upon the follies of the Age…” These prints were published in groups of 24, in six volumes that were published between 1771 and 1773. Colonial Williamsburg owns volumes 1-3.

1) The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 59.