# Ideal yet Actual: Actresses Posing as Antique Heroines in Late-Victorian “Classical” Portraits

Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada

► To cite this version:

Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada. Ideal yet Actual: Actresses Posing as Antique Heroines in Late-Victorian “Classical” Portraits. Interfaces: image, texte, language, 2024, Forms of Intermediality in British Portraiture, 51 (51), https://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/8808. 10.4000/122dn hal-04864200

HAL Id: hal-04864200

https://hal.science/hal-04864200v1

Submitted on 4 Jan 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
# Ideal yet Actual: Actresses Posing as Antique Heroines in Late-Victorian “Classical” Portraits

*Idéales et pourtant réelles : portraits d'artistes en héroïnes antiques dans la peinture « classique » victorienne*

Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/8808

DOI: 10.4000/122dn

ISSN: 2647-6754

**Publisher:**

Université Paris Cité, Université de Bourgogne, College of the Holy Cross

**Electronic reference**

Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, "Ideal yet Actual: Actresses Posing as Antique Heroines in Late-Victorian "Classical" Portraits", *Interfaces* [Online], 51 | 2024, Online since 30 June 2024, connection on 22 July 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/8808; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/122dn

This text was automatically generated on July 22, 2024.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are "All rights reserved", unless otherwise stated.
# Ideal yet Actual: Actresses Posing as Antique Heroines in Late-Victorian “Classical” Portraits

## Idéales et pourtant réelles : portraits d'artistes en héroïnes antiques dans la peinture « classique » victorienne

Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada

1. At the turn of the 1850s-1860s, a great many bust or half-length paintings depicting sensual female sitters in antique settings were produced by various academic artists related to the Aesthetic movement and to what was then labelled “the classical school”, an artistic trend that revived subjects and iconographical sources drawn from Antiquity. In particular, George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), Frederic Leighton (1830-1896) and Edward Poynter (1836-1919) portrayed actresses under the guise of literary heroines, mythological deities or historical figures. Leighton posed his favourite model Dorothy Dene (1859-1899) as Antigone, the heroine of ancient tragedy, probably to promote her nascent career as actress. F.G. Watts depicted his adolescent wife Ellen Terry (1847-1928), who had already had a solid experience in acting, as tragic or mythical heroines. Poynter represented the notorious socialite Lillie Langtry (1853-1929) as the Greek character Helen at the time when she was making her stage début. The models adopt theatrical poses befitting women who would perform as characters of classical productions. No doubt the artists counted on the acting abilities of these women and on their notoriety to reach both pictorial effects and success. A tension opens up as the idealized de-actualization induced by the choice of an antique subject collides with the recourse to well-known sitters, two of whom were also romantically involved with the artists.

2. The issue of likeness is particularly topical in these subject paintings and it brings them closer to the genre of portraiture. In the context of the commodification of their images, the actresses' faces would be recognizable by the middle- and upper-class viewers who attended the public exhibitions where the canvases were shown. Images of
at least two of these women, Terry and Langtry, were circulated as photographs, *cartes-de-visite* or adverts, which were accessible to all social classes.

The fact that three would-be or confirmed actresses posed as figures from Antiquity highlights a potential wish to articulate idealized representation and occupational concerns. The treatment of the female sitter as a Greek heroine bestowed cultural authority and respectability on women whose status was controversial. Acting was still considered a questionable profession, and so Terry was induced to stop acting when she married Watts. Models were expected to be promiscuous with the artists, as Dene was rumoured to be. Langtry experienced social opprobrium because of her affairs with prominent men. Sitting for a subject painting with a theme drawn from Antiquity could therefore confer an improved status on these women. Such works probably helped Terry, Dene or Langtry negotiate their own images. And yet, these paintings are most of all portraits that problematize their positions as objects of desire.

