In this world and the next: a tragedy of gender and celebrity

“Perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this.”
SARAH SIDDONS (1755 - 1831)

Self-portrait by Sarah Siddons, plaster bust c 1820 © Victoria and Albert Museum

PART FOUR - A Woman's Tragedy continued

Sarah Siddons had to bear the worst tragedy that can befall a mother, the death of a child, five times. Two of them died in infancy, an expected mortality rate for the time, but she gave the impression that only pouring her grief into acting enabled her to endure the losses of two grown up daughters, one aged only nineteen, and of her eldest son when he was forty, all due to lung diseases. Two children, a son and a daughter, survived her.

As a conscientious mother, Mrs Siddons' instinct was to protect her daughters from the devil's profession of acting; as an actress, to protect herself from competition. She and William Siddons were anxious to secure conventional respectable lives for all their children. Only Henry, the eldest, became an actor. Their younger son, George, was a godson of the Prince of Wales, later George IV, and entered the Indian Civil Service.

In the character of a tender mother, with her son Henry Siddons, the only one of her children to follow his parents into the acting profession, in 'Isabella' by Thomas Southerne. Engraving, June 1785, London by Caldwall of a painting by William Hamilton © Victoria and Albert Museum.

Due to their mother's successful career, the girls were not brought up in expectation of having to work for a living. Mrs Siddons provided for them all their lives.


All three girls were articulate, attractive, self-assertive and strong-willed, raised in a cultured household, conversing with the leading writers, artists and actors of the day. The eldest, Sarah Martha, known to the family as Sally, was reputed to be an accomplished song-writer. Weakening health cut short any professional aspirations of the two elder girls, and the youngest was brought up from the age of nine to be her mother's companion and solace in retirement, a sacrifice made without complaint or surrender of individuality; after Mrs Siddons' death, with her comfortable inheritance, she lived an active and happy life.

Her daughters were not downtrodden; they respected their mother and her career; the highly intelligent eldest and youngest daughters were protective of her professional creative needs, which included being spared emotional upset at home. 

Like other loving mothers, the only thing Sarah Siddons, the prophetess of emotion on stage, could not save her daughters from was their own feelings. Sally never blamed her mother for the part she played in the psychological drama - it wasn't a love story - with Thomas Lawrence that overwhelmed all of them. 

Initially, Mrs Siddons was too blinded by her own affection for Lawrence to see the whirlpool into which he was pulling them; she was enjoying the undercurrent too much, that his confused feelings were flowing towards her, not her daughters.

The Gipsy Girl by Thomas Lawrence, oil on canvas, 1794
© Royal Academy of Arts, London
A disturbing piece of erotica by Lawrence, for which Maria Siddons, aged fifteen, has been suggested as the model. It is a plausible theory: she has the intense, dark eyed and tousle-headed look of her family, and the date fits with their period of intimacy. The genre to which the picture belongs in art history is "fancy", a sentimental objectification of rural life for rich people, but this wild, half-naked, boyish girl with her flushed cheeks, parted lips and fierce gaze, is inviting a far more sexually ambivalent response, begging tough questions about what on earth Lawrence wanted out of the Siddons sisters.

Mrs Siddons was in her early forties, still slim and splendidly handsome, at an age when the most famous actress in the country needed assurance that she could still be loved as a woman, not just a national monument. It was never a sexually consummated love affair; it was more of a self-dramatization for the suppressed bisexual, celebrity-obsessed Lawrence to fulfill an impossible dream of union with the irreproachably moral mother-goddess Mrs Siddons.

Sarah Siddons and members of her family by Richard James Lane, published by Joseph Dickinson, after Sir Thomas Lawrence, lithograph, published May 1830
© National Portrait Gallery, London. 

Sketching her informally at home in 1798, at the time he was trying to marry one of her daughters, Lawrence saw the actress as a classical deity of brooding potency with three of her children and one of her younger brothers revolving like satellites around her. Clockwise: Cecilia Combe (née Siddons); Sarah Siddons (née Kemble); Maria Siddons; George John Siddons; Charles Kemble (actor)

Lawrence was fourteen years younger than Mrs Siddons and ten years older than her daughter Maria, who was a lusciously pretty sixteen year old when he started courting her after ditching the elder sister. Both girls shared the intense dark-eyed good looks and striking features of their mother; they were mini-Sarah Siddonses. 

