Flaunting It: Sexual Display Among Humans

Darwin showed that among birds and other animals, the male of the species was equipped with beautiful features to attract a mate. Among humans, however, the roles were reversed. Woman had 'become more beautiful' than man, he believed, and further enhanced her appearance with 'all sorts of ornaments'.

Although notions of beauty were relative in human societies, Darwin acknowledged, the 'passion for ornament' applied throughout, most particularly among women. All preferred to beautify themselves with objects from the natural world: flowers, foliage, and minerals, and especially the feathers of male birds.

 

Darwin took note of contemporary fashions, often satirised in widely read magazines. New vivid colours were made possible by chemical dyes. The craze for plumage led to the large-scale importation of feathers from tropical hummingbirds, egrets, and birds of paradise. Whole birds were nestled on fans and posed as if in mid-flight on hats. Here the powerful demands of the nineteenth-century fashion industry outweighed the protests of anti-cruelty campaigners.

---

'There was a young person in red' from More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany by Edward Lear (1812–1888). London: R.J. Bush, 1872

Lithograph

Best-known today for his nonsense rhymes, Edward Lear was also distinguished ornithological draftsman. He provided illustrations for a number of John Gould’s publications, notably his Birds of Europe (1837) and also taught lithography to both John Gould and his wife Elizabeth.

---

'Civilisation!' from Le Rire. Journal humoristique (23 Jan. 1897)

Coloured lithograph

Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man: 'As with the artificial ornaments used by savage and civilised men, so with the natural ornaments of birds, the head is the chief seat of decoration' (2,70).

Private Collection

---

'Mr. Punch’s Designs after Nature. Grand Back-Hair Sensation for the Coming Season' after Edward Linley Sambourne (1845–1910), Punch, 1 April 1871

---

John William Inchbold (1830–1888)

Suggestive Study, Paradise (Head of a Girl and a Bird of Paradise), 1864–65

Watercolour over graphite

From the mid-nineteenth century, bird of paradise feathers—and sometimes whole birds—were used as trimmings in fashion accessories, especially millinery. Alfred Russel Wallace, who was one of the first Europeans to see birds of paradise displaying in the wild, noted that the minor (or lesser) birds of paradise (paradisaea minor) was especially prone to be hunted for its ornamental tail feathers. They are worn by the young woman in Inchbold’s watercolour.

John Inchbold was a close friend of the poet Algernon Swinburne, whom he met through Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1862. He was primarily a landscape painter, who, like John Brett, worked in the Alps under Ruskin’s influence.

Tate, London. Purchased as part of the Oppé collection, with assistance from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund