Shearer West

The Darly Macaroni Prints and the Politics of “Private Man”

During the early 1770s, the rage for caricatures in London was fueled by the activities of the print publishers, Matthew and Mary Darly, who flooded the market with their wry visual commentaries on social life. Among their productions were dozens of prints representing a group of men labeled by contemporaries as “macaronis,” allegedly because of their affectation of foreign tastes and fashions.1 The macaronis were an ephemeral phenomenon, as well as an extension of the fops and beaus of the earlier part of the century.2 They were called, among other epithets, “noxious vermin,” “that doubtful gender,” and “amphibious creatures,” and were compared variously to monsters, devils, reptiles, women, monkeys, asses and butterflies.3 Their concern for elaborate clothing, including tight trousers, large wigs, short coats, and small hats made them the ridicule of their generation, who focused on their gender ambiguity and the dangers of their conformity to foreign and effeminate fashion.4 A contemporary pamphlet, The Vauxhall Affray, sums up this view:

Siddons, Celebrity and Regality: Portraiture and the Body of the Ageing Actress

During the eighteenth century the concept of celebrity was in its formative stages. Although the effects and consequences of public recognition existed before this time, its by-products — including journalistic voyeurism, public obsession and image manipulation — were manifestations of a commercial culture that became especially strong in England during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Despite the ostensible differences between developing ideas of celebrity in the eighteenth century and a fully formed concept of celebrity perpetuated through the mass media of modernity, there are many continuities between Georgian London and twenty-first-century global culture. Mechanisms of publicity that were only in the process of invention in the eighteenth century remain: image-making, puffing, idolatry, the collapse of distinctions between public and private, and an obsession with the body. Furthermore, as Richard Dyer has argued, ‘stars’ can serve the function of either reinforcing dominant value systems or patching over often unspoken cultural problems,1 and these ideological operations existed as strongly in the ‘pre-cognitive’ celebrity culture of the eighteenth century as they do today.2 What changed in the intervening centuries was the way these ingredients gradually overturned the continuity and longevity of public ‘fame’ in favour of the evanescence and replaceability of ‘celebrity’.3

The Photographic Portraiture of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry

In the late Victorian period, portraits of performers held an uneasy position in the longue duree between the eighteenth century, when portraits of actors were regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, and the late twentieth century, when celebrity head shots became a symptom of the global obsession with famous people. Nearly 200 years separate Reynolds’s portrait of Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1789) from Andy Warhol’s silk screen depictions of Marilyn Monroe of the 1960s. In the meantime, the way that portraits were made, what they signified and how they drew upon the aura that surrounds performers changed exponentially. Reynolds’s portrait of Sarah Siddons is an iconic image, encompassing a range of referents from Aristotle to Michelangelo, and echoing the seated frontal pose favoured in portraits of kings and queens. The production of this portrait drew upon the burgeoning fandom of the late Georgian period: its creation was surrounded with apocryphal tales of the sitting itself - tales that resonated well into the nineteenth century when Henry Irving referred to the portrait in several of his many speeches and William Quiller Orchardson painted an imaginary glimpse of Siddons in Reynolds’s studio.1 Reynolds’s portrait was also copied and reproduced in numerous engravings designed for an elite public eager for an image of their favourite actress.

The Visuality of the Theatre

Art and theatre historians are blessed with a healthy quantity of portraits of actors and representations of the stage from the eighteenth century in the form of paintings, prints, sculptures, caricatures, even decorated mugs and fans. There is no doubt about the richness of this material, but there is less consensus about how representations of the theatre can be ‘read’ and what these readings tell us about actors and their audiences at this particular historical juncture. Like any historical evidence, there is a temptation to interpret images as documentary and revelatory, but as Christopher Balme has cautioned, To study pictorial evidence purely in terms of its documentariness, i.e., its function in reconstructing the theatrical past, is to deprive iconographical objects of much of their discursive potential.’1 It is this ‘discursive potential’ that needs to be uncovered in eighteenth-century representations of actors. By considering these images as part of a burgeoning visual culture in London from the 1760s onwards, it is possible to demonstrate a fertile relationship between visual art and theatre that does not merely make one subordinate to the other. On the one hand, this visuality fed into what we now know as the modern idea of celebrity, in its manipulative, commercialized, commodified form. However, the eighteenth century was also a period of transition in which a visual culture of celebrity still functioned creatively, rather than repressively. Portraits of actors did not merely signify the unthinking desires of a nascent capitalist society; they also both reflected and affected the way the public engaged with their leisure life and social world.