Emma Hamilton and Late Eighteenth-Century European Art

Agency, Performance, and Representation

Ersy Contogouris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367516062
• eBook ISBN: 9781351187893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book offers a renewed look at Emma Hamilton, the eighteenth-century celebrity who was depicted by many major artists, including Angelica Kauffman, George Romney, and Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun. Adopting an art historical and feminist lens, Ersy Contogouris analyzes works of art in which Hamilton appears, her performances, and writings by her contemporaries to establish her impact on this pivotal moment in European history and art. This pioneering volume shows that Hamilton did not attempt to present a coherent or polished identity, and argues instead that she was a kaleidoscope of different selves through which she both expressed herself and presented to others what they wanted to see. She was resilient, effectively asserted her agency, and was a powerful inspiration for generations of artists and women in their own search for expression and self-actualization.

1La vie de Lady Hamilton est un roman

Emma Hamilton’s vertiginous rise into, and spectacular eventual collapse from, high society prompted Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun to reflect, “The life of Lady Hamilton is a romance” (149). What follows is a recounting of the main events of Emma’s life. It outlines the different identities she juggled as well as the various instruments for agency that were available to her and the ones that she was able to develop. These will be examined in more detail in the following chapters, but their exposition here within this broad overview of her life shows that these accomplishments were set against the limited opportunities that were available to her given her gender and class.

The exact events of Emma’s life are often unclear and sometimes disputed. What is presented here is a more or less agreed-upon trajectory of her progress. Some of the events are taken from Emma’s letters (Hamilton; Tours), some from her contemporaries’ writings (Angelo; Hamilton), and others from recent biographies (Fraser; Peakman, Emma; Pocock; Williams). There is no doubt that Emma’s letters are sometimes self-serving, and at other times, performative, as she tries to prove to others and to herself the status that she has achieved. The writings of her contemporaries are also often expressive of their authors’ own biases, particularly regarding class and gender. No writing is ever neutral, however, and as long as we can retain some critical distance from them, all these texts contribute to our understanding of Emma’s life. I have elected to retain the original spelling of Emma’s letters and those of her contemporaries. Specifically in the case of Emma’s, they are testament to her regional and lower-class accent and to the little formal education she had received.

“My Virtue Was Vanquished”¹

Emma Hamilton was born Amy (or Emy) Lyon, probably on 26 April 1765, at Ness, a small village on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire.² Her father, a blacksmith at the local coal mine, died when she was a few weeks old. Her mother was forced to return to her family’s home in the Welsh village of Hawarden, where it is doubtful Emma received much education. Little is known of Emma’s early years, other than that she was raised in dire poverty. Around the age of twelve, she went into service for a local family. Finding herself unemployed after a few months, she moved to London. She entered service first for the Budd family, where one of her fellow maids was Jane Powell, later a famous actress. Emma often stayed out late, which displeased her employers. But she ignored their rebukes and was fired. She then went to work for the Linleys, owners of the Drury Lane Theatre. There, she met actresses such as Frances Abington, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Farren, women who rose through society despite their sometimes-disreputable backgrounds. But by December 1778, Emma had lost that position too and had begun working as a barmaid and prostitute.

This was not an unusual course in late eighteenth-century Europe, where thousands of people moved from the countryside to the cities in search of a better life. The population of London, for instance, grew from 600,000 in 1700 to over a million by 1800 (Facos 112). This exodus into the urban environment was rarely as successful as hoped, and life in the city brought with it its own set of trials. For women, this meant they were very often forced into prostitution or other work, such as barmaids, where their presence in the public arena and poor wages made them vulnerable to sexual exploitation. For many of these women, the ideal scenario seemed to be to become the mistress or kept woman of a wealthy man and to keep this position for as long as possible with full knowledge that age, disease, or the patron’s changing taste might put an end to it (Gatrell). In extremely rare cases (such as Emma’s) the women married into a higher status and thus achieved some form of protection from poverty and disease, and while some feminist critics might argue that this amounted to a capitulation to the limits imposed upon women, it must also be recognized that there were just not that many options for women from poorer backgrounds who were fighting for their survival.

