Theodosia Burr Alston (1783-1813)

Silk corset, steel coil boning, signatures of 100% cotton paper
stitched in silk.

The Loves of Aaron Burr:
Portraits in Corsetry & Binding

Theodosia Burr Alston (1783-1813)

In 1783, Theodosia Burr Alston was born to Theodosia Prevost and Aaron Burr. Steeped in a liberation theology few understood, the couple raised
their daughter to exemplify the feminist ideals and educational precepts of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures
on Political and Moral Subjects.  Once widowed, Burr’s near obsessive parenting was reciprocated by the love and devotion of his daughter for
her father, evidenced in their surviving correspondence.

“Mr. Burr has introduced me to his daughter, whom he has educated
with uncommon care; for she is elegant without ostentation, and learned
without pedantry.  At the same time she dances with more grace than any
young lady of New York, Miss Theodosia Burr speaks French and Italian
with facility, is perfectly conversant with the writers of the Augustan age
 and not unacquainted with the language of the father of poetry.”
John Doris, 1798, cited in Nancy Isenberg’s Fallen Founder.

Theodosia Burr Alston's corset is a light pale pink silk bound about pages
that are strewn into book binder's signatures as a book would be constructed. The silk binder's thread is sewn through the corset along the front of the bodice visibly binding her. The paper, equivalent to what we know her to have written in letters and journals still extant is her "volume" of work bound within a corset.

Reference: Burr, Aaron and Theodosia.  The Correspondence of Aaron Burr and His Daughter Theodosia. Edited and with a Preface by Mark Van Doren.  New York: Covici-Friede Inc., 1929. Cote, Richard. Theodosia Burr Alston: Portrait of a Prodigy, Corinthian Books, 2002.

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The Loves Of Aaron Burr:
Portraits in Corsetry & Binding
The Film 

Drawing connections between her own interpretive work
and the historic corsets exhibited in
Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette,
Camilla Huey will speak on the changing architectural, structural, and functional forms
of corsets, corset-making, materials, and methodologies. The artist employs these
forms in her unique approach to analyzing portraits of nine 18th- and 19th-century women. Through ephemera, fetishism, material culture, and texts, the artist
invites the audience to follow both design and historic research as she explores biographical narrative. She will bring selected works from her exhibition,
The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding

Preview May 7, 6pm Bard Graduate Center
38 West 86th Street, New York City 10024
$25 RSVP programs@bgc.bard.edu

The Premiere of
The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding Film
with select works from the exhibition at the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Manhattan's oldest house the very place where the lives of these women, filming and exhibition took place.
A reception and screening with discussion to follow.
View the works of Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Colonial Arrangements before.

Premiere May 14, 6pm Morris-Jumel Mansion
65 Jumel Terrace, New York City 10032
$25 RSVP visitorservices@morrisjumel.org

Camilla Huey (artist/couturière) has exhibited artwork at the Bard Graduate Center
and the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York City. Her exhibit, The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding, paid homage to the women who surrounded and influenced this controversial founding father.

Margaret Moncrieffe (1763-?)

Boned corset with first edition of “The Memoirs of Mrs. Coghlan”
J. Fellows, New York, 1795.

The Loves of Aaron Burr:
Portraits in Corsetry & Binding

Margaret Moncrieffe (1763-?)

The First Love of Aaron Burr, the allure and seduction of, fourteen-year-old, Margaret Moncrieffe, the daughter of a British officer during the Battle of Harlem Heights is where Burr’s legacy as a profligate begins. In her 1794
The Memoirs of Mrs. Coghlan, Burr suspects of spying for the British through “the language of flowers” regards herself less a “victim of seduction” than a teenager with a crush.  Ms. Moncrieffe is coy regards the dashing “American Colonel” who “plighted my virgin heart.” Still, she credits him with her rebellion against “the barbarous customs of society” that kept them apart.

In this piece we contend with the condition of a fourteen year old girl having
a trippingly light and halcyon experience amidst a colonial war while painting pictures of flowers for her own father while losing her “virgin heart” to yet another father figure, that of Burr. The light blue damask corset cradles a
first edition of her “memoirs”, however disputed the authorship, the volume
is the vehicle through which we had first become familiar with her later
debauched life. Looking into the book, arising from the pages, are the florid, watercoloured pages. This portrait was continually worked on after exhibition,

finding a stand with a curved finish, cut away under the hip filled with a peplum beneath the corset. The bones are concealed within the velvet ribbons as casings over the seams. The edges and lacings are traced with a shredded crimson silk and under the book is an iridescent silk square drawing the viewer’s eye back to the book and the original bibliographic material.

Burdett, Charles. Margaret Moncrieffe, The First Love of Aaron Burr. New York, H.W. Derby, 1861. Coghlan, Margaret. Memoirs of Mrs. Coghlan, (daughter
of the Late Major Moncrieffe,): Written by herself and dedicated to the British nation; being interspersed with anecdotes of the Late American and present French war, with remarks moral and political. London: J. Lane, 1794.