3

## Portraiture and “subject painting”

Portraiture had held pride of place at the Royal Academy since the 18th century, but it was especially encouraged under Francis Grant's term as President from 1866 to 1878. Portraits being lucrative, many academicians produced both subject paintings and portraits. Classicist artists like Watts, Leighton and Poynter exhibited literary, mythological and historical subjects and Aestheticist canvases while being also commissioned portraits. However, some of their works blurred the fixed categories, especially when they represented real-life models under the guise of fictional or legendary figures. These were closer to the “subject pictures”, a prominent category at the Royal Academy. The term recurs in the catalogues of the Royal Academy Summer exhibitions as well as in contemporary critical reviews. “Subject paintings” were any literary, historical, religious, narrative subjects, *genre* or anecdotal subjects. The painter George Dunlop Leslie, a proponent of *genre* painting, lamented the privilege granted to portraiture under Grant's Presidency and regretted the decrease of subject painting:

> Coincidentally with the invasion of the line by the life-sized portraits, the patronage hitherto given to subject-pictures began to fall lamentably, and in consequence of this a great number of distinguished painters, who formerly produced important works of figure subjects, began to take to portraiture. (Qtd in Denvir 35)

The two classes of paintings were therefore distinct and a hierarchy of pictorial genres still prevailed. In many reviews of the Royal Academy, for instance, history painting was still distinguished as the noblest genre.

In their writings or letters, Watts, Leighton and Poynter often referred to their noble artistic intentions and to their desires to emulate the forms and subjects of Antiquity in order to reach an ideal in art. However, clear-cut categorizations become difficult when one considers their depictions of actresses under the guise of Antique heroines. To start with, the practice of using models who were relations instead of professional models diverged from academic practice and blurred the distinction between studies for portraits and preparatory drawings for larger canvases. The models appear as real-life individuals disguised as legendary or literary figures. The classicist artists represented their models through the academic conventions of history painting. But the single

4

5

6
sitter bore strong resemblance to contemporary photographs and was presented in a bust format. Thus, these paintings are poised between the historical and the individual and they comply with the function of a portrait, which is to provide a resembling image of the model.

7 In his study of the theories of portraiture from the Renaissance to the 19th century, Édouard Pommier shows that diverging criteria were invoked to ascertain the quality and status of a portrait, such as the perfect depiction of the model or the demonstration of the artist's creative power. According to other art historical approaches to portraiture, identification should entail a degree of idealisation: portraits were expected to provide an ideal vision of the sitter and reality was improved upon. All in all, the function of portraiture was to represent an individual who would be immediately recognizable: this involved realism – fidelity to the sitter – but also interpretation as the portrait was meant to impress the viewers and refashion their reception of the sitter. This could be achieved in the way the sitter's features, gestures and attire were treated (Pommier 24-27).

8 Having an actress pose as a character in a play or a heroine of mythology gave a surplus of emotional value and theatrical expressiveness to Watts's, Leighton's and Poynter's canvases. On that account, their portraits looked to the 18th-century tradition of "fancy paintings", which before all, were portraits that showed famous courtesans or actresses disguised as Graeco-Roman heroines. Joshua Reynolds showed the courtesan Emily Warren as the hetaerae Thaïs in the eponymous portrait of 1781 (Waddesdon Manor, The Rothschild Collection) and the famous actress Elizabeth Hartley as a *Nymph with a Young Bacchus* (1771, Tate Britain). John Hoppner painted *Dorothy Jordan as the Comic Muse* in 1785-6 (The Royal Collection). Emma Hamilton was turned into a bacchante by Reynolds (1783-4, private collection) and into Circe by George Romney (c. 1782, Tate Britain). William Hamilton had Sarah Siddons adopt the pose of the *Apollo Belvedere* when represented as *Euphrasia in "The Grecian Daughter"* (1780, Stratford-upon-Avon Town Hall). Most of these works conflated the academic codes of history painting with the gestural rhetoric of the theatre.¹ Courtesans and actresses were also quite accustomed to role-playing and self-invention, which made them particularly useful as dramatic models. Besides, these celebrities were much sought-after by artists who aimed at exploiting their magnetic appeal in the context of a public demand for visual representations of female stage stars (Asleson 2). Thanks to these representations, the female performers and courtesans could sometimes regain some control over the construction of their public images (Asleson 11). But most of all, these socially marginal women became the inspiration for intellectually ennobling and imaginative subjects – that is, works designed to elevate portraiture to the level of high art.² Nevertheless, these canvases were clearly perceived as portraits.

