When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Size: 6 x 3 inches
🎩 Antique 1800s Victorian Candy Box Insert -- Green Silk Hat, Powdered Curls, NOS
An unused Victorian candy box top: a Georgian-style beauty in a green silk hat, a scarf tied beneath her chin and white powdered curls, set in an embossed coral rope oval on a cream rose-lattice ground. New old stock, never mounted on a box.
SPECIFICATIONS
- Type: candy box top / box insert, decorative picture card
- Era: Victorian, 1800s
- Printing: color lithograph (chromolithograph)
- Mark: a line of very small capitals, lower left of the front
- Subject: young woman in a green silk hat with gold-edged brim and green scarf tied under the chin, white powdered curls, white off-the-shoulder gown, copper-brown ground
- Border and ground: embossed coral rope-twist oval; pale cream ribbon-and-leaf lattice with red rosettes; fine ribbed surface
- Reverse: plain kraft-tan board, embossed oval visible from behind
CONDITION
New old stock. Never used or mounted on a box; soft unfaded color, crisp embossing, clean back. See the photographs.
THE STORY
The look. Powdered curls and a vast silk hat are the Georgian fashion of Thomas Gainsborough\'s portraits, above all Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806). In the 1784 Westminster election she canvassed the streets for her cousin Charles James Fox and had a thousand medals struck for his voters; the rumor that she bought votes with kisses was fixed for good by Thomas Rowlandson\'s print The Devonshire, or Most Approved Method of Securing Votes. Her Gainsborough portrait was stolen in 1876 by Adam Worth, the \"Napoleon of Crime,\" and returned in Chicago in 1901.
The painter. Gainsborough, raised in Suffolk and a founding member of the Royal Academy, died on August 2, 1788; legend gives his last words as \"We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyck is of the party.\"
The powder. William Pitt the Younger\'s hair powder tax of 1795 charged a guinea a year for the right to powder; payers were mocked as \"guinea pigs,\" and the duty changed British fashion, hastening the end of powdered hair. It was repealed in 1869.
The revival. Victorians romanticized the Georgian age. The Devonshire House Ball of July 2, 1897, held in Piccadilly for Queen Victoria\'s Diamond Jubilee, required historical costumes dated earlier than 1820.
The printing. German presses led the world in chromolithography. Raphael Tuck & Sons of London, founded in 1866 by the Prussian-born Raphael Tuck, had most of its cards printed in Bavaria and Saxony. Britain\'s Merchandise Marks Act of 1887 and the McKinley Tariff of 1890, sponsored by William McKinley of Canton, Ohio, required imports to state their country of origin in English.
The box. Stephen F. Whitman opened his confectionery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1842 and sold a decorated box of sugar plums in 1854; Richard Cadbury of Cadbury Brothers painted his daughter holding a kitten for a chocolate box in 1868. Victorians kept fancy boxes as keepsakes.
GOOD FOR
- Candy box and confectionery ephemera collectors
- Georgian and Victorian portrait and fashion history
- Chromolithograph and German color printing collections
- Vanity, dressing room and powder room walls
- Framing in a cream or antique-gold mat
