Book Review: Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media
[Editor’s Note: Like so many exhibitions this year, Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media at London’s Foundling Museum was forced to close early when the pandemic made in-person attendance impossible. Before its closure in April 2020, contributor Eanna Morrison Barrs was able to visit the museum; reviewer Marley Healy was, like the rest of us, only able to access the show via its catalog. We’ve included both their perspectives in this issue, as the show and its book are so relevant to this special issue and so important to widening the lens on how we view female-identified bodies in art.]
Historically, pregnancy has never been a simple affair, nor has childbirth been as medically safe an experience as it generally is today. The physical conditions of pregnancy have been treated with all manner of attitudes from reverence to revulsion, with religious, political, and social influences interloping into what can already be an anxious situation for women. While society’s opinions on the pregnant body or circumstances around pregnancy oscillate across time, it is an inescapable part of the human experience that everyone is confronted with in some capacity. In January of 2020, The Foundling Museum in London opened Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media, an exhibition that unfortunately closed before its scheduled conclusion due to the pandemic. According to its press release, Portraying Pregnancy was “the first major exhibition to explore representations of the pregnant female body from the past 500 years,” [1] which of course includes clothing, as must any exploration of the body. The exhibition’s curator, Karen Hearn, is also the author of the accompanying publication of the same title, which is reviewed herein. [2]
At the offset, it is important to understand that this book and the exhibition it accompanies do not deal with pregnancy through the lens of fashion but historical fashion is instead used as a tool to assist in the greater analysis of material culture objects. Hearn even states outright in her introduction that “the main focus is on the women themselves,” [3] so it is not surprising that there is much description of the women portrayed in the context of their lives rather than analyses of their garments. However, there is significant discussion of contemporary fashions throughout the examples chosen by Hearn, which are contextualized by her unique art historical insight. Previously the curator of sixteenth and seventeenth-century British Art at Tate Britain, Hearn’s knowledge base of the subject is clearly vast. While Hearn states that the case studies she selected for the publication are personal choices, they are obviously evidentiarily sound examples and also titillating from a fashion history point of view. For example, she includes paintings of royalty and members of the aristocracy whose expensive and ornately detailed garments are captured in their portraits during their pregnancies. However, this also feeds an age-old problem of having to lean on the trappings of the elite for examples of life in the past because those are overwhelmingly the examples that have survived over representations of ordinary life for common people. In any case, Hearn still manages to include enough variety of materials that a fair representation of pregnant women in general can be gleaned.
“Rather than being generally accepted and appreciated as is done today, the physical state of being pregnant was not a publicly celebrated condition, but rather something to be disguised and hidden. ”
Considering the myriad public avenues available to share one’s personal life and experiences today, it is surprising to learn about the significant visual suppression of women’s pregnancies in public throughout various points in history. Rather than being generally accepted and appreciated as is done today, the physical state of being pregnant was not a publicly celebrated condition, but rather something to be disguised and hidden. Hearn weaves this dichotomy of editing or concealing a pregnancy through the chapters using a variety of paintings to demonstrate different perspectives on pregnancy at different points in time. Because many artworks of women do not represent them in a manner that would easily identify them to a viewer as being pregnant, Hearn includes images that show obvious pregnancies and others that are not so obvious coupled with her analysis of written records and identification of special garments and the styling of the sitter.
A strength of the publication is its quantity of full-color images covering a swath of mediums beyond portraiture like sculpture, photography, and a variety of illustrated materials. These range from funerary monuments depicting women who had died from complications in childbirth to an engraving of an illustration of the dissection of a young woman who had died close to term in her pregnancy. Even though the images that made it into the publication are relevant, Hearn also describes additional images in detail that are sadly not included in the text. The title “From Holbein to Social Media” suggests that there will be a chronological review of pregnancy across a number of artistic or visual mediums. However, there appears to be a significant dearth of information regarding digital, print, and social media of the late twentieth century which occupies minimal space at the very end of the book. Actor Demi Moore’s controversial Vanity Fair cover photo from 1991 in which she displays her nude, seven months pregnant body is given its own chapter. This is an exciting and provocative image that easily stands as an example of the shifting portrayal of pregnancy in media. Bafflingly though, given the magnitude of its massive contemporary social effect, this chapter amounts to approximately a page and a half of writing and no accompanying image. In the book’s final chapter, athlete Serena Williams’ similar cover photo for Vanity Fair in 2017 does thankfully make an appearance, so there is a visual reference to provide context. This chapter also mentions Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s now-famous Instagram pregnancy announcement image from 2017, but the image is also conspicuously absent. This is most likely due to the cost of acquiring the rights to such images; however, it is still important that Hearn included discussion of these images for their stark contrast to those of the past and their impact on modern narratives surrounding pregnancy in the United States.
