Who is standing

Costume is what people notice in these pictures and posture is what the pictures are made of. Strip out the boots, the corsetry and the props and the arrangement still works, because the argument is carried by where the bodies are and how they are held. Everything else is dressing on top of a very small grammar.

That grammar has perhaps six terms. Once you can see them the pictures stop being interchangeable, because the same costume can be arranged to say quite different things.

Height, and the low viewpoint

The first term is elevation. One figure occupies a higher plane than the other, and the eye reads that difference before it reads anything else in the frame. Heels, plinths, staircases, chairs, boots and simple standing all serve the same function, examined from the object side in the boot.

A low viewpoint amplifies the effect and adds something else. Photographed or drawn from below, the standing figure gains length, the head recedes, and the face has to angle downward to meet the viewer. That downward angle is the mechanism, not the height itself. A tall figure looking straight ahead reads as tall. A tall figure looking down reads as addressing you.

Why the seated figure wins

The counterintuitive rule of the genre is that the seated dominant almost always outranks the standing one, and the reason is economic rather than visual. Standing is work. It is readiness, availability, a position you can be moved from. Sitting says the work is unnecessary.

A picture in which one person is seated and everyone else in the frame is not has made its argument without a single prop. The throne pose that runs through decadent illustration, described in from postcards to print, depends entirely on this: the figure is stationary, ornamental and entirely still, and the stillness is the claim. The mid-century magazines borrowed it and kept it, because a seated figure is also considerably easier to draw well than a standing one, and because it leaves the second figure somewhere to be.

There is a subtler version. A figure seated casually, sideways in a chair, one arm over the back, reads as more secure than one seated formally. Formality implies an occasion.

The turned back and the withheld face

Three postures work by refusal, and they are the ones a careless picture never uses.

The turned back is the strongest. A figure shown from behind, facing away from a seated companion, denies the viewer her face and denies the other figure any exchange at all. The picture becomes a study of someone not participating, which is much harder to consume comfortably than a confrontational one.

The raised chin is the smallest gesture in the vocabulary and one of the most reliable. It lifts the eyeline over the other figure, so the look passes above him rather than at him. A face turned slightly away does related work: it grants a profile and keeps the direct gaze in reserve.

The hand on the hip is the odd one out, because it asserts rather than withholds. It widens the silhouette, breaks the standing vertical with a horizontal, and gives an idle arm something deliberate to do. Illustrators reached for it constantly, and it has been in the vocabulary so long that it now reads as a quotation of the genre rather than a natural stance.

Where the kneeling figure is placed

The second figure decides more about a picture than the first. He can be put almost anywhere, and each placement produces a different image out of the same two people.

Placed centrally and lit, he becomes the subject. The picture is about him, about his position and what is happening to him, and the standing figure functions as a condition of the scene rather than its subject. A great deal of magazine-era illustration works this way, which follows directly from who was writing the letters that commissioned it.

Placed at the lower edge, cropped, in shadow or turned away from the viewer, he becomes furniture. The picture belongs to the standing figure and he is there to establish scale. This is the arrangement that ages best, because it treats the woman as the subject of her own image rather than as an instrument in someone else’s.

Placed outside the frame entirely, implied only by a downward gaze or the angle of an object, the picture becomes something else again. It addresses the viewer directly and puts them in the vacated position, which is the most confrontational thing a composition of this kind can do.

Reading the frame edge

The last term is the boundary. A figure who touches or overlaps the edge of the frame reads as too large for the picture, and the effect is immediate: the image cannot contain her. Cropping the top of the head does it most aggressively. A skirt or a coat that runs off the side does it quietly.

The opposite arrangement, a figure held entirely inside generous margins, reads as displayed and available for inspection. Neither is better and both are choices, and asking which one a picture has made is the quickest way to find out who it thinks it is for. One plate on this site tests both readings of the same pose, and the difference between them turns out to be a few centimetres of margin.