When I was researching hip baths I had great difficulty in finding suitable images – basically it seems that no nineteenth century cartoonist, artist or photographer produced an image of a hip bath in use which has ended up in the public domain.

I couldn’t even find a nineteenth century soft porn image, so I ended up settling for the above image from the Wellcome collection. I’m assuming it is public domain – given that you can buy prints, towels and t-shirts online with the image I reckon it’s a fair bet.

The Wellcome collection doesn’t give a provenance – the description given is

A man smoking and reading the paper fully clothed in a hip-bath; self-help hydrotherapy in hot weather. Wood engraving.

which is almost certainly incorrect. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Both Microsoft and Google’s visual search tools bring you back to the Wellcome collection, via the beach towels etc, but don’t turn up a source.

I did try searching the Punch archive, which is where most of the more common nineteenth century cartoons come from, but no luck.

There were other magazines similar to Punch, including ones published in Melbourne and Adelaide, but so far I’ve been unable to find a source for the cartoon.

So, why do I think the Wellcome Collection description is wrong?

Well, for starters, the man has taken his hip bath outdoors into his garden – you can see the garden fence behind him, and he has a watering can beside him.

Secondly, he’s not fully clothed – while he has his slippers on he is by no means fully dressed and is wearing some tight fitting leggings, possibly cotton long johns, and has a sheet wrapped round him, which would wick up the cool water from his bath, and keep him cool.

We know that in the nineteenth century people would often put a sheet in a hip bath and wrap the damp warm sheet around them while sitting in the bath, there’s no reason at all why someone shouldn’t have decided to use a cool damp sheet to keep them cool, much in the way that in the days before air conditioning, people would cool down during the summer heat by sitting in a cool or tepid bath – a former colleague once told me that he would often do his research reading in a cold bath on hot afternoons in Adelaide.

Can we guess when it dates from?

The description of the image says it’s from a wood block. Until lithography came along in the mid 1880’s, most illustrations in newspapers and magazines were engraved on wood blocks made to fit the column width of the publication, so I think we can be confident in saying the image dates from some time before 1890.

I’d guess, and it is only a guess, that the man’s hairstyle dates the image to the 1860’s, but I could easily be out by five years either way …