CULTIVATING CELEBRITY:
PORTRAITURE AS PUBLICITY IN THE CAREER OF SARAH SIDDONS,
July 27 - September 19, 1999
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, California 91108
This exhibition explores the phenomenal celebrity of Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), the renowned tragic actress who dominated British theater during the late Georgian era. Siddons's reputation as a divinely inspired "Tragic Muse" masked the meticulous preparation and shrewd orchestration that lay behind her compelling performances. Even off the stage she manipulated her image with extreme care, striving to achieve a social and moral status previously denied actresses, who were generally kept at arm's length from respectable society. Ahead of her time, Siddons made savvy use of publicity in order to shape her professional and personal reputation. Collaborating with the image-makers of "high art" as well as those engaged in popular media, she participated in the creation and dissemination of her own legend, exerting considerable control over the management of her celebrity. Siddons helped make acting a respectable career for women, while simultaneously challenging contemporary prejudices concerning female intellectual capacity. Her unprecedented professional, financial, and social successes were entirely self-made and paved the way for others.
Highlighting the Huntington's extensive holdings in eighteenth-century British theater history, the exhibition consists primarily of the prints and drawings that defined Sarah Siddons's public image. Charting the actress's path to fame, and beyond fame to immortality, the exhibition provides a comprehensive re-construction of Siddons's evolution in the public eye. It also reveals the complementary relationship of Grand Manner painting with more ephemeral and popular arts in promoting Siddons's broadly based fame. In doing so, the exhibition re-constructs the historical and iconographic contexts of one of the greatest masterpieces of late-eighteenth-century art: Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait, Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (Huntington Art Collections). During the run of the Huntington show, Reynolds's monumental painting will be on view at the Getty along with other major portraits of Siddons.
The Huntington exhibition opens with portraits made while Siddons was still a young, itinerant actress touring the provinces. Several of these works were executed by Thomas Lawrence, a thirteen-year-old prodigy who a decade later became court painter to George III and ultimately President of the Royal Academy of Arts. Lawrence made numerous portraits of Siddons and her family over the course of an obsessive and stormy relationship that endured for the rest of his life. Pictures by other artists, such as William Hamilton and Samuel de Wilde, demonstrate the range of dramatic roles undertaken by Siddons. They embody the transcendent emotionalism and majestic deportment that enabled her to eclipse the finicky performance style popularized earlier in the century by the actor David Garrick. Although many of these early depictions rely on conventional theatrical imagery, later portrayals document the idiosyncratic gestures, expressions, and costumes through which the actress infused new energy and significance into such standard roles as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katharine. Her imaginative reinterpretation of time-honored conventions established new modes of performance that would endure for the next several generations.
A fascinated public followed Siddons beyond the stage and into her private life through the agency of eighteenth-century equivalents of today's paparazzi. Prints and drawings of the actress in her own personal character attest to the extent of her cult status as a fashionable star. Satirical engravings by caricaturists such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson lampoon aspects of Siddons's appearance and personality, exposing the hazards of self-promotion and celebrity--especially when pursued by a woman. The exhibition concludes with posthumous tributes to the actress, including the erection of statues in Westminster Abbey and Paddington Green, and the founding of a prestigious theatrical prize in her honor by the Sarah Siddons Society of Chicago.
Related Event:
Model, Muse, Myth: Incarnations of Sarah Siddons, Star of the British Stage
, a lecture by Robyn Asleson, exhibition curator. September 9, 1999, 7:30 p.m. at the Huntington.For further information, call (626) 405-2225