In 1780, Emma is rumoured to have started posing at the Templum Aesculapium Sacrum, the Temple of Health and Hymen, in Westminster, an establishment opened the previous year by the quack doctor James Graham (Porter, “Graham”; Porter, Health; Otto). There, Graham delivered lectures and provided consultations on a variety of ills, dispensing all kinds of cures and advice, mostly for problems related to sex and fertility. His clients were treated to a multimedia extravaganza involving lights, music, smells, smoke shows, and alluring young women dressed in classical gowns, as Graham relied for full effect and maximum conviction on a mixture of latest technology and classical language. The main attraction was the Celestial Bed, where for £50 infertile couples could spend the night on a bed through which passed a static electric current, with the promise that the babies thus conceived would be healthy and beautiful. While there are no records to confirm the rumour that Emma worked at the Temple of Health, it is significant that this was the perception during her lifetime and that she never disclaimed it (Pop). And if indeed she did work there, it is not clear what she did: she is said to have either danced as one of the goddesses of health inside the room that housed the Celestial Bed, posed on stage on a pedestal where she fed snakes out of a goblet while Graham lectured, or delivered the concluding part of Graham’s lecture in the character of Hebe Vestina.

A wash drawing by the miniaturist and portrait draughtsman Richard Cosway depicts Emma performing at the Temple of Health, personifying a character that has traditionally been interpreted by later viewers as Hygeia, the Greek and Roman goddess of health (fig. 1.1). Usually dated around 1775 to 1780, the drawing initially belonged to Charles Greville, Emma’s protector between 1782 and 1786, and then to Sir William Hamilton. It depicts Emma wearing a loose thin gauze that exposes her right shoulder and the top of her right breast and that reveals the contours of her right buttock and thigh. She smiles very slightly, her gently rounded cheeks signifying youth and health. She steps airily on lightly drawn clouds, her feet bare yet adorned with laces, as if she were wearing sandals. The drawing exudes a sense of movement and lightness, slightly held in check by the heavy vertical lines of the drapery over her left forearm but enhanced by the movement in Emma’s hair. This type of long flowing hair was associated with a natural acting style in representations of the eighteenth-century actress Dorothy Jordan (Perry, “Staging”). Here, Emma’s hair is partly let loose and partly held with a ribbon and tied in a knot, and it illustrates the combination of naturalness and artifice that characterized her. In the words of the Earl of Minto, who met her in Naples in 1796, “she is all Nature, and yet all Art” (II, 364). What is striking about this comment is that it describes Emma not as combining these two elements in some perfect proportion, but as embodying both of them whole and undiminished. Emma’s ability to display contradictory and seemingly mutually exclusive extremes was no doubt part of the fascination she held for her admirers.

Figure 1.1Richard Cosway (1742–1821), Emma Hart afterwards Lady Hamilton as the goddess of health while being exhibited in that character by Dr Graham in Pall Mall, [after 1784 (?)]. Pen and wash on paper, 31.5 × 27.2 cm. Greenwich, London, National Maritime Museum (PAF4385).

The vase that Emma holds in Cosway’s drawing is unusual. Carefully rendered and the object of her gaze, it is clearly meant to be significant to the meaning of the image. But Hygeia is not usually represented holding a vase. Her attribute is a snake, which she is occasionally shown feeding out of a shallow bowl. The vase seems to have a lid, making it a type of pyxis,³ a container in which we might have found the ointments and salves that Graham promised would provide youth, renewed sexual vigour, and cures for all manner of ills. In ancient times, pyxides were often decorated with marriage scenes, an iconography that would have fitted with Graham’s purposes. That the vase is a pyxis suggests that Emma is represented not as Hygeia but as Hebe Vestina, “the rosy goddess of youth and health,” a divinity that Graham had invented for his Temple. (A transcription of Hebe Vestina’s lecture at the Temple of Health was published in 1782 anonymously, though almost certainly authored by Graham himself, under the title Il Convito Amoroso! Or, a Serio-comico-philosophical Lecture on the Causes, Nature, and Effects of Love and Beauty … As Delivered by Hebe Vestina! The Rosy Goddess of Youth and Health! …). Her name is a combination of Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth, cupbearer to the gods, and Vestina, a name derived from Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth.

A closer look at Cosway’s drawing reveals that he had initially drawn a much slenderer vase, one that might conceivably have been used for pouring, thus identifying the figure as Hebe. The final reworked version, however, has neither a handle nor a spout, so it cannot be identified as the amphora from which she pours the nectar to the gods. Graham introduced Hebe Vestina in 1782, by which time Emma is known to have left his establishment, which leads me to believe that the drawing postdates 1782 and that its design is an invention of Cosway’s. In 1784, Graham declared bankruptcy, and Cosway and his wife Maria moved into Schomberg House, the second building that had housed the Temple of Health (Foskett), and it was perhaps the fact of living in that building, coupled with Emma’s growing fame, that prompted Cosway to execute this drawing.