9 Marcia Pointon dwells on the imperatives that regulated 18th-century portraits: they should both conform to pictorial convention and achieve likeness. But such portraiture threatened the hierarchy of pictorial genres: although it figured lower in the academic genre system, it came close to the grand style of history painting by presenting individuals in their noblest aspect, notably through the mode of staging and composition. Portraits, therefore, were fundamentally driven by a paradox: they responded to a social need to represent noble characters embodying virtues and values but their purported lack of originality situated them quite low in the system of the
genre categories (Pointon 79-83). This is precisely what Reynolds, for one, tried to overcome by using classical models or allegorical devices for his portraits.

10 In the next century, Leighton or Poynter emulated the neo-classicism of artists like Reynolds. In particular, they wanted to elevate the portrait to the historical genre and to lift the sitter to respectability and fame. Their scenography was influenced by the theatre, which reflected the strong interactions between the performing arts and the visual arts. Many classical artists were indeed employed as set and costume designers; conversely, academic painters used the visual codes of drama or of the opera. Bringing the genre of portraiture closer to that of history painting blurred the distinction between the two and these works problematise the link between likeness and generalisation, or between the actual and the ideal. However, the advent of mass photography interfered with these artists' idealized approach to art. For the circulation of the models' faces in photographs set the conditions for a collision between the ideal and the actual. These portraits, thus, articulate both a collective and a personal dimension. The representations of idealized celebrities who were sometimes close to the artists are also commodities offered to the public's consuming gaze.

## The uncertainty of the ideal: G.F. Watts's portraits of Ellen Terry

11 In 1864, Watts, aged 47, married the 17-year-old actress Ellen Terry. Terry, who came from an inferior social background (her parents were actors), had acted in classical costumed burlesques: several stage photographs from 1861-1862 now in the Guy Tristram Little Collection at the V&A show her performing with her sisters in William Brough's *Endymion*; or, *The naughty boy who cried for the moon: a classical mythological extravaganza in one act*. She had also performed in another play by Brough, *Perseus and Andromeda*; or, *The Maid and the Monster*. A classical *extravaganza*. Later in her career, she kept acting in antique costume dramas, such as Tennyson's *The Cup*. A Tragedy (1880), for which she appears in numerous stage photographs and *cartes de visite* (Guy Tristram Little Collection). Terry had also sat for Watts, for whom she embodied a model of beauty that fused his classical ideal with the Aesthetic sensual type that was in fashion in the early 1860s. Watts wished to detach her from the world of the theatre but this clashed with her personality (Loshak 479-480). Their marriage only lasted ten months and Terry went back to the theatre in 1866 and achieved some success in plays by Tom Taylor. Meanwhile, Watts' representations of her in works such as *Choosing* (1864, National Portrait Gallery) or *Ophelia* (1864, Watts Gallery), whom she played at the Lyceum (Loshak 485), had placed her among the iconic faces of the Aesthetic movement. In these, he showed her as a young, delicate and frail figure and used her performing capabilities, albeit less spectacularly than in John Singer Sargent's imposing portrait of her, *Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth* (1889, Tate Britain).

12 The essential imperative of likeness that is so central to the genre of portraiture was especially acute in the context of photography. In the case of Watts, the issue is also whether the actress is idealized thanks to the recourse to the classical subject and models, or whether she appears to all as the actual person. What's more, in these works, the highly charged confrontation with the man she was emotionally involved with clashes with the classicist artist's desire to reach the ideal. Watts indeed held that the human figure was the best vehicle to convey ideas, and in order to do so he turned
to models drawn from Antiquity, mostly from ancient sculpture, which he believed to
be universally legible. This he fused with a Venetian treatment of colour, which opens
up a paradox: the universal language of antique sculptural forms is counteracted by the
sensuous and quite subjective treatment of colour. Still, Watts's approach to portraits
corresponded to an idealistic vision of art: portraits were not supposed to reveal the
sitters but to construct or produce them through cultural allusions (Gould, *The Last
Great Victorian* 89). As an anonymous reviewer commented in the *Athenaeum*,

despite the great distinction he enjoys as a portraitist, [Watts] has always declared
that he “paints ideas, not objects.” The fact is, however, that, although his portraits
yield to none in veracity and in modesty of style and execution, they embody ideas.
(Anon. 23)

