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| Pieter Christoffel Wonder Evening Dress 1816 oil on canvas private collection |
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| John Dawson Watson Rosalind in As You Like It 1881 oil on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| John Seymour Lucas Costume Study 1914 oil on canvas Wolverhampton Art Gallery, West Midlands |
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| Edgar Degas Study for Departure for the Hunt ca. 1873 pastels and oil paint on paper Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Anselm Feuerbach Landscape with Two Ladies 1867 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Kate Bunce The Keepsake ca. 1895-1905 oil on canvas Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, West Midlands |
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| John William Godward The Fish Pond 1899 oil on canvas Bury Art Museum, Manchester |
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| Arthur Hacker The Annunciation 1892 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
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| Childe Hassam Fifth Avenue at Washington Square 1891 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Reginald Marsh The Battery ca. 1926 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| George Morren Woman adjusting Hat ca. 1901 pastel Musée d'Ixelles, Brussels |
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| Edward Penfield Lacrosse Player ca. 1910 ink and watercolor (cover design for Collier's Magazine) Library of Congress |
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| Frank O. Salisbury The Bridal Train 1933 oil on canvas Beecroft Art Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, Essex |
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| Henry Woods Rosina 1906 oil on canvas Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, Cheshire |
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| Pieter Christoffel Wonder Game of Backgammon ca. 1827 oil on canvas Historisch Museum, The Hague |
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| Mary Cassatt Young Woman picking Fruit 1891 oil on canvas Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh |
"Other things being equal, according as the character brought into light by a picture or a statue is more or less important, this picture and this statue are more or less beautiful. This is why you find in the lowest rank, those drawings, aquarelles, pastels, and statuettes, which in man do not depict the man, but his dress, and especially the dress of the day. Illustrated reviews are full of them; they might almost be called fashion-plates; every exaggeration of costume is therein displayed: wasp-like waists, monstrous skirts, overloaded and fantastic head-dresses; the artist is heedless of the deformity of the human body; that which gives him pleasure is the fashion of the moment, the gloss of stuffs, the close fitting of a glove, the perfection of the chignon. Alongside of the scribbler with the pen he is the scribbler with the pencil; he may have a good deal of talent and wit, but he appeals only to a transient taste; in twenty years his coats will be completely out of date. Countless sketches of this description which, in 1830, were in vogue, are, at the present hour, simply historic or grotesque. Numbers of portraits in our annual exhibitions are nothing but portraits of costumes, and, alongside of the painters of man, are the painters of moire-antique and of satin."
– Hippolyte Taine, from Lectures on Art (1865), translated by John Durand (1896)
"No doubt Woman is sometimes a light, a glance, an invitation to happiness, sometimes just a word; but above all she is a general harmony, not only in her bearing and the way in which she moves and walks, but also in the muslins, the gauzes, the vast, iridescent clouds of stuff in which she envelops herself, and which are as it were the attributes and the pedestal of her divinity; in the metal and the mineral which twist and turn around her arms and her neck, adding their sparks to the fire of her glance, or gently whispering at her ears. What poet, in sitting down to paint the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful woman, would venture to separate her from her costume? Where is the man who, in the street, at the theatre, or in the park, has not in the most disinterested of ways enjoyed a skilfully composed toilette, and has not taken away with him a picture of it which is inseparable from the beauty of her to whom it belonged, making thus of the two things – the woman and her dress – an indivisible unity?"
– Charles Baudelaire, from The Painter of Modern Life (1859), translated by Jonathan Mayne (1964)