The Spy Who Lost Her Clothes

THE MASQUE OF QUEENS, A SHIPWRECK
AND A MISSING DRESS

Nothing

Part eight

Part nine

Part ten

Nothing

Part one of Nothing

Part two of Nothing

Part three of Nothing

The Power of Pink (parts 10 -11)

 Part ten

Part eleven

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

Out of the killing sun

PART FIVE OF ROMANTIC FICTIONS AND CASUALTIES

 Adam Buck, Two Sisters, print, 1796. London.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Sense and sensibility, reason and passion, love and illusion, neoclassicism and romanticism dancing on the eve of cataclysm.
During the years 1795 to 1797, while the two elder Siddons sisters were engaged in their own danse macabre with Thomas Lawrence, Jane Austen wrote her first draft of the novel that was eventually published in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility.

It should have been the end, the two beautiful girls consumed by passion and disease, but the Tragic Muse had another daughter, only nine years old when her eldest sister died, a child with a name like the peal of golden bells under a blue sky, a tiny Buddha with a ferocious will [1] and eyes that glared like a torch in the night on the charades and vacillations of grown ups. 

After Sir Thomas Lawrence, Cecilia Combe, (née Siddons), 1798. Lithograph by Richard James Lane, printed by Charles Joseph Hullmandel, published by Joseph Dickinson,
May 1830. © National Portrait Gallery, London. She glares out of the picture with fanatical fervour, lowering her brows like her mother did in dramatic parts.

Her resemblance to the second of her elder sisters was so close in "all the dazzling, frightful sort of beauty that irradiated the countenance of Maria" [2] that she made the Tragic Muse shudder.

She was designated the last companion of the goddess, the comfort of her melancholy age, and custodian of her shrine. For twenty-eight years the purpose of her existence was to serve her mother, who stared back at her with vacant eyes, in "apparent deadness and indifference to everything". [3]

But the youngest daughter had a flame inside her that would not be quenched.  She had a gift denied her sisters. She did not breathe the same fatal air as they had done. She outlived her mother to write her own last act. She was determined that it would be not be a tragic one.

Her sisters' ghosts haunted her girlhood, her memory of them based more on other people’s accounts than her own recollections; they were cautionary figures from myth, glimpsed in faded portraits and drawings, girls who should have been entwined in their youthful loveliness, but were sundered by bitterness, wraiths straying in the seductive heat of their mother's and an artist's imaginations, to fall and drown in the pool of Narcissus.

In 1798, the two elder daughters of the Tragic Muse had pursued love to give them individual identity in a revolutionary world that seemed to offer a new dawn to men and women. They had hoped, like the two young step-sisters who wnent on an adventure of free love with Shelley and Byron in the lakes and mountains of Europe sixteen years later, to find "an immortality of passion."[4]

Romantic Fictions and Casualties

Part Four:

The Prophetess and the Muse

Shortly after the death of the eldest daughter of The Tragic Muse, whom he had once thought he loved, in the same year of 1803, the artist found his ideal of physical and intellectual femininity personified in an elegant and composed woman, a refined and independent spirit who understood his temperament and his art. She was about the same age as the daughter of tragedy, perhaps a few years older, tall and dark like her, but uncomplicated by illness and sisters.

She was a model of discretion as much as beauty, a social sophisticate who made no demands on him. She did not need marriage to consummate their friendship so not a breath of scandal marred the artist's reputation ever again. Her gratification came from inspiring and guiding him to create works that would invest her with immortality by association. She was his perfect muse.

The shining culmination of the artist's love of his muse:

Sir Thomas Lawrence. Mrs. Jens Wolff, 1803 - 1815. 

© The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Kimball Collection.
At the time she first met Lawrence, Isabella Anne Hutchinson was unhappily married to the Danish diplomat and art collector Jens Wolff from whom she later separated in 1810.

He spent twelve years painting her portrait, and it was the most emotionally tender image of a woman he ever created.