13

Such an approach would imply that resemblance had to be achieved. Watts was a
prominent portraitist who rarely sold his portraits, which he bequeathed to constitute
the “Hall of Fame” at the National Portrait Gallery (Perry 2004, 122). This name may
have been conceived as an allusion to William Hazlitt’s celebrity/fame dichotomy: in
“On Different Sorts of Fame” (1817), Hazlitt opposed the writers who could gain
immediate applause and those who were animated with the desire to reach posterity.
Watts would certainly have associated his portraits with fame, which, unlike celebrity,
implied timelessness and cultural legitimacy. Such desire to attain universality was
foregrounded on the use of antique models, which was a formal means to achieve the
idealized de-actualization of the model. Watts indeed elaborated a theoretical discourse
about portraiture which posited portraits as the reflection of a transcendental
physicality or a spiritual essence beyond the representation of mere visual likeness.
Watts also aimed at enhancing the nobility of his sitter in his portraits, working either
directly from him/her or from photographs so as to give a general idea of the sitter
(Perry 123). He referred to his portraits as “reality”, while labelling his literary and
mythological subject pictures as “types” (Gould, *The Last Great Victorian* 90).
Incidentally, the intended idealism of his portraits met with a mixed reception. Sidney
Colvin for one favourably noted the “elevated ideal aim and style” of his
portraits (ibid. 45) while W.M. Rossetti expressed his wish that his portraits showed
“more of the individual and less of the impersonal ideal”, even if he admitted that
portraiture was the genre that best enabled Watts to control his “tendency to
idealism” (ibid. 71). For Rossetti indeed, “an ideal painter is better adapted to actual
than to ideal subjects” and Watts’s “great mastery over beauty and feeling in
portraiture seems to us to be a case in point” (ibid.). This shows that the articulation, in
Watts’s portraits, of the ideal and the actual constituted a central element in their
reception.

14

Watts's portraits of Ellen Terry as antique heroines raise specific issues. Using classical
models – a cultural sign in itself – places these works within the categories of subject
paintings. But they also function as portraits of an actual woman. The model acquires
an elevated status thanks to the classical allusion and yet this is counterpointed by the
eroticized treatment of and likeness to the model. Watts made many portraits of Terry
from the mid-1860s, and this even after she was no longer his wife. The numerous
drawings and sketches of her and the fact that he retouched and reworked many works
which represented her attest to an enduring feeling for the woman. His relation with
her had much to do with the change of style that characterized his works, which
became more sensuous and even more sensual. In his portrait *Ellen Terry* of 1864-5
(National Portrait Gallery), for example, her long blond hair is painted in the Venetian
manner and chromatically matches the deep blue cloak that flows over her golden-
patterned white gown. She also expressively holds her hands, which reflects her acting
skills. Watts was then strongly influenced by the lush style of Aestheticism, adopting a
richer texture and high-key colours. Watts also resorted to mythology, history,
literature and allegory to celebrate female beauty, like many Aesthetic painters,
depicting a costumed Terry in subject paintings, such as "Watchman, What of the Night?"
(1867, National Trust, Smallhythe Place, Kent), in which she poses as Joan of Arc. In a
medieval subject, *Knight and Maiden*, and in *Paolo and Francesca Maiden*,³ Watts probably
depicted himself next to Terry.

15

Watts kept returning to the now-famous actress in later drawings and sketches which are often characterized by a sensual and even a sexualized presentation of her body. In particular, Watts chose Ovidian themes and classical motifs in a series of nudes that were modelled on a sculpted bust he and the archaeologist Charles Newton had restored. Watts believed that, this sculpture, which they called the Oxford bust (Ashmolean Museum), had been made in the age of Phidias. To him, the classical sculpture of the 5th century B.C. was the noblest of Antiquity. But the fact that it epitomized the summit of idealisation did not prevent him from using it as the source for erotic paintings and sculptures. The woman is presented frontally, her breasts are almost always nude and her head is placed in various positions. In these works, the figure is far from being idealized, as shown in his three sculptures entitled *Clytie* (plaster model, ca. 1868-75, Metropolitan Museum, bronze sculpture of 1865-9, Watts Gallery Trust, and bronze sculpture of 1868-78, Tate Britain).⁴

