Maggs Bros.

Rare. There are two copies in the BM (one coloured the other not) and one at Yale (coloured).

A striking engraving showing a prostitute in her dilapidated room in the notorious St Giles area of 18th-century London. The print is part of a pair in which the St Giles’s Beauty is contrasted with the St James’s Beauty, an elegant woman, fashionably dressed sat in her beautifully decorated room in the most fashionable part of the city. The present example is one of a number of pairs of prints in this period which contrasted the wealthy parts of London with their salubrious neighbours.

The smiling woman in the print is dressed in gaudy and revealing clothes and sits in her upstairs room where the ceiling, walls and furnishings are shabby and broken and her modest table contains just an old loaf of bread and a wine glass and bottle. Pasted to the wall behind the woman is a contemporary printed execution broadside.

The print is carefully designed to mirror various aspects in the corresponding St James’s print: the furnishings of the room are much finer and the table is of a much more delicate and fashionable design with an ink stand and pen on top of it. Behind the woman is a handsome bookcase with neat calf bound books, contrasting the crude street literature behind the woman in St Giles.

The series number has been trimmed away from our example of the print but should be 521 (a reference to the catalogues of prints produced by Carington Bowles) and the St James’s Beauty is numbered 520. Prints sold as pairs were not unusual in the 18th century but there was also a vogue for prints which contrasted the social situation in the richer and poorer parts of London. For example Stubbs’s Refreshment at St. James’s and Refreshment at St. Giles’s (1789) shows fashionable people eating ice cream in St James’s while Refreshment at St. Giles’s shows dishevelled people drinking in a run-down establishment.