Drawing connections between her own interpretive work and the historic corsets exhibited in Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette, Camilla
Huey will speak on the changing architectural, structural, and functional forms of
corsets, corset-making, materials, and methodologies. The artist employs these
forms in her unique approach to analyzing portraits of nine 18th- and 19th-century women. Through ephemera, fetishism, material culture, and texts, the artist invites
the audience to follow both design and historic research as she explores biographical narrative. She will bring selected works from her exhibition, The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding, Morris-Jumel Mansion.

Preview May 7, 6pm Bard Graduate Center, 38 West 86th Street, New York City 10024, $25 RSVP programs@bgc.bard.edu

The Premiere of The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding with select works from the exhibition at the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Manhattan's oldest house the very place where the lives of these women, filming and exhibition took place. A reception and screening with discussion to follow. View the works of Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Colonial Arrangements before.

Premiere May 14, 6pm Morris-Jumel Mansion, 65 Jumel Terrace, New York City 10032, $25 RSVP visitorservices@morrisjumel.org

Camilla Huey (artist/couturière) has exhibited artwork at the Bard Graduate Center
and the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York City. Her exhibit, The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding, paid homage to the women who surrounded and influenced this controversial founding father.

Esther Edwards Burr (1732-1758)

Silk and velvet corset with steel boning and lace, mourning stationery envelopes

The Loves of Aaron Burr:
Portraits in Corsetry & Binding

Esther Edwards Burr (1732-1758)

Esther Edwards Burr was the mother of Aaron Burr, Jr., the wife of founding Princeton University President Aaron Burr, Sr., and the daughter of Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist evangelist of the Great Awakening of New England.
Her mother, Sarah Pierpont Edwards, underwent a mystical religious experience. Edwards encouraged others to emulate her conversion through proselytizing and the publication of several pamphlets written by Sarah. Esther Burr descended from five generations of literate females.

She kept a diary in which she wrote daily over three years to her
friend Sarah Prince, living in Boston. This diary was overlooked and is important because it is a woman’s journal, of domestic observations and female concerns. The journal is a continual self-examination and spiritual quest, a private document. Jonathan Edwards claimed a true understanding of divine things to be a sixth sense, drawing a connection between women’s greater piety and emotional natures. His daughter’s journal is a surprisingly modern self-examination and spiritual quest, a private document. Ostensibly, in the service of the Lord, Esther Burr and Sarah Prince were quite ready to employ their pens.

The female pens that did the most to prompt women to write were held not
by real women at all, but by the heroines such as those of Richardson’s epistolary novels. Pamela and Clarissa were avidly read in both Britain and America. It was Pamela’s “positive self-assertion through letter writing that ultimately brought her wealth and happiness. Burr and Prince could easily have accepted Richardson’s premise that pious women, armed with their letter-writing talents, had the power to influence their destinies.

View fullsize

In creating a personification of Esther Burr, despite her young and surprisingly irreverent attitudes which were overwhelmed by the presence of death in her narrative. The letters are not open, they’re folded within mourning stationary envelopes, addressed with the names of friends, family and loved ones veiled under green lace. The silk is a somber overlay of subtle striped burgundy over a purple silk with velvet chevrons down the center front like a blade. The back panel of the corset is a solid claret velvet in the shape of a shield like that of a family heraldry symbol. The corset was originally a full eight panel corset but two side panels have been removed to dramatize the dramatic and emotional volumes between the vessel of the bust of the corset and the extremely small waist.

The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr 1754-1757, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, 354 pgs, Edited & introduction, by Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1984.

Drawing connections between her own interpretive work and the historic corsets exhibited in Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette, Camilla
Huey will speak on the changing architectural, structural, and functional forms of
corsets, corset-making, materials, and methodologies. The artist employs these
forms in her unique approach to analyzing portraits of nine 18th- and 19th-century women. Through ephemera, fetishism, material culture, and texts, the artist invites
the audience to follow both design and historic research as she explores biographical narrative. She will bring selected works from her exhibition, The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding, Morris-Jumel Mansion.

Preview May 7, 6pm Bard Graduate Center, 38 West 86th Street, New York City 10024, $25 RSVP programs@bgc.bard.edu

The Premiere of The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding with select works from the exhibition at the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Manhattan's oldest house the very place where the lives of these women, filming and exhibition took place. A reception and screening with discussion to follow. View the works of Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Colonial Arrangements before.

Premiere May 14, 6pm Morris-Jumel Mansion, 65 Jumel Terrace, New York City 10032, $25 RSVP visitorservices@morrisjumel.org

Camilla Huey (artist/couturière) has exhibited artwork at the Bard Graduate Center
and the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York City. Her exhibit, The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding, paid homage to the women who surrounded and influenced this controversial founding father.