Painted ladies

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Painted ladies is the collective American vernacular term to describe Victorian houses which are usually painted in a multi-colored scheme, especially in the Charles Village neighborhood in Baltimore City, the greater San Francisco and New Orleans areas, and the city of Cape May, New Jersey.

The term's popularity spread east in the late 1970s and 1980s, however its use began to decline amongst colour artists in the 1990s and is seldom used in 2000, replaced by more accurate terminology such as polychrome. Those familiar with historic preservation view the term painted ladies as bordering on kitsch, however it is yet popular amongst laypersons.

As a rule, highly decorative homes built during the Queen Anne style era of the late 1800s were painted in multiple colors as to draw attention to the elements of the design. After 1900, Queen Anne style fell from popularity, replaced by the classical revival schools of design; whites and light crèmes dominated these types of wood structures, and so many Victorian homes were subsequently painted all white, or one color, as a means of simplifying painting and modernizing facades by playing down their highly ornamented style details.

In a more specific sense, the “Painted Ladies”, or sometimes the “Six Sisters”, are a row of Victorian houses on Steiner Street, bordering Alamo Square park, in San Francisco. This block appears very frequently in media and mass-market photographs of the city and its tourist attractions. It is sometimes known as “Postcard Row.”

Though the term “painted lady” is also an archaic slang referring to a prostitute who wore cosmetics in an era when respectable women did not, this definition is unrelated.

[edit] References

• Larsen, Michael; Elizabeth Pomada, Photographs by Morley Baer (1978). Painted Ladies: San Francisco's Resplendent Victorians. New York: E. P. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-48244-X.