I came across this gallery of USA First Ladies and I’m just totally fascinated with it. First of all, Dolley Madison was the Chubby Hotness. And there is something about Louisa Adams that makes me want to sit up all night drinking and playing cards with her. Also take a peek into her hat closet. I swear Hannah Van Buren looks like somebody I know. It shouldn’t, because people are people (so why should it be???), but it always kind of throws me when people in old photos look like modern people, just dressed up in dusty clothes from the Old Time Photo booth on the boardwalk.
I also find it interesting to see how, around the time of Sarah Polk, so the mid-1800s and right before the Civil War, women’s fashion got really dowdy and intense. Mary Todd bucked that trend, but the Washington wives and the press really tore her a new one for it. Things didn’t really seem to lighten up much until Frances Folsom Cleveland, who was 21 when she married Grover in the Whitehouse and was considered to be pretty saucy for her day.
I also like to see how beauty standards have changed over the years. We went from the crazy frizziness of Helen Taft’s hair, to Lou Hoover’s considerable eyebrows to Lady Bird’s immaculately symmetrical brows and immobile hair helmet. And we never looked back.
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August 15, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Tari
I am with you on Louisa Adams. She looks like fun.
August 15, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Sweet Machine
it always kind of throws me when people in old photos look like modern people, just dressed up in dusty clothes from the Old Time Photo booth on the boardwalk.
I am totally the same way. It really freaks me out when I see, like, Renaissance portraits that look like they could be some dude/dudette shopping at Whole Foods in a fancy cape. I don’t know why I expect people’s faces to be olde timey too, but I do.
August 15, 2008 at 4:32 pm
atiton
…you and I should get along so awkwardly? I mean, alternately? I mean, awfully? Yes, that’s it, awfully.
And, if I can put on my stick-in-the-mud art historian’s helmet for a moment (can you imagine what that would actually look like?), it’s worth a mention that portraits are always idealized images; idealized both from the perspective of the artist, but also from that of the patron who “approved this message” (not always the sitter!!). I think this is another reason why it is extra shocking to see someone who looks like a portrait just walkin’ around…it just doesn’t happen that much.
August 27, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Rosa
You’re not the only one who gets that impresion of Abigail Adams – I just read Barbara Hambly’s novel Patriot Hearts, and the author clearly got that impression as well. Except it doesn’t seem that she got too much leisure time.
(http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Hearts-Novel-Founding-Mothers/dp/0553804286)