Dressing gown
Category
Costume
Date
circa 1729
Materials
Silk
Order this imageCollection
Ham House, Surrey
NT 1140120.1
Caption
Lionel Tollemache, 4th Earl of Dysart (1708–70), commissioned this costly dressing gown and matching slippers for his marriage to Lady Grace Carteret (1713–55) in 1729. They are made of ‘orrace tissue’, a lightweight silk woven with silver thread in a pattern of ornamental flowers and lace. Wearing them, the young earl would have been as fashionably attired in his private dressing room as in the public eye. The earl’s dressing table cover and mirror, together with the boxes and brushes he used to complete his toilette, were designed to match. Surviving accounts reveal his preference for wash balls combining soap, herbs and spices, and large quantities of perfumed water. The earl invested heavily in clothes throughout his life, spending £575 6 shillings and 3 pence Dedicated follower of fashion (the equivalent of around £95,000 today) with tailor Henry Joseph La Motte between 1733 and 1741. London mercers, drapers and specialist shops supplied everything that the earl, as a discerning man of fashion, might require, from wigs and shoe buckles to patch boxes. Emma Slocombe
Summary
Dressing gown, as part of a dressing set of pale blue silk and silver thread. Made for Lionel Tollemache, 4th Earl of Dysart. Possibly made for his wedding in 1729.
References
Antrobus and Slocombe 2025: Helen Antrobus and Emma Slocombe, 100 Things to Wear: Fashion from the collections of the National Trust, National Trust 2025, pp. 58 -59. Ribeiro 2013: Aileen Ribeiro, 'Elite male fashion in mid- eighteenth-century England: The case of Lionel Tollemache, 4th Earl of Dysart', in Christopher Rowell (ed.), Ham House 400 Years of Collecting and Patronage, Yale, 2013, pp.298-308..