Product Description

During the Georgian period there was a remarkable proliferation of seductive visual imagery and written accounts of female performers. Focusing on the close relationship between the dramatic and visual arts at this time, this beautiful and stimulating book explores popular ideas of the actress as coquette, 'whore', celebrity, muse and creative agent, charting her important symbolic role in contemporary attempts to professionalise both the theatre and the practice of fine art.Gill Perry analyses the complex ways in which these identities were both constructed and challenged through portraits and exhibition and theatre reviews. Using a concept of 'flirtation' as an analytical tool that can illuminate eighteenth-century perceptions of female sexuality, theatricality and social mobility, Perry argues that a fashionable culture of 'dressing up' and flirtatious masquerade, performed through public drama, concerts, amateur theatricals and painted portraits, provided late eighteenth-century actresses with many possibilities for unconventional role playing, both on and off stage.Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, Mary Robinson, Frances Abington and Elizabeth Farren are among her cast of leading ladies for whom portrait commissions in role could act as public advertisements, and as forms of social and artistic re-positioning. She shows how artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner or Lawrence often used metaphor, masquerade and aesthetic allusions to produce complex images of female performers as fashion icons, coquettes, dignified queens or creative artists. Drawing on visual records and reminiscences, Perry also explores the roles of women within popular public venues for flirtatious exchange, including the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres, The Pantheon and the Royal Academy exhibitions, contributing to a rich interdisciplinary study of the Georgian actress.In an illuminating and original way, this book uses visual imagery, especially painted and graphic portraits, as a primary source for the study of femininity in eighteenth-century theatrical culture and will be essential reading for all those with an interest in the literature, theatre and visual culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #477911 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 248 pages

Review
"...a rich interdisciplinary study of the Georgian actress." --Sarah Moulden, Burlington Magazine, 1st April 2009

About the Author
Gill Perry is Professor of Art History at The Open University. She has published many books and articles on twentieth-century and contemporary European art and on eighteenth-century British art, and is the co-editor of Primitivism, Cubism and Abstraction (1993) and Themes in Contemporary Art (2004), both published by Yale University Press.

Customer Reviews

Spectacular Flirtations - Gill Perry
Spectacular Flirtations is a rich interdisciplinary study of the Georgian actress. Central to the author's argument is that a type of socially tolerable flirtatious behaviour was a defining characteristic of the female performer. By engaging `flirtatiously' with her audience both off and on stage, the author illustrates attempts by the actress and her portraitists to substitute the popular personality of coquette and 'whore' for a more chaste, fashionable and favourable one. The book, however, focuses more on archive than visual analysis, which unfortunately occasionally renders the plethora of beautifully reproduced details rather superfluous for an academic book. Despite this, arguments on spectatorship and perceptions of femininity are developed, complementing existing studies on women dismantling traditional gender boundaries.