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Top and Tail

Ascribed to Miss Heel British
After Mr. Perwig British
1777
Not on view
To modern eyes this design looks surreal but it is actually a fashionable, erotic variant of a seventeenth-century print type. Known as Nobody prints, these featured figures composed only of legs and heads, with nothing in between, and the resulting verbal-visual pun was aimed critically at specified target. Here, the elegant female "no-body" is composed of a huge, elaborately dressed, wig sitting atop a bare derriere, with her lower extremities clad in white silk stockings, red garters, and high heeled pumps. Like other fashion satires that mocked the latest trends, this example took aim at the enormous hairdos and wigs that women favored in Britain and France before the French Revolution. The title and partial nudity frankly acknowledges the sexual appeal of the fashion while simultaneously suggesting that those who followed it were literally brainless.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Top and Tail
  • Artist: Anonymous, British, 18th century
  • Artist: Ascribed to Miss Heel (British, 18th century)
  • Artist: After Mr. Perwig (British, 18th century)
  • Date: 1777
  • Medium: Hand-colored etching with stipple
  • Dimensions: plate: 12 11/16 x 7 13/16 in. (32.3 x 19.9 cm)
    sheet: 14 1/16 x 8 9/16 in. (35.7 x 21.8 cm)
  • Classification: Prints
  • Credit Line: The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959
  • Object Number: 59.533.5
  • Curatorial Department: Drawings and Prints

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