A generational pattern was being repeated: Sarah Kemble had been a headstrong fifteen year old when she promised herself to William Siddons, an actor eleven years older than her in her father's touring company. Roger Kemble was so disapproving that he dismissed his daughter, despite her obvious talent, and sent her into service, to no avail, because the determined lovers married two years later.

Mrs Siddons supported what she believed was true love, joining Lawrence and Maria's fight to overcome William Siddons' opposition to an engagement until they wore him down. He looks tired in Opie's portrait. A few weeks after pledging his troth to Maria, Lawrence broke the news to Mrs Siddons that he had changed his mind again, and wanted to marry her elder daughter. She was sympathetic; she understood the play of passions in an artistic temperament. A few months after that, Maria was dead.

Lawrence was the only other man apart from her husband who aroused such reckless feelings in her; he was a soulmate, and they had a rapport that was never broken, even after Maria and Sally's deaths; in old age, she said she wanted Lawrence to be a pallbearer at her funeral. They were part of each other's myth.


It says a lot about the devotion and respect that Sarah Siddons commanded from people, and even more about the steadfast character of her eldest daughter, that Sally did not utter or write a word of reproach against the mother she adored.

Money was important to Mrs Siddons, as it was to a self-made man like Lawrence. Contemporaries, wanting artists to live on inspiration alone, sneered at their materialism. Formative experiences had made both of them terrified of penury. She was understandably jealous of her value in a male-dominated market. Her notorious meanness about appearing for other actors’ benefits is contradicted by the numerous charity performances she gave after her official retirement, not always for members of her own family. Her celebrity and relative affluence for a self-employed actress made her a target for caricaturists, and, finding no other vices in her, they aimed at her supposed avarice.

 Print by Gillray, Theatrical Mendicants, relieved, published 1809. Sarah Siddons and her brothers Charles Kemble and John Philip Kemble begging for money to rebuild Covent Garden Theatre. Mrs Siddons appears as a more forceful masculine presence than her fawning brothers; even in caricature, she retains dignity © Victoria and Albert Museum.

In 1789, during a brief break from acting, due to ill-health, she took up sculpture as an alternative creative outlet which sustained her through emotional crises and later her melancholy retirement. Her main subject was herself.  She discovered an even more powerful intensity than any of the many artists who portrayed her, a fuller underlip jutting forward in an expression seething with passions, a Shakespearean head of Brutus, a brooding Romantic hero, a grieving mother or queen, a guilty Lady Macbeth reliving her crimes in her sleep. She could imagine herself in all these parts.

The esteem in which Mrs Siddons was held by the public and critics was higher than that of any other actor, male or female, but her brother John Philip Kemble was given grander honours on his official retirement than she had on hers. Stung by this proof of the difference in the official status of male and female actors, Mrs Siddons remarked that "perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this”.

 Mrs Siddons in the Character of the Tragic Muse engraved by Cook, 1783. © Victoria and Albert Museum. She walks regally into the next world, as the most famous tragedienne in English-speaking history

In this world and the next

“Perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this.” SARAH SIDDONS (1755 - 1831)

PART THREE: An obvious conclusion

 Sarah Siddons as Zara in Congreve's tragedy 'The Mourning Bride', engraving by after painting by Thomas Lawrence, 1783. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum. This is the face of a determined, passionate, brave, intelligent individual, transcending gender. "Independence I will ever secure..." Mary Wollstonecraft.
"...she did look so beautiful! It is a part I like to see her act extremely." Sally Siddons, writing in a letter on February 8th, 1799, about her mother as Zara. 

Sarah Siddons was socially acquainted with Mary Wollstonecraft and only four years older. Temperamentally, the reserved actress, who regulated her emotions and the impulsive, radical feminist, who acted on her desires, were far apart. Siddons did not see herself as a rebel other than in being an actor, which, in the glory days, before it was confused with showing-off, was a form of rebellion in itself.

