The Bum Shop

R. Rushworth

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the 1780s the London fashion for high hair had been replaced by an exaggerated female silhouette that featured an inflated bust and enlarged rump, both achieved with the help of props. In this print, fashionable women visit a “Bum Shop” to buy bustles and are shown trying on various models. A young woman by the door in white, who has achieved the desired effect, prepares to leave. The facetious text below, written by the proprietor “Derriere,” assures ladies “to whom Nature in a slovenly moment has been niggardly in her distribution of certain lovely Endowments” that he has become expert at “artfully supplying this necessary appendage of female excellence." A small poodle clipped to imitate the fashion underscores the satirical tone. Other writers of the period describe fashionable ladies wearing a "fashionable circumvallation of tow and whalebone" and "protruberances on the hips called bustlers, another behind...called in plain language a rump, and a merry-thought of wire on the breast to puff out a handkerchief like a pouting pigeon."

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art