Femme de qualité habillée en sultane [graphic] / N. Arnoult fecit, 1688.

Paris : N. Arnoult, [1688]

1 item ; 34.2 x 24.2 cm

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France -- Paris, -- publication place.

272876

From dealer's description: "3. Nicolas Arnoult. Femme de qualité habillée en Sultane. Paris: “N. Arnoult fecit, 1688,” “Se vend Paris, Chez N. Arnoult, rue de la Fromagerie, à L’Image S.t Claude, aux halles Avec privil. du Roy,” 1688. [34.2 x 24.2 cm], [1] f. etching. Very rare (2 copies worldwide: Bibliothèque nationale de France & Musée Carnavalet), separately issued 1688 etching by Nicolas Arnoult depicting a “Lady of quality” dressed “en Sultane,” i.e., in a striped, orientalist dress inspired by interactions with the Ottoman Empire during the Turkish Wars then ongoing. Of greater interest today, however, is the depiction of the woman’s Black attendant. The print is illustrated in David Bindman & Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s influential The Image of the Black in Western Art along with similar examples by Henri Bonnart and others: “That these black attendants also functioned as a fashion statement of one kind or another for the ladies at Louis XIV’s court is attested to by the number of them incorporated in the multi-volume compilation of prints published by Henri Bonnart in the 1680s and 1690s, called Costumes du siècle de Louis XIV. Some of these prints were sold individually by the engravers, as in the case of Femme de qualité au rafraichissement des liqueurs (A Woman of Quality Refreshing Herself with Liqueurs), a copperplate engraving by Nicolas Arnoult of 1688. They all show the fashionable dresses of the “femmes de qualité” or the vogue at this date for dressing as sultanas in Turkish costumes, but it was clearly also the height of fashion at this time to be seen with a black page, serving drinks or holding the train of the dress as he walks in his mistress’s shadow. Sometimes the page is represented in a feathered turban and wearing a slave collar, as in the case of Arnoult’s print of the dowager Princess of Conti, and of Femme de qualité habillée en Sultane (Woman of Quality Dressed as a Sultana), where he is smiling broadly, either at the viewer or at his mistress” (Bindman, pp. 125-70)." Ordered from Marshall Kibbey Rare Books, D9714, 2024-02-23, Cat. 15 Recent Acquisitions, item #3.

272876