Beauty and the Beast: Animals in the Visual and Material Culture of the Toilette

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the toilette evolved from a single object, the petit toile that covered the dressing table, to a set of objects, and from a set of objects to a daily ritual, synonymous with the morning hours.¹ The highly codified rites of the toilette were re-enacted over and over again in eighteenth-century art, not only by beautiful women, but also by monkeys and butterflies.² Indeed, animals played a central role in the visual and material culture of the toilette. Both exotic and domestic creatures were depicted as frequent witnesses to—and sometimes anthropomorphic participants in—the toilette. Animals lurk in corners and chairs and under tables in so many toilette scenes that they cannot be dismissed as mere props or accessories; the symbiotic connection between beauty and the beast demands further investigation.

Although ostensibly private, the toilette was, in practice, extremely public. Louis XIV and his mother, Anne of Austria, had instituted the custom of dressing—or, rather, being dressed—in front of privileged courtiers.³ This royal ritual was imitated by women (and men) of the nobility and haute bourgeoisie, who transformed it from an exercise in political power and proximity into a domestic celebration of taste and sociability, one frequently depicted in genre scenes and portraits. Not only the carefully choreographed event itself, but its elegant accoutrements, were calculated to impress and entice.

Just as the toilette transitioned from a royal to a bourgeois pastime, so did keeping pets. As Glynis Ridley has observed, “the eighteenth century was a time not only of rapid expansion of the natural world but also of rapidly changing relationships between human and non-human animals.”⁴ New species were being discovered and classified at an unprecedented rate; once-exotic animals were becoming familiar sights in Europe. It has been well documented—notably by Louise E. Robbins—that pets of all kinds grew more common in homes at all levels of French society during the eighteenth century: dogs, cats, monkeys, parrots, cockatoos, canaries, finches, and, occasionally, small rodents.⁵ Although there were a number of male pet owners, in art and literature pets were associated with women and girls almost exclusively. Robbins attributes this to “the romantic and erotic connotations aroused by the close physical and emotional bonds between owner and animal,” and argues that at a time when wealth was beginning to replace birth in determining social status, pets—and especially exotic pets—were a desirable form of conspicuous consumption.⁶

The same can be said of the toilette. Although men and women alike held toilettes attended by friends, family members, clergymen, servants, and tradesmen, it was the female toilette that became a recurring theme in French art and print culture. Like female pet ownership, the female toilette carried connotations both erotic and economic. The taste for toilette scenes spanned history painting, genre scenes, and portraits, combining the ancient vanitas tradition with the ultramodern tableau de mode. Pets lent these scenes credibility and visual interest, but they also functioned as convenient symbols, whether of status, sexuality, exoticism, or human foibles. Indeed, artists were attracted to their human characteristics as much as their distinctively bestial colors and textures.

Birds—especially parrots—flock to toilette scenes. Parrots were not only rare, beautiful, and expensive, but they could mimic human speech, which made them good companions as well as handy human surrogates in art. The parrot’s splendid plumage came at a price; the gaudier the parrot, the more expensive it was.⁷ However, like mirrors and burning candles, parrots were traditional emblems of mortality in addition to being a standard components of toilette tables, providing a reminder of the fleeting nature of beauty and the futility of attempting to mask the ravages of time. Equally exotic if less colorful and loquacious, the cockatoo is distinguished by its crest of curled feathers, which can be raised or lowered at will. In François Boucher’s painting Le Matin: La Dame à sa Toilette (now lost, it survives as an engraving by Gilles-Edmé Petit), the...