Chapter 3: Sporting with Clothes

In the 1770s, John Collet (1725–1780), ² often called “the second Hogarth,” produced a number of mildly humorous paintings and prints of fashionably dressed women, but of indeterminate class, engaged in active sports of the kind usually thought to be properly masculine enthusiasms. Collet and other artists of the period made prints of women driving, riding, and shooting, but only Collet showed them also at skittles, cricket, ice-skating, rowing, and hunting. That he should be the only artist to devote so many prints to women and sport is worth trying to explain beyond their erotic connotations. In some of his images, women wear adaptations of male dress, symbolizing and facilitating their appropriation of masculine gender roles; in others, women in ordinary female garb engage in male activities. Collet’s pictures suggest that in the politically and socially turbulent late 1760s and 1770s some English women and men experimented with conventions of dress and behavior—especially in sport—and explored the boundaries of social and moral arbitration concerned with keeping the sexes distinct.