The éclat of her splendid aquiline profile, gracefully bent in contemplation of Michelangelo's drawings, recalled the artlessly drooping head of the dead girl he had tried to love, listening to her own thoughts, composing her own songs. If he had been a woman, this was how he would like to have been painted, and loved.


The Tragic Muse carried on working for a few more years after her eldest daughter's death, but she had lost some of her elemental power. The people no longer worshipped as before. They demanded to see her in the same parts, then criticized her for using “her great guns” too soon, never caring that the goddess in person really was "in paroxysms of agony".[1]

Her presence had always been monumental, but now her body had grown so heavy that could not get up without help during performances. People felt sorrier for the woman herself than the characters she was playing.

William Blake,Hecate or the Three Fates c. 1795. Tate Gallery, London. 

Image source: WGA

Despite her habit of standing outside herself, so she could control the effect she was making, mortality had overrun her divine gift. Either her own emotions had burst their banks and flooded the character she was imagining, or public taste in deities was changing....

Romantic fictions and casualties

PART THREE: SILENCE

 Silence by Fuseli, 1799-1801
Oil on canvas, Kunsthaus, Zurich. Image source: WGA

The lightning struck, and receded, the earth quaked and settled again. Resolute, she never spoke again of love and betrayal. She began to believe that the artist had never loved her for her own sake, but more for the sensation of passion, a drama of love, in which she and her sister had been no more to him than sparks of her mother's fire. She knew her mother and he still met, an ageing goddess and her acolyte, and she did not say a word of reproach to either of them.

But the worm had entered the bud. During the next five years, while his fame as an artist and a lover spread, and queens and princes were seduced by him, and still he wore his sweet-sad smile, she started to wither away until her own muse fled - “I sing but little now to what I did once”. She had lived only to give joy to those she loved, and she had no joy left. She had reached the limits of feeling. She lived, but it was the posthumous existence of despair. Every asthma attack was like a drowning, in which to die would be easier than the struggle for breath. She yielded to invalidism as if it was a lover. 

She never lost faith in her mother, she would always be the chief priestess of the Tragic Muse, ensuring nothing distracted the goddess, knowing that the slightest shift of wind might upset the sacred artifice of her art, causing the goddess to misjudge her timing or overreach her power to represent emotion from feeling too much, performing worst when she most ardently wished to do better than ever.[1]

Her breath got shorter and shorter. Even when she knew she was dying, the eldest daughter did not want to cause her mother trouble. There was never any question that the goddess must continue working while her daughter was ill, often travelling far away, giving spiritual sustenance to her worshippers on other islands to pay for medicine, food, clothing and lodgings for her family.  All her life the girl had suffered in her mother's absence which created a vacancy in her heart that nothing else could fill [2] but she and her father, a mere mortal player, not a god, who relied on his wife's earnings to maintain their household, kept the worst news to themselves.

Drawing of Sarah Siddons, artist and date unknown  © Victoria and Albert Museum 

 

At last there came a day when an attendant dared tell the Tragic Muse that her daughter was dying. "Will you believe I must play tonight!" [3] exclaimed the distraught mother. She had always known that she was not immortal, as people wanted her to be, but rather an heroic victim of her own powers of arousing emotion. She broke her contract so she could rush home, but her journey across the sea was delayed by great storms, which neither her dramatic arts nor maternal appeals could appease, and when she arrived, her lovely child, her sweet Sally, was already dead.

Claude-Joseph Vernet, Nocturnal Seastorm 1752
Oil on canvas. Private collection. Image source WGA

[1] Paraphrasing Sarah Siddons' much quoted piece of self-criticism that holds true for all actors, from her letter to Rev. Whalley, 16 July, 1781, published in The Kembles, Percy Fitzgerald, 1871: "Sorry am I to say, that I have often observed I have performed worst when I have most ardently wished to do better than ever"[2] Paraphrasing Letter from Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, 15 September, 1798, quoted by F.M.W. Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons, 1909, p.199.
[3] Paraphrasing Letter from Mrs Siddons to Mrs Fitzhugh, quoted by Parsons, p.204