Nanny's 1906 Portrait Dress

Those of you who have been reading along might remember the amazing portrait I posted when discussing Nanny's closet. I'm sure you can imagine how anxious I was to find the dress from that portrait. But alas, I did not find it, and returned to school in upstate New York confident that it hadn't survived.

Since I was a kid when we went through the closet, I didn't have many qualms about the mess we made in the process; I was way too busy loving the treasure hunt. I think Grammy's curiosity had been triggered, too. I remember her often saying, "Huh, I've never seen that before." So she was totally nonchalant about having everything out even though we had trashed Nanny's former bedroom by using it to drop all the stuff we displaced to reach the closet's depths. When my vacation ended, I left without helping to put anything away.  As I'm sure you can imagine, subsequent visitors to Grammy had a "What the Hell happened here?" kind of reaction to the disaster. Someone seems to have continued the exploration though, because when I next visited Grammy, the room was still a mess, but it was configured differently and the goods removed had multiplied. More importantly, however, I was informed that the portrait dress had been located!

I rushed up the stairs and demanded direction to the dress in question, and was unbelievably deflated when I saw it. It looked like a mass of stiff yellowed paper. And not only did it look bad, but it was clear that there was NO WAY I'd fit into it. My disappointment was complete. I concluded, with all of my teenage knowledge, that it had probably been starched like crazy and stored that way, leaving it to shrink and become brittle over time. I took pictures in 2000, but remained unimpressed.

Even when we spread out the portrait dress for photos in 2000, it looked shriveled, yellowish, and generally not as fabulous as I expected it to be.  

Well, last week I was up in Maine and this time I was armed with two dress forms, a backdrop, a petticoat wired to help a trained skirt take its intended shape, and most importantly, a hand-held steamer! My aunt Joy inherited the portrait and the dress to go with it, so she brought it over for a photo shoot. Sadly, the original matching lace belt has not been located, so I substituted with another gathered belt from the collection that was period appropriate. The fabric is still yellowed, but it no longer looks like old shredded paper. So here it is: the dress Georgiana Mayhew Duncan wore in the portrait made when she graduated La Salle in 1906, front, back, side, and in detail. Now I can finally say that I'm impressed. Who wouldn't love this delicate frock?

Nanny's Closet

My great grandmother died about a year before I was born, but she was still very much a presence in the family when I was growing up. Pictures of Nanny were prominently displayed at my grandmother’s house, and her stuff was everywhere. In many ways, Nanny was to me what the Disney princesses are to today’s little girls. She was this sort of unreal character who had beautiful, old, mysterious things and wore the most amazing dresses I ever saw.  Even her name sounded worthy of old English gentry: Georgiana Mayhew Duncan Seavey.

Georgiana Mayhew Duncan, or "Nanny" as she is known in our family. This image was taken in 1906

just after she graduated from La Salle University. She was 21. This dress is one of the ones she stored

away in a closet near her room when she moved in with her oldest daughter's family in the 1940s. 

So can you imagine my enthusiasm when I was given the opportunity to dig around in the closet that held all of Nanny’s oldest dresses and nice things? Grammy Rivers had just helped me start collecting antique purses (story here), and she thought that there might be some purses in the closet that Nanny, her mother, had used until she died in 1976. For the most part, this closet had been left alone since Nanny died. The Christmas things were piled high right inside the door, so its depths had not been accessible. I had already decided by this time that I wanted to be an archaeologist, so excavating the depths of a large closet full of family heirlooms was like blisspalooza for me. I vowed to devote whatever vacation time I had to Grammy’s offer to go through the closet together.

Nanny's closet as it appeared in October 2011. It's actually less crowded here

than it had been in the late 1980s, but I didn't take pictures back then.

By the end of the first hour we had completely trashed Nanny’s old bedroom with piles of things we had to get out of the way, and we successfully reached the first trunk. There was a lot of dust, dirt, rodent excrement, and suspicious debris, but I was a kid who had never read up on biohazards, and at the age of 11 or 12, I had little guilt about ignoring messes (like complete mouse skeletons) that Grammy was too blind to see. I was just excited to be there, and the discovery of really old clothes and purses—the only things I really cared much about at the time—was about to begin.

There was too much stuff for me to remember all of it, but here’s a sample: piles of gently used wrapping paper, a plastic garment case full of circa 1960s coats and dresses, suitcases full of older dresses, circa 1850-1925, hats-a-plenty, furs, a pitcher and basin in its original shipping container, complete with mouse nest inside, a box of wooden jigsaw puzzles, really old photo negatives rolled up with age, a trunk full of linens, shawls, and newspapers, a box of Japanese parasols, a folding lap desk full of letters, and a huge trunk full of fabric scraps. And that barely represented a fraction of what was there. We didn’t even get to about half of the boxes in the closet, but still, it was more memorable even than the Milli Vanilli concert I went to that year!

The trunks in Nanny's closet were in the same place in 2011 as they had 

been when I first went though the closet with Grammy Rivers. On the right 

are hanging bags with furs in them, and the shelf in the back has boxes 

with puzzles, letters, and old photos.

A box of Japanese parasols.

A major highlight of the treasure hunt for me was a chance to try on the most amazing green dress. The bodice was so tight that I had to take short shallow breaths and I could barely move (and it wasn’t just because I was unknowingly wearing it backwards). Also, the skirt was missing the crinoline it needed to reach the diameter it was intended to have, so it dragged on the floor and I accidentally stepped on the hem a couple of times. I am ashamed to admit that I heard it rip. It’s hard not to be haunted by that now that I know so much more about the age and fragile condition of the dress. I’m still grateful that I tried it on though; had I waited even one more year, I would probably have outgrown it or developed some scruples about using an 1850s gown to fulfill my dress-up fantasies. The memories mean so much to me though, that even my current curatorial ethics can’t convince me that the minor rips weren’t worth it.

Extreme dress-up aside, Grammy and I also had the pleasure of finding what we were originally looking for: several antique purses. Most of them were ones that Grammy had never seen before, meaning that they had probably belonged to her mother or grandmother before she was born in 1912. Grammy gave them to me for my collection, and I have cherished them ever since. I’ll devote a whole blog entry to those later.

This 1850s dress boasted a pagoda sleeve and slightly pointed bodice, but  you can't tell since I put it 

on backwards. How was I supposed to know? The skirt suffers a bit without a crinoline, but I was still 

ever so happy.

Purses were no longer enough for me though. After this foray into Nanny’s closet I decided that antique dresses were too irresistible to admire only on family visits, and I resolved to start my own collection of those as well. By the time I entered Jr. High, I was saving my allowance for antique shows. Now, as an adult, I sometimes I wonder how much money I’d have in my IRA if I had saved up instead of investing in my costume collection. But I have no regrets. My collection may not pay for my retirement, but the enjoyment I get from it is priceless.