She craved social acceptance, for herself and her children. She was more interested in improving her life through her art than suffering for it. In private, this passionate artist was conventional, religious and moral. She never compromised her right to have a career, children and a husband, and she earned it all herself.


Frequently when Wollstonecraft wrote about an emancipated woman, independent of men and men's money, she unintentionally described Siddons: “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.”


“Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.”  Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the words; you can hear Sarah Siddons saying them.

In this world and the next: a tragedy of gender and celebrity

 Sarah Siddons as Euphrasia in 'The Grecian Daughter'. Print of Pine's painting by the female engraver, Caroline Watson. Published in London by John Boydell, 1st May, 1784. © Victoria & Albert Museum. Euphrasia was one of the parts in which she conquered the London stage on her return in 1782. The heroine triumphs in restoring peace to her country after an extraordinary, even gross, display of filial duty, when she suckles her own father rather than escape to safety from despotic tyranny with her husband and infant son. The mix of sensationalism - the audience enjoyed shrieking along with the heroine - and serious moral about debate a woman's right to determine her public and domestic roles, without becoming a victim, were ideal for Sarah Siddons' stage persona.

 PART TWO - A Woman's Tragedy

Mrs Siddons understood the value of art, both as an aesthetic and a publicity tool. Her collaboration with all the leading portraitists of the day and the subsequent national distribution of prints spread her fame. She was not an easy subject; she was considered a beautiful woman, in her strong featured face, large dark eyes and lithe, graceful body, but, as often happens with expressive, charismatic people, her beauty could not be captured in repose.

Many of the heroic qualities that she was admired for on stage were regarded as unsuitable for a lady in real life. The power she conveyed with the grandeur of her elocution and sweeping, authoritative movements, were supposed to be exclusively masculine attributes. Except for Thomas Lawrence, society portraitists shied away from her forcefulness, emphasizing instead her willowy grace, and the tender beseeching pathos of her raised eyes, rather than showing them blazing with passion under frowning brows.

Sitting in her elegant black plumed hat and blue-striped dress in Gainsborough's 1785 portrait, she looks uneasy, coiled, as if she'd rather spring up and save her country, defy a tyrant, or murder Duncan.

When Lawrence painted Mrs Siddons, rather than avoiding the challenging masculine aspects of her stage persona, the fierce concentration of her gaze, her imposing height and the athletic build of her shoulders and arms (reminiscent of Mrs Freke’s “masculine arms” in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda), he celebrated them.

 

Portrait by Thomas Lawrence, Tate Gallery, London. Image:© Tate, London 2011
The Tragic Muse of Neoclassicism and prophetess of Romanticism in a portrait of 1804, when she was nearing fifty, in which her lifelong friend, Sir Thomas Lawrence displayed her powerful physique and brooding presence with such panache that she looks like a bruiser about to step forward and knock you out. Like many great classical actors she combined masculine and feminine qualities in the authority and sensitivity of her interpretations.

When Lawrence painted Mrs Siddons, rather than avoiding, like other portraitists, the challenging masculine aspects of her stage persona, the fierce concentration of her gaze, her imposing height and the powerful build of her shoulders and arms (reminiscent of Mrs Freke’s “masculine arms” in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda), he celebrated them.


For the last full-length portrait, after the natural studio light from the high source used by Lawrence faded, she posed by lamplight till two o’clock in the morning, so he could finish the painting in time for the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1804. The night-time sitting caused such slanderous tittle-tattle around town that Mr Siddons had to issue a press statement denying his wife's adultery. Any lady of any age who sat for Lawrence risked seduction - he was dangerous to know while Byron was still a schoolboy. Mrs Siddons and Lawrence were not lovers, they were something even closer, intimate collaborators who understood the demands of each other's arts.


She steps forward towards us as she would have done during one of her Shakespearean readings; the simple composition is neoclassical, except for the free brush work, the great swathes of red and black, the injury in her expression, all suggest emotional disturbance beneath the surface of acting. It was the year after her eldest daughter's death; a younger one had died five years before. With "two lovely creatures gone", their grieving mother, comparing herself to Niobe, had begun to look older and heavier, which Lawrence did not disguise.