Hearn asserts that “this book represents the tip of the information iceberg,” [4] which becomes abundantly clear considering the erratic chapter lengths. There is an expectation of comprehensive analysis in a publication that accompanies an exhibition but none of the subjects are discussed in an exhaustive capacity, save for the first chapter “Christian Context.” This chapter offers helpful background on subjects like the popularity of the Visitation narrative from the New Testament with mothers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Individual chapters, while in chronological order, feel fragmented from each other since everything is based on specific images, therefore some chapters are noticeably longer than others, containing more subsections, images, and deeper extrapolation. There is, of course, a brief mention of the well-known Arnolfini wedding portrait in which the woman was long believed to be pregnant because of the gathered fabric around her torso. It is now generally understood that the woman is not, in fact, pregnant, but rather wearing a garment that would have been typical of wealthy women in the fifteenth century. Hearn’s analysis throughout the book is an excellent lesson in portrait reading; however, it would have been advantageous to use the case study of the Arnolfini portrait to expound on the difficulties of portrait reading as it pertains specifically to identifying potential pregnancies. Hearn outlines a number of poses and details that may, or may not, allude to pregnancy and further supports the assertion with research on both the artist and their sitters in the context of the time period. This is also supported by historical records like personal journals or correspondence that help to determine if the sitter would have been pregnant during the time of the sitting.
“Hearn also discusses a short-lived fashion trend of ladies wearing belly pads at the end of the eighteenth century that is accompanied by an etching depicting women of a variety of ages looking rather pregnant in contemporary fashion. ”
While this book is not focused on fashion history, there are a number of fashion-focused entries such as the portrait of Princess Charlotte made in 1817. In this portrait, Charlotte is wearing a loose blue silk tunic with a white lace chemise styled after a traditional Russian sarafan dress. During this time Charlotte was experiencing her second pregnancy, therefore a garment of this construction and style would have been a welcome costume to disguise a growing baby bump. A photograph of the garment is also included in the chapter, a rare luxury considering there are not too many surviving examples of clothing, particularly maternity garments, that have been depicted in portraiture prior to the twentieth century. Hearn includes an image of a pair of pregnancy stays with a matching stomacher from the seventeenth century which is interesting to see for the immense detail of the pieces, but there is not any comprehensive discussion about them. In her chapter “Caricatures and Satires,” Hearn also discusses a short-lived fashion trend of ladies wearing belly pads at the end of the eighteenth century that is accompanied by an etching depicting women of a variety of ages looking rather pregnant in contemporary fashion.
Ultimately, the conclusion of the book is somewhat disappointing because it is only a few sentences standing in lieu of a formal assessment of the material’s significance. It would have been interesting to have some wrap-up that connects pregnancy and the portrayal of it across centuries in definitive terms. The best use of this book is to be a supplemental resource for anyone looking at research topics in women’s history pertaining to pregnancy and art history, with a lesser emphasis on fashion history. While there is not a book that dives head-on, unapologetically into the history of maternity wear, there are dozens of online resources and articles that explore the fashions of pregnancy that are both minute in detail and digestibly broad in scope. Two articles of note for those interested in research that has been conducted on collection objects are “Looking for Maternity: Dress Collections and Embodied Knowledge” by Dr. Catriona Fisk, and “Dressing for Pregnancy: A Maternity Gown of 1780-1795” by Linda Baumgarten will surely offer a deeper understanding of maternity dress from the past. Additional sources of interest include Kay Goldman’s book Dressing Modern Maternity and an academic thesis, “Selecting and Adapting Clothing for Pregnancy in the Nineteenth Century” by Cassandra Curry Moon.
Notes
[1] The Foundling Museum, 2020. Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein To Social Media. [online] Available at: https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Portraying-Pregnancy-press-release.pdf [Accessed 9 May 2020].
[2] Hearn, K., 2020. Portraying Pregnancy. Holbein To Social Media. London: Paul Holberton Publishing.
[3] Hearn, 9.
[4] Hearn, 9.
