1840s Man's cotton coat
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1840-1850 A coat in printed cotton.
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The back of the coat
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Detail of the front showing the breast pocket
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Detail of the inside showing the breast pocket in the left front
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Detail of the printed cotton showing the fading
Description
The white cotton sateen has a printed pattern of dense tiny chocolate sprigs overlaid with a brown trellis which has faded in a very patchy way.
There is a waist seam and the skirt panels have slight gathering over the hips. The right-hand centre back panel is cut as one piece with no waist seam.
The front bodies are faced with the printed cotton and this is visible as the lapels; the collar and under-collar are also in the printed cotton. Five buttonholes are worked in white cotton down the left front, but stumps of thread are all that remain of the buttons. Four more stumps of theads are about 1" nearer the edge, to accommodate a slightly larger wearer.
Each front skirt has a pocket with a slanted opening, 5½" long with rounded ends, and a strip of the cotton is at the top of the inside, visible in the slit. The left front has a similar slanting breast pocket with a 4⅞" long opening, and an inside breast pocket with a horizontal opening, 5⅛" long.
The centre back skirt panels are open from the waist down and overlap each other by 1" at the top; 2" each side of the centre on the waist seam there are remains of buttons, at the point where the side back seams meet the waist.
The sleeve heads are very slightly gathered into the body; the ends have 2¼" wide pieces sewn on as cuffs, and there is a worked buttonhole each side of the seam with the sleeve but only stumps of thread where the buttons would have been. The right sleeve had a slit from the cuff seam up at an angle, 7" long and ⅞" at its widest, which has been repaired by an insertion of the printed cotton.
The coat is lined with plain white cotton.
Contemporary illustrations
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Fashion plate in Petit Courrier des Dames, 1841
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Detail from a cartoon in Punch, 1844
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James Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie by Sir John Watson-Gordon, 1847. National Portrait Gallery
