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This is not just a clothing catalogue. Mancoff explains the codes of 19th-century fashion. The Impressionists conjured up fleeting moments that hint at piquant narratives. The quality and style of their subjects’ clothes may have been obvious to their contemporaries, but these days it can be useful to have Debra Mancoff at your side, whispering behind her fan that the woman in Manet’s ‘Argenteuil’ is dressed rather cheaply, or reassuring you that the woman in Alfred Stevens’s ‘Departing for the Promenade’ is wearing a shawl of fashionable dimensions, even if it is impossible to tell from here whether it’s real cashmere or not.
According to Mancoff, Renoir’s Charles le Coeur wouldn’t think of wearing a boater in Paris, but on holiday his get-up is jauntily dignified; in Manet’s ‘Répose’, Berthe Morisot’s dress is acceptable for receiving close friends at home, but not for going out in. Mancoff’s asides give a rapid guide to shopping, leisure and etiquette for 19th-century Paris.
Fashion works well as a selection criterion for an Impressionist collection, allowing for some striking full-length portraits — Monet’s magnificent ‘Woman in a Green Dress’, Manet’s mysteriously elegant ‘Young Lady in 1866’ (in a pink dressing gown), Sargent’s roguish ‘Dr Pozzi’ and Alfred Steven’s glamorous dog walker are highlights — as well as enjoyable crowd scenes and snapshots of Paris. Degas’s Vicomte Lepic striding through Place de la Concorde and Caillebotte’s ‘Pont de l’Europe’ give a sense of the elegance and attitude of stylish Parisians. The layout is good and the reproductions are high quality.
But the focus on clothing can seem a little blinkered: ‘The couple on the right embody the height of elegance. The man accessorises his sharply tailored suit with a walking stick, a monocle and a rose boutonnière.’ Mancoff’s description of the clothes in Seurat’s ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’ is nothing if not thorough, but what about Seurat’s singular technique? The overall strangeness of the painting? What about that monkey? The author leaves that to the viewer, and resists the temptation to hold forth where so many others have been before.
Even if it feels slightly silly to be looking at these paintings for the clothes, it is a luxury to have an art book that sticks to its brief and doesn’t foist interpretation on its readers.
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