The Milk Woman,

1774

Like tea and chocolate, coffee became a fashionable beverage in eighteenth-century France. In these pendant prints, a demure coffee drinker is paired with a coquettish young woman holding a canister of milk. Images of milk vendors and milkmaids were popular during the reign of Louis XV (1715–74), whose mistress Madame de Pompadour constructed several pleasure dairies at Versailles and Fontainebleau. Bonnet placed an advertisement for these prints in the December 25, 1774, issue of Le Journal de politique et de littérature, lauding their remarkable resemblance to painted miniatures and their innovative printed gold-leaf frames. According to the ad, they were made by M. Marin of London and available for purchase in Bonnet’s shop for nine livres each. The prints were in fact made by Bonnet himself and designed, lettered, and marketed as British imports to sidestep France’s tight restrictions on the use of gold in printmaking.