ABSTRACT

This paper examines the seventeenth-century French series of prints known as The Grotesque Costumes of the Trades (Les Costumes Grotesques), a collection of one hundred prints begun by Parisian almanac engraver Nicolas I de Larmessin (ca. 1632–1694) during the second half of Louis XIV’s reign. Each of the black and white prints of the Costumes features an elegantly posed “tradesman” whose body is rendered imaginatively out of the instruments and tools of his occupation. Larmessin created these bodies of work, I argue, by appropriating images known as gravures de mode (“fashion prints”) published by his competitors and colleagues forming the prolific printmaking community established along the rue Saint Jacques in Paris. Larmessin’s images transformed these representations of the elite into fanciful expressions of professional identity. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century audiences, conditioned to interpret representations of the laboring and leisure classes in very particular ways, would have been sensitive to the numerous ways in which Larmessin placed his characters in dialog with fashion prints. Larmessin thus capitalized on the complex social dynamics of print-collecting culture, which placed high value on recognizing and interpreting visual puns.