"Darling! The set was wonderful"

It’s one of those site-specific shows in which the lead actress, in the title role of “Sweet Melancholy”, is upstaged by a live, cooing, flying prop; the play is in blank verse, and the director, after blaming everyone else at the Tech Rehearsal, has lost the plot; but the set design is wonderful....

 Joseph-Marie Vien Sweet Melancholy 1756.
Cleveland Museum of Art. Image: Wikipedia

Melancholy, as you know it, was never this sweet. This looks more like Wistful Posing, though maybe you have missed the point about contemporary self-consciousness. Mid-drama, she, Melancholy, looking as pretty as possible, rearranges her drapery and takes a selfie.

You would be at a loss for words when you congratulate your friend afterwards, if it wasn't for Vien's sophisticated colour scheme, daring to put Melancholy's acid yellow dress against a dark grey background, and his dedication to historical detail in the props and furniture, pioneering a fashion in neoclassical home interiors.

The smoke from the antique brazier is scented, sending the front rows, especially the critics, into drowsy raptures. That might explain the liminal moment when you thought you heard the dove speak.

You travelled far to get here, to a disused temple in an inaccessible part of the old City, where no buses dare to stop. You took three wrong turns on your way from the station. You are dismayed by the thought of missing connections on the long journey home, and arriving tired and dispirited in the lonely night.

You imagine yourself slumped unprettily on a chair, holding your head in your hands, mourning your losses, knowing that bad as the day has been, there is always hope tomorrow will be worse.

You promise yourself that if you can ever afford it - ach, if only you'd got that film job the other day - you will buy a neoclassical upholstered chair and incense-burner, and recline elegantly in a full-length, yellow silk gown, to sweeten your own melancholy.

You are not lying when you reassure Sweet Melancholy that, "You looked like a goddess on that set, and deserve awards just for acting with that pigeon."

Gilded Dramas

Gilded Interiors: French Masterpieces of Gilt Bronze
exhibition at The Wallace Collection

A Regency Romance (3)

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

A Regency Romance (1)

PART ONE

Epistolary (Half-) Eschewed

Portrait of a Young Woman, writing a letter, by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1802 -1804. 

Image courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

I am sorry to have interrupted her; she is rather lovely, rather to be loved and written about than briefly employed as a cover girl.

All roads in this land lead to Pemberley. Jane Austen, the prosaic revolutionary, waits quietly, with gloves and bonnet on, at the crossroads of 18th century and modern novels. The bonnet conceals the expression in her eyes, which isn't quiet at all.

Audio: Till this moment, I never knew myself

 

Pride and Prejudice, which seems so fresh and spontaneous on every reading, took eighteen years to evolve, from the first draft written in 1796-97 to publication in 1813. It had a gestation period almost as long as the heroine's life 

But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes

Part One

Part Two

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

“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.

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

Romantic fictions and casualties

“I never should have sung as I do had I never seen you; I never should have composed at all. . . You then liv'd in my heart, in my head, in every idea…” 

 

The Art of Loving or The Pleasant Lesson, furnishing fabric,

Favre Petitpierre et Cie (possibly, maker), ca.1785-1790, detail © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

PART ONE

One autumn long ago, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, whose armies under Napoleon had conquered most of mainland Europe, and the people at home were rejoicing at Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile that saved the Middle East, while Irish rebels were fighting their English oppressors with the help of the French; while Jenner's findings on vaccination against the mass killer small-pox were being published; while a new kind of poetry was being read for the first time in Coleridge and Wordsworth's collection of Lyrical Ballads, while quietly in a village in Hampshire Jane Austen was writing Northanger Abbey, and a new kind of woman appeared in a novel called Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft; while the external world was spinning and bleeding and crying and laughing, the eldest daughter of the Tragic Muse renounced forever the man she loved. 

He was a charming young artist who painted everyone as if he was in love with them. His pencil, chalk and brush had the power of Cupid's arrows to pierce men and women with the flushed, breathless heat of desire. When he looked at someone, however dull they had felt the moment before, they saw the reflection of beauty in his eyes. 

François-André Vincent, Zeuxis Choosing his Models for the Image of Helen from among the Girls of Croton 1789. 

Oil on canvas. Private collection. Image source: WGA

He was....

Liberation and Self ownership

 THE LAUREL TROPHY

part six

 Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth 

sculpted in marble by Canova, 1796-1817, Canova Museum, Possagno

Instead of carrying off the charming but vacillating Madame Récamier to his Berlin palace as his bride in 1808, Prince Augustus of Prussia took the famous portrait by Gérard, perhaps sensing that owning an archetype of the eternal feminine was a more prestigious investment than a legal bond with the living woman.

The real Madame Récamier was unfazed by the incorruptible beauty of her painted alter ego, while her own fortunes, looks and health faded, and continued to pursue her career as a salonnière. It is a relief to know that her vitality, charming conversation and good taste were resilient to time and poverty. The cultural power generated by her reputation, that we would call her brand, was unassailable.