There is nothing of the "flattered and pinky" which Farington objected to in some of Lawrence's society portraits. The painting did not go down well at the time, but when you physically enter her presence, the effect is breathtaking, and you suddenly get a sense of her power on stage without even being able to hear her voice.

We think of one as the treasure of the Establishment, rendering female passions socially acceptable, and the other its scourge, but Sarah Siddons and Mary Wollstonecraft had social and cultural affinities....They were only five years apart in age, and well-acquainted.They had to earn their own livings all their adult lives; as young women struggling to establish independent careers, they had both taken jobs as ladies' companions.

What could have been a humiliating experience for the sixteen year old Sarah Kemble, forced to work as a maid in the house of landed gentry while she burned to be an actress, turned out to be more like a cultural education than servitude. Like Elizabeth Bennett seeing Pemberley for the first time, she walked into 18th century enlightenment. She was already well-educated in literature and drama, and now daily exposure to the Greatheed family's art collection inspired her appreciation of the visual arts, and a special interest in sculpture.

The manor house at Guy's Cliffe, Warwickshire, by Alexander Francis Lydon, from 'County Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain and Ireland', 1880.
Image: Wikipedia.
Not a theatre set, but a real house that informed a dramatic imagination. As was so common in the 18th century, the picturesque idyll and magnificent art collection was paid for by sugar plantations

She was treated kindly, even with respect, and soon promoted from maid to companion; everyone, masters and servants, seem to have been enthralled by her recitations; her habit of spouting Milton in the servants' hall didn't annoy anyone - it begins to sound like a fairy story, an episode in a preposterous TV drama.

The new maid carried herself so grandly around the house, that her amiable employer Lady Mary (oh, yes, that was her name), a Whig duke's daughter, later recalled how she had had an irresistible urge to rise from her chair whenever the girl entered the room. Her subsequent fame might have coloured this recollection, for nothing succeeds like success in shifting perceptions, but it is still an illustration of how, in the age of aristocratic supremacy, Sarah Siddons, who had been born in a small tavern in Brecon, was treated like a queen. 

Mrs Siddons by Richard Crosse, 1783, watercolour miniature © Victoria & Albert Museum. Here, in a poor likeness conveniently packaged for publicity, she looks like a typical 18th century lady of sensibility. Her features deliberately softened by the painter, she is the epitome of feminine grace and moral virtue in a temperate classical setting, a very small part of her dramatic range. The insipidity of this type of portrayal of women annoyed Siddons and Wollstonecraft. “[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.” (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)

TO BE CONTINUED

In this world and the next:a tragedy of gender and celebrity

“Perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this.”
SARAH SIDDONS (1755 - 1831)

PART ONE - A Celebrity's Tragedy

 

Sarah Siddons, oil on canvas c 1784, attributed to William Hamilton (or Thomas Beech).
© Victoria and Albert Museum.

Siddons dominated the female tragic roles on the English stage for over 30 years. Her stately performances in the most emotionally immediate of art forms articulated the eighteenth century's ideal of the sublime, and her representations of the classical passions, in combination with her outwardly virtuous private life, won over audiences as diverse as George III, who appointed her Reader to his family, and Lord Byron, who admired her more than any other actor, male or female, worth more than Cooke, Kemble and Kean all put together. Even the Duke of Wellington, as famous for dry understatement as she was for grand pathos, was a fan.

Going to see her act was like an ecumenical religious event. Hazlitt said she was a goddess, Tragedy personified. By the time she died in 1831, she had outlived two kings, her friend, the portraitist Lawrence, the poet Byron, her brother and fellow-actor John Philip Kemble, her upstaged and discarded husband William Siddons, and, worse than anything that a mother should endure, five of their children, but not her reputation.

The mystique of the Tragic Muse had been preserved, but only just. Even before her formal retirement in 1812, something had gone wrong. "She was no longer the same...." complained Hazlitt of her inaudibility and disproportionate emphases. She kept making ill-advised and distressing comebacks: "her voice appeared to have lost its brilliancy"; "....she laboured her delivery most anxiously as if she feared her power of expression was gone" (Robinson).

She had gone from goddess to joke.