Things I've been thinking about...

I have become fascinated by the Aesthetic clothing and costume designer, Alice Comyns Carr. She was a great friend of the actress Ellen Terry, and designed most of her costumes and some of her clothing in the 1880's and 1890's. Mrs. Comyns Carr also wore Aesthetic dress herself, after rebelling most soundly against the bustle of the late 1860's-early 1870's. She just stopped. In her memoirs, she doesn't recount whether she actually stopped wearing a corset, but I assume from the way she describes her dresses that she did.

She was a tall rangy woman with a face more striking than "professionally" beautiful. A few of the Punch cartoons featuring Aesthetic women were based on her. I am about halfway through her Reminiscences, which I bought used off of www.abebooks.com. She is a lively memoirist, and she has much to say about both the fashionable and the artistic society of the day. She met everyone in the Bohemian circles and, while she is circumspect about Oscar Wilde, she does not refrain from giving quite biting - though affectionate - remarks about James MacNeil Whistler. Her husband Joseph Comyns Carr was the co-founder of the Grosvenor Gallery, the place where artists like Burne-Jones and Whistler could exhibit their paintings, away from the restrictions of the Royal Academy.

Ellen Terry trusted her taste in costumes and clothing as she had only ever trusted her former lover E.W. Godwin, the famous Aesthetic designer of everything from houses to furniture to dresses for Liberty and Co. He had originally designed costumes for Ellen when she had first gone on the stage after the disastrous marriage she'd had with the painter George Frederick Watts, which was eventually annulled after she'd already run off to live with Godwin. She speaks of Alice in her memoirs, and Alice remembers her very fondly in her book.

I want to find out more about the woman who actually did the dressmaking for Mrs. Comyns Carr, Mrs. Nettleship. She is hardly mentioned in Alice's memoirs, and yet she was the one doing all the actual sewing. It would be as though I were to neglect to mention all of Veda's help and expertise in making those dresses for my presentation (as well as all the other clothing she's helped me to design and make over the last few years!). But I am hoping that somewhere someone has dredged her out of the past. Mrs. Nettleship's daughter, Ida, was the wife of the painter Augustus John, who in the Edwardian period became fascinated with the gypsies and their way of life, and decided to try it for himself. So he packed up Ida, their children, and his mistress Dorelia MacNeill and they all set off for the open road. (In fact, it is my suspicion that Kenneth Graham based Mr. Toad of Toad Hall in Wind in the Willows on Augustus John, because a few years later, he grew tired of the gypsy life, sold his caravan and bought a big shiny motor car! Just like Mr. Toad!)

I do like how, because of the smallness of the Bohemian circles, everyone ends up being connected somehow. One of these days, I'm going to do a chart starting at William Morris and see how far the links go between him and, say, Augustus John, or Lytton Strachey.

Well, more soon. Much sooner, I promise, than the last time!