Leaving off powder, or, A frugal family saving the guinea / Js. Gy. desn. et fect.

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James Gillray
1756-1815
Leaving off powder, or, A frugal family saving the guinea / Js. Gy. desn. et fect.
hand colored etching
image: 24.5 x 34.5 cm; plate: 25 x 35.3 cm; sheet: 26.2 x 36.5 cm
Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan, 1900.
Peel 2856
Published: 
[London] : H. Humphrey, 1795.
Provenance: 
Formerly owned by Sir Robert Peel.
Summary: 

A domestic interior. An unattractive citizen, wearing old-fashioned dress with a small unpowdered wig, stands on the hearth-rug (right), his back to the fire; he is meditatively reading the 'Gazette', headed: 'New Taxes', and 'Bankru[pts]', his left hand plunged in his breeches pocket. Behind him on the chimney-piece is a pair of scales for weighing guineas. His wife, bald-headed and stout, leans back in an arm-chair, her hands raised in protest at an unpowdered wig which a grotesquely thin and ragged French hairdresser (left) proffers obsequiously. A fashionably dressed young man with cropped hair looks with surprise at his reflection in an oval mirror over the chimney-piece. His mouth is half-covered by his swathed neckcloth, he wears a short spencer over a sparrow-tail coat, and half-boots. A young woman with over-dressed but unpowdered (red) hair looks with dismay at her reflection in a mirror which she has snatched from the wall. On the wall is an oval bust portrait of 'Charles 2d', his tiny head framed in an immense powdered wig.

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