The uncertainty of the drawing’s subject matter and date reveals a quandary at the centre of the study of representations of Emma. Over the last two centuries, artists and art dealers have sought to utilize Emma’s fame to further their own ends, which has led to the reattribution and misnaming of many drawings, prints, and paintings. For instance, Emma was identified as the model for the figure of comedy in Joshua Reynolds’s Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy (Waddesdon Manor) even though it was painted in 1760–61, four years before Emma was born. Many unidentified portraits and studies in expression have been renamed as portraits of Emma. The resulting confusion is only beginning to be redressed.

In late 1780, at the age of fifteen, Emma is believed to have joined one of London’s most glamorous brothels: in his Reminiscences the aristocrat and fencing master Henry Angelo, Sir William Hamilton’s godson, writes that Emma had worked for Mrs. Kelly (II, 238). While no account—Angelo’s included—can be fully trusted regarding the specific places Emma worked and when, all biographers agree that she did turn to prostitution. Nicknamed Santa Carlotta’s Nunnery (Williams 62), it was run by the procuress Mrs. Kelly, whom her regulars called the Abbess. The Nunnery was very exclusive, frequented by the wealthiest of patrons. In order to provide suitable companions for her aristocratic clients, the Abbess had her girls tutored in music, languages, and the less lofty performance of erotic postures and dancing (Williams 60), as a result of which they became known as “posture molls.”

It is probably around then that Emma began to model for artists. It is widely believed she sat at that time for Joshua Reynolds, who was known to scour the brothels for models, and that he used her for The Death of Dido (1781; The Royal Collection) and A Nymph and Cupid: “A Snake in the Grass” (1784; Tate Gallery). Some biographers believe she also sat for George Romney during those early years, and that she was the model for Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare (Williams 52–53). In his article entitled “Sympathetic Spectators: Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare and Emma Hamilton,” the art historian Andrei Pop has argued convincingly for an affinity between Emma and the subject of Fuseli’s emblematic painting, but while a drawing of Emma by Fuseli from that time does survive, Pop does not believe this is enough to conclusively identify Emma as the model for the Nightmare. What we can conclude, however, is that artists had begun to appreciate Emma’s talent for modelling.

It was either at the Temple of Health or at Mrs. Kelly’s that Emma was spotted by the roguish minor aristocrat Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh. He took her as his mistress and moved her into his mansion in Uppark, Sussex. There, at uproarious parties whose guests included the Prince of Wales, Emma was served as entertainment, reportedly dancing naked on tables. It is at this time that she renamed herself Emma. But in December 1781, Fetherstonhaugh discovered Emma was pregnant and cast her out.

“You Made Me Good”⁴

Emma had been entirely dependent on Fetherstonhaugh. Now sixteen years old, penniless, and pregnant, she turned to Charles Greville, a friend of Fetherstonhaugh’s who had professed his admiration for her while she was at Uppark. In January 1782 she wrote him a letter that suggests they were already well acquainted:

believe me, I am allmost distracktid … What shall I dow? Good God what shall I dow? … I cant come to toun for want of mony. I have not a farthing to bless my self with … O G., what shall I dow? what shall I dow? For God’s sake, G. write the minet you get this, and only tell me what I am to dow.

(Hamilton I, 78)

In his answer, Greville berated Emma for her earlier indiscretions in a way that suggests that they had had secret assignations while Emma was at Uppark, raising the possibility that Greville was in fact the father of Emma’s unborn child (Hamilton I, 78). In any event, he did help her out of her crisis. He moved her into his house on Edgware Row in Paddington—a backwater suburb of London at the time—away from society gossip, and made her promise to sever links with her old acquaintances. And he took in her mother as housekeeper.

Emma’s daughter, “little Emma,” was sent away to be raised by family back in Hawarden. Emma could not object, for she was under Greville’s protection. Greville then began the process of taming Emma’s wilder side and shaping her into his ideal woman. He changed her name to Mrs. Emma Hart, made her dress and act more demurely, worked with her to improve her deportment and pronunciation, and encouraged her to practise her reading and her singing. He made her read his friend William Hayley’s highly successful didactic poem The Triumphs of Temper, first published in 1781, which told the tale of Serena, a young ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Emma Hamilton, the Most Extraordinary Compound Ever Beheld
• 1 La vie de Lady Hamilton est un roman
• 2 The Acme of Sir William’s Delights
• 3 Emma’s Attitudes: Movements and Surprising Transformations
• 4 Emma’s Tarantella
• 5 Model, Muse, and Artist
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index