But something changed in her. At the age of forty she freed a hidden self when....

Pictures within pictures - which one is true and who owns the truth?

THE LAUREL TROPHY, part five

Detail of La Chambre de Madame Récamier à l'Abbaye-aux-Bois 

by François-Louis Dejuinne, 1827, showing Gérard's painting of Madame de Staël in the character of her literary heroine, Corinne, at top right.

After Madame de Staël's death in 1817, Prince August of Prusia commissioned a painting of her in the character of her most famous heroine, Corinne, as a gift for Madame Récamier. Among de Staël's most treasured possessions at Coppet had been a portrait and bust of Juliette.

These were not mere sentimental souvenirs of idealized female friendship. Public relations, mutual admiration and ideological statement all contributed to the self-created cult of two very different women who recognized their complementary attributes. One was a brainy, brilliant, pushy, sexually liberated published author, the Sappho of her times, and the other....

THE LAUREL TROPHY part four

The erotic thrills of spiritual love: Canova's Cupid and Psyche
Marble, 1786-93, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image source: Web gallery of Art

MADAME RÉCAMIER and THE PRUSSIAN PRINCE  

In 1805, Napoleon exiled Madame Récamier from Paris. He had expected her to be a decoration, not a threat, at his imperial court. Tyrants are always galled when a pretty woman resists his authority. Paradoxes and anomalies are subversive by definition. Madame Récamier was feminine, gentle and sweet, and her reason for existence was personal power and influence.

Undermined by Napoleon's spite, her charmed life was suddenly precarious. Her husband was bankrupt and their magnificent style of living was gone. She left France and travelled in Europe as a celebrity in her own right and as one of Napoleon's loveliest victims. Among the many men who laid siege to her was a swaggering young prince of Prussia with splendid black whiskers. August von Hohenzollern was one of the few distinguished men of his family with any brains or cultural sensitivity.....

THE LAUREL TROPHY part three

 Pure sex symbol: Gérard's portrait (c.1805), still an effective image of natural feminine beauty and grace, in a setting that evokes the drapery and elegant furniture of Madame Récamier's real bedroom and bathroom.
Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Image source: Web Gallery of Art 

The pose Madame Récamier adopted for portraits, the lush sensuality of her appearance, the brilliant brown eyes and luxuriant black hair,the pale skin of neck and shapely arms left bare, even the hint of down on her upper lip, that seemed to promise so much earthly pleasure, was so far removed from her delicate personality that it was like performance art, in the late 18th century tradition of "attitudes." 

The virginal banker's wife enjoyed role-playing an odalisque, and though most of the portraiture created in her youth exudes sex appeal, she remained all her life a symbol of femininity that could never be owned or exploited by anybody.....

THE LAUREL TROPHY

part two

 "She was one of the neo-Greeks who rose, half naked indeed, but fully clad in their own modesty..." 

 (Arsène Houssaye, Notre-Dame de TJiermidor, 1866).  

.

The nymph-bride stands under a laurel tree, timeless grace and chastity personified, not disguising her expression of mischievous amusement: detail of the oval portrait in oils of Madame Récamier, in her early twenties, c.1799, by Eulalie Morin (1765 - 1837). 

Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et du Trianon

As much as politicians, generals and philosophers, she was trying in her own way to make order out of chaos, contributing her own sensibility of what was best in old and new, while maintaining an unusual degree of independence in her private life. Outwardly avoiding the thunderbolts and lightning of her Romantic contemporaries, an arouser of unrequited passions in other people apparently unmoved by sexual desires herself, a good...

The Character of Light

The Enchanted Castle: at this apex of feeling, the poet/painter is tolled back to “self-concentration”, and, carefully selecting the words or colours for sunlight (“patent yellow or white lead”, renews their cycle of creativity. As for the rest of us, without their “magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas”, where on earth would we be?.........

Chameleon and Narcissus

part four of The Character of Light

John Keats, Thomas Lawrence and the Brilliance Feminine

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

© The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Kimball Collection.

We feed on the human drama; it stirs and nourishes us. The painting suddenly looks better. We must forget....

"The next Keats can only be a painter”

part three of The Character of Light

JOHN KEATS AND VICTORIAN PAINTERS

Edward Burne- Jones, Beguiling of Merlin, 1872 -77, Lady Lever Art Gallery. 

Image source: Wikipedia

"La Belle Dame sans merci/Hath thee in thrall!"

When the Pre-Raphaelites, ardently following “the footsteps of Keats”[1] away from mannerism to revitalized Gothicism, took inspiration from the fresh, saturated colours of his imagery and medieval settings, they chose to overlook his devout Hellenism and appreciation of Raphael’s “heroic simplicity and unaffected grandeur”. [2] 

Their admiration for his technique of conveying intensity of sensory experience was genuine - "the next Keats can only be a painter" observed Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a letter to William Morris - but like many apostles they distorted the intentions of their prophet.

Keats had.....