LARMESSIN, Nicolas de. [LES COSTUMES GROTESQUES ET LES METIERS (= Habits des métiers et professions)].

The most complete collection of grotesque costumes and fashions from the reign of Louis XIV along with that of the B.N.F (see below).

Exceptional collection, created at the end of the 17th^e century by Louis 1^er de la Tour du Pin de la Charce (1655-1714) and bound with his arms.Godson of Louis XIV, from one of the oldest families in France, Louis 1^er de La Tour du Pin was a cavalry captain, knight of Saint Louis, member of the States of Burgundy, and first gentleman of the Prince of Condé. Among other titles, he bore those of Marquis de la Charce, Count of Montmorin and Oulle, and through his marriage, Marquis of Fontaine-Française and sovereign Prince of Chaume, shown around his coat of arms. (Richard-Edouard Gascon, History of Fontaine-Françoise, Paris, 1892, pp. 314-315).These two volumes offer a spectacular review of characters, costumes, and trades from the century of Louis XIV. The “fashion portraits” are particularly well represented, engraved by several members of the Bonnart dynasty – Henri II, the most famous, his brothers Nicolas 1^er and Robert -, representing the celebrities of the era as attractive young mannequins, starting with the king, Madame de Maintenon, the royal family, the Court.

OfHenri Bonnart there are also several prints from his series of allegories set in fashion.

The other fashion engravings contained in these volumes are attributed to Jean Dieu de Saint-Jean, today considered the inventor of the genre, and to his Parisian followers Claude-Auguste Berey, Nicolas Arnoult, or Antoine Trouvain. Finally, there is a very important set (75 plates) of “grotesque costumes” by Nicolas de Larmessin, a fascinating series of allegorical portraits composed from the tools and products of their trade.

“Rare suite of 75 folio-size engravings from the printmaker Nicholas II de Larmessin’s (c. 1645-1725) famous series of Grotesque Costumes, first conceived by the artist’s father, Nicholas I, in the 1690s and gradually expanded to include some 100 unique designs issued separately or in various groupings with contents depending on a client’s choice of subjects, a printseller’s pre-selected choice or some combination of the two. Issued without a title page and variously called the Habits des métiers et professions or The grotesque costumes and trades, these folio-size prints depict contemporary tradesmen (and women) wearing costumes composed of the tools, instruments, accessories, and wares used in the practice of their professions. The project represents an ingenious melding of two well-known genres: the fanciful composite portraits painted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-93) and the popular prints known as “Cries,” in which readily recognizable street hawkers, peddlers, and local types of various reputation were delineated in a purportedly documentary manner. Recent research suggests that Larmessin was likely also influenced by the ballet costumes designed by Henry de Gissey (c. 1621-73) and Jean Berain (1637-1711), which were published by Jacques Lepautre (c. 1653-84) in the early 1680s (Préaud, p. 244).

Here we have, for example, a costume of the printer (Printer in letters) as an unwieldy press fully enclosing the body of the craftsman who skillfully manipulates the letter case, ink ball, tympan, bar, and frisket of his own clothing. The fisherman (Fisherman) is a proud aristocrat with a net for a cape, a crab trap for a scepter, lobsters for greaves, a flounder and perch for a breastplate, and an eel for a belt. Whether more closely related to Ancien Régime stagecraft, to Arcimboldesque capriccios, to the exotic costume books of such artists as Jost Amman (1539-91) and Nicolas de Nicolay (1517-83), or to the social realism of such publications as Marcellus Laroon’s (1653-1702) Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life (1687), the Grotesque Costumes of Larmessin have long intrigued both casual viewers attuned to the comic charms of these prints and cultural critics in search of a fuller historical context to help explain their eccentricity.

Roland Barthes (1915-80), while aware of the simple pleasures of these works, also sees Larmessin’s project as a “superlative case” of a “vestimentary lexicon” that links clothing “either to anthropological states (sex, age, marital status) or to social ones (bourgeoise, nobility, peasantry, etc.).” The work is not as lighthearted as it at first seems, but is the product of “a society which was starkly hierarchical, in which fashion was part of a real social ritual.” Barthes recognizes in Larmessin, “a creation which is both poetic and intelligible, in which the profession is represented by its imaginary essence [;] in this fantasy, clothing ends up absorbing Man completely, the worker is anatomically assimilated to the respective instruments and in the end it is an alienation which here is described poetically: Larmessin’s workers are robots before their time” (Barthes, The Language of Fashion, p. 20).

Because of the fragmentary nature in which Larmessin’s plates have come down to the present day, the publication history of the Larmessin oeuvre is yet to be fully documented. Examples of complete sets of any issue or state of Larmessin are unknown: The B.n.F. houses a suite of 76 plates, the Metropolitan Museum has a suite of 41, and OCLC locates two U.S. Libraries with Larmessin engravings included as part of larger costume sammelbands, (Brown, Clark Art Institute). Lipperheide cites a volume with 38 plates; but even individual engravings are rare both in institutional collections and on the market.

References: Lipperheide, vol. 2, p. 118, no. 1971 lists a suite of 38 prints; R. Colas, General Bibliography of Costume and Fashion, no. 1779; Inventories of the French Collection, XVII^e century (1973), vol. 6 (Nicolas II de Lermessin), nos. 12-86; IFF XVII (1993), vol. 11, nos. 23-8 (Jacques Lepautre); Maxime Préaud, catalog entry in P. Fuhring et al., eds., A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660-1715, p. 224, no. 86; G. Valck, Fantastic Costumes of Trades and Professions; S. Benni, ed., The Archimboldo of Professions: Fantastic Visions and Grotesque Costumes in Prints; Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, A. Stafford, trans., (Oxford: Berg, 2006).

Pascale Cugy, « The creation of the desirable body: Parisian fashion engraving during the reign of Louis XIV » History of Art, no. 66, 2010, pp. 83-93.The most precious, the most complete, and the only copy in a period armorial binding sold on the market for half a century.