Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons by Heather McPherson

Interweaving art history, history of performance, and cultural studies, Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons offers important insights into the intersecting worlds of artist and actor, studio and stage, high art and popular visual culture. Id., Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons (Philadelphia: Penn. These transport the reader to eighteenth-century London and the dynamic venues where art and celebrity converged with culture and commerce. AbstractThis chapter will explain how celebrity, which appeared in the. This richly researched study draws on a wide variety of period sources, from newspaper reviews and satirical pamphlets to caricatures and paintings by Reynolds and Lawrence as well as Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, and Angelica Kauffman. McPherson considers this increasing interest in theatrical and artistic celebrities and explores the ways in which aesthetics, cultural politics, and consumption combined during this period to form a media-driven celebrity culture that is surprisingly similar to celebrity obsessions in the world today. Likewise, artists such as Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence figured prominently outside their studios-in polite society and the emerging public sphere. Popular actors in Georgian London, such as David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, and John Philip Kemble, gave larger-than-life performances at Drury Lane and Covent Garden their offstage personalities garnered as much attention through portraits painted by leading artists, sensational stories in the press, and often-vicious caricatures. Vigée-Le Brun displaced Hamilton from the work in order to project herself into it, in a process of identification with the sibyl and affirmation of her own creative genius.In this volume, Heather McPherson examines the connections among portraiture, theater, the visual arts, and fame to shed light on the emergence of modern celebrity culture in eighteenth-century England.

It argues that this painting can be read as a statement on feminine genius at the very moment the notion of genius began to acquire its modern meaning. Grounded in Vigée-Le Brun’s own writings and a detailed reading of the painting, this paper contends that Lady Hamilton as a Sibyl should be understood within a wider discussion on the nature of genius.

It displays a number of departures from the conventions and expectations regarding portraiture, to such an extent that the artist seems to have tried to empty the canvas of her sitter’s presence. This painting is heavily permeated by the tensions that seem to have existed between Vigée-Le Brun and Hamilton. Despite this, “her” Sibyl, as she simply and affectionately called it in her Souvenirs, remains little studied by art historians. more Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun designated her portrait of Lady Hamilton as a Sibyl (1791–92) as one of her favourite works. Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun designated her portrait of Lady Hamilton as a Sibyl (1791–92) as one of h.

Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons by Heather McPherson