Du Roi (Gallery of French fashions and costumes, drawn from life, engraved by the most celebrated artists in this medium, and hand-colored with the greatest care by Madame Le Beau;publication begun in 1778.

Although no private or public collection possesses a complete edition of the Galerie, the series is widely recognized for its high aesthetic value as well as its innovation within the overarching field of the fashion plate.

René Colas, who compiled the major reference work Bibliographie générale du costume et de la mode (1933), calls it "the most beautiful collection in existence on the fashions of the eighteenth century.

"[2] This supreme influence was undoubtedly strengthened by Queen Marie Antoinette as well as figures such as Rose Bertin (her dressmaker) and Monsieur Léonard Autié (her hairdresser) who were responsible for designing her iconic courtly wardrobe.

[3] Beginning in the 1770s (the decade during which Antoinette both married future king Louis-Auguste and assumed the title Queen of France and Navarre), women's dress came to exhibit greater variation than ever before; the fashion plate emerged under these conditions, as if to disseminate each budding trend.

[4] Ostensibly rendered "after nature", according to the everyday observations of prominent contemporary artists, the engravings of the Galerie thus responded to a growing demand for fashion news as well as a general gap in the market of French prints.

Both of these men hailed from the region of Normandy (Esnauts came from Magny-le-Désert, and Rapilly came from Pirou), and the name of their publishing house, Ville de Coutances, reflects these common origins.

Located on the rue Saint-Jacques, this maison was established on July 6, 1773 following their brief stint at the nearby La Croix de Lorraine, where they had worked about three years earlier.

Here the editors primarily published portraits of both historical and contemporary subjects; they began issuing the Galerie after obtaining a printing privilege on July 29, 1778 and continued to do so until 1787.

[5] Perhaps in an effort to emulate the prints of The Lady's Magazine, various engravers, hairdressers, and booksellers had, at this time, published a number of small almanacs on contemporary fashion.

In formulating their Galerie, Esnauts and Rapilly combined the subjects of these early volumes (which primarily focused on hairstyles) with the high quality of engraving found in series by the prolific Moreau le Jeune, such as Suite d'estampes pour servir à l'Histoire des Moeurs et du Costume.

The first collected volume of the Galerie (published in 1779) included 96 plates which came from the initial 16 portfolios of the series and was preceded by a forty-page descriptive introduction written by the lawyer G.François-Roger Molé.

To quote Peter McNeil and Sanda Miller's Fashion Writing and Criticism: History, Theory, Practice, the compositions completed by each one of these artists demonstrate "the strong influence of figurative painting in their creation.

[9] With the exception of the first six notebooks (which are not signed) as well as a few other plates which seem to have been released later in publication, the names of the designer and the engraver are found below each image included in the Galerie, often with variations in spelling.

On plates with full-outfit compositions, text is printed directly below each image andusually above some variation of the inscription, "A Paris chez Esnauts et Rapilly rue St Jacques, à la Ville de Countances.

In the late eighteenth century the courtly presence of Marie Antoinette was, as mentioned, absolutely instrumental to augmenting France's influence on the world of fashion at large.

As highlighted in New for Now, the Galerie was circulated among a wide array of "fashion-conscious" audiences, both in France and abroad, and would ultimately go down in history as "the best and largest" fashion plate series of the eighteenth century.

[17] This rare edition can be read at a select number prominent research institutions, including Brooklyn Museum Library where one can also examine the 24-plate volume compiled and by Roger-Armand Weigert.

Regardless of their degree of accuracy and fidelity, the existence of these posthumous editions reflects the persistent importance of the Galerie in the worlds of fashion, costume, and, more generally, visual culture.