Lady Godina’s Rout; – or – Peeping-Tom spying out Pope-Joan. Vide Fashionable Modesty.

James Gillray

Lady Godina’s Rout; – or – Peeping-Tom spying out Pope-Joan. Vide Fashionable Modesty.

London, H. Humphrey March 12^th 1796

Etching

Original hand-colouring

260x360mm

£950

The interior of a salon, with a fashionable crowd seated at small round card tables playing the card game ‘Pope Joan’. In the centre is a pretty young woman, identified as the beautiful Lady Georgiana Gordon (later Duchess of Bedford), sitting slightly in profile to the left, wearing a loose, semi transparent dress, which leaves her breasts almost bare, and a turban on her head with enormous upstanding ostrich plumes. A leering, elderly roué, standing just behind her chair, leans over her shoulder to snuff a guttering candle in order to peer down her décolletage. On the left is Lady Georgiana’s mama, Jane the redoubtable Duchess of Gordon, a stout lady seen in backview. She displays her hand to a gaunt, snaggle-toothed gentleman, possibly Gillray’s friend William Sneyd, Rector of Elford, and another young girl, while on the table in the background on the right, a young woman with cropped hair plays with an elderly dowager and a man with a grotesquely carbuncled nose. All the ladies have headdresses with fashionably tall ostrich plumes. The Duchess (1749-1812), a leader of fashion and principal political hostess to the Tory party, married Alexander fourth Duke of Gordon in 1767. At her house in Pall Mall, belonging to the Marquis of Buckingham, she received large gatherings of the hangers-on of the government during the last fourteen years of Pitt’s first administration (1787-1801). She was for many years bitterly estranged from her husband, but was regarded by her friends as successful beyond precedent in match-making, three out of her five daughters marrying Dukes, and a fourth a Marquis.