Painted Babies

Pick of Punch 10. This area of the blog offers a selection of entertaining quotes from Punch magazine. The following is from 3^rd March 1866.

In Paris the fine ladies not merely smear themselves with rouge, but make their babies even wear it! And the law provides no punishment for such disgusting outrages. Will this French fashion, we wonder, become popular in England? Girls with pimply faces and bad complexions wear rouge and pearl-powder unblushingly enough — at least nobody can see their blushes, if they have any. Will such artists, when they marry, take to colouring their children? Painting on velvet is a very pretty art; but to paint upon the velvet of a baby’s dimpled cheek is a worse outrage upon nature than painting on a lily. English ladies mostly take their fashions from the French, but we hope they will not introduce this infant school of painting. If Mr. Kingsley’s Water Babies be translated into French, perhaps, to make them popular, the babies will be painted, and put forward with the title of the Water-colour Babies.