A Lady's Dressing Room in Calcutta.

£2,250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

An excellent example of this scarce print, commonly misread in the past. British Museum Satires describes the print thus: “An Eurasian, Portuguese, or English lady, sallow, with black hair, sits on a stool in profile to the right in the centre of a bare room, attended by six Indian women …” However, Satyasikha Chakraborty notes that the figures attending the European lady are, in fact, men. “In William Holland’s satirical print of A Lady’s Dressing Room in Calcutta (1813), six black menservants are shown preparing the Anglo-Indian lady’s toilette, fanning her, caressing her child and smoking a pipe. The presence of menservants, particularly black menservants, in a lady’s dressing room insinuated the Anglo-Indian family’s lack of domestic propriety . The constant presence of black/brown menservants not only posed an imagined sexual threat to white women, but also indicated (to metropolitan audiences) the lack of Anglo-Indian sexual morals, and underlined the proverbial sexual promiscuity of Anglo-Indian wives—ridiculed as the ‘fishing-fleet’” (Chakraborty, 53). Furthermore, she adds, “The Yale University catalogue erroneously describes the Indian servants as maidservants. The attire of the servants (when compared with early nineteenth-century visuals) clearly reveal they are all menservants, and that is precisely where the satirical aspect of the print lies ” ( ibid ). OCLC locates a copy at Yale only. We add another at the British Museum. BM Satires, 12164; Chakraborty, S., “

• Year: 1813

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