The portrait of Mrs. Hannah Jarvis with her two children, painted before she came back to Canada in 1781, shows her in a long-sleeved, white muslin dress. It is gathered around the neck, which is filled in with a kerchief, and it is held in by a wide sash and a drawstring under the bust line. This is the chemise dress which came into fashion in the 1780s.
Mrs. Jarvis is wearing the fashionable wide hair style which had replaced the earlier high one. It too required false hair, grease, and powder to be α la mode. The style went out of fashion early in the 1790s when a more natural one came in; the successor can be seen in the other portrait shown here. The anonymous work was painted in QuΘbec and shows stylish attire of the 1790s.
The waist rose to a position under the bustline in the 1790s and is featured on this chemise dress by a buckled belt. The sleeves are gathered at the top in a narrow vertical band, a hint of the puffed sleeve which came in at the end of the century.
The headdress, trimmed with a bunch of flowers and feathers, is very stylish. Hannah Jarvis, writing from Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1793, notes: "Feathers, not an inch of them lost on their caps." They were higher than any she had seen in London.
The little girls wear cotton dresses with a drawstring around the neck, and a wide sash, like their mother's. In the 1790s little girls too were wearing high waists. There is a child's printed cotton dress in this style in the Hampton Museum, New Brunswick.