16

In several paintings, he fused this sculpted bust with studies of Terry's face, such as *Ellen Terry Sleeping* (undated, private collection), and nude studies drawn from a maid who had become his favourite model and whom he nicknamed Long Mary. Here, the allusion to the antique blends with the autobiographical. Among them, *The Wife of Pygmalion* (1865-68, the Faringdon Collection Trust, Buscot Park), subtitled "A Translation from the Greeks", alluded to the Renaissance tradition of transmuting an antique sculpture into a modern painting. Gould interprets the work as "the [Oxford] bust coming to life as Galatea" (Gould *The Last Great Victorian*, 90). The female sitter is also shown frontally, clad in a drapery that exposes her breasts and turning her face away from the beholder, in *Chalk study for "Clytie"* (1860-69, Watts Gallery Trust), *A Study with Peacock's Feathers* (1863-65, private collection), or in the oil study *Ariadne* (1869, private collection). These paintings have a classical subject, but their format is that of the portrait. Watts may have had in mind 18th-century portraits as he too posed a real woman as a Greek heroine but more overtly eroticized her.
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. G. F. Watts, *The Wife of Plutus*, c. 1865-89.</figcaption></figure>

© Photo credit: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Licensed under CC BY-NC.

17 *The Wife of Plutus* (Fig. 1) is a highly sexualised variation on that model. It represents the wife of the Greek god of riches who stretches her neck in what may be seen as either ecstasy or agony. Any aspiration to reach an ideal that would transcend the model is here contradicted by the erotic treatment of the figure. Besides, the autobiographical dimension appears strong when one compares this work to Watts’ *Ellen Terry Sleeping*: the face of Plutus’s wife is clearly recognizable as Terry’s, and the composition and pose are quite close. In both, Terry’s head is propped against a pillow, whose deep creases produce an impression of tension that in the drawing contradicts the theme of quiet sleeping. The woman’s thin nose and head show the influence of Greek sculpture but her hair is unkept, her mouth half-open, and her eyes are closed. The sketch is a sensual rendering of an actual sitter. The gown and its elaborate puffed sleeve recall Pre-Raphaelite costumes. In *The Wife of Plutus*, the likeness to Terry becomes obvious. The woman’s nose is clearly that of the actress and the resemblance with her portrait in *The Sisters* (1863, Eastnor Castle Collection) is strong. In both canvases, Terry’s face is seen in a three-quarter profile, only viewed from below in *The Wife of Plutus*. The subject picture can therefore be apprehended as a hidden portrait of Terry.

18 In choosing to depict Terry as the wife of the god of riches, Watts may have more or less consciously expressed bitter feelings about his former wife. The canvas was painted after Watts's well-known separation from Terry and it perhaps reflects latent hints at his failed marriage and his own thwarted desire for her. The woman seems indeed engaged in auto-eroticism. The work, then, eludes the ideal Watts wished to reach through the use of classical models. This would contradict the assertions of his biographer, Mrs Barrington, that Watts had a "more intellectual conception of portrait-
painting” than other painters because he was fundamentally unconcerned with “the
physical aspect of his sitters at one given moment” (Barrington 1905, 120). On the
contrary, the work puts forward the actual physicality of the sitter.

19 Unlike his allegorical nudes modelled on Terry, such as *Love and Life* (1884-5, Tate Britain), *The Wife of Plutus* is more openly erotic. This goes against Gould’s claim that, The pursuit of a language that transcended specifics of time and place allowed for the development of a figure style that played down sexual characteristics in favour of an idealised treatment of form and which in the artist’s words did not retain any signs of the individual (Gould *The Vision of G.F. Watts*, 23).

20 *The Wife of Plutus*, rather, fails to create the sense of timelessness that would have idealized the sitter. Furthermore, the mode of depiction demeans the sitter. Watts suggested that the female model was an allegory of the capitalistic ills of his times: “in the Wife of Pluto I wish to suggest the disease of wealth” (qtd. in Gould *The Vision of G.F. Watts*, 38-9). By associating Terry with the avaricious and debauched wife of Plutus, Watts was perhaps alluding to an enduring stereotype – or fantasy – about actresses, who were associated to prostitutes as both classes of women worked at night and in the same theatre districts (see Barrow 213-214, and Zeleny 2017, 285-287). In this portrait, the former muse, who had gone back to the world of the theatre, is depicted as the goddess of lucre whose equivocal gesture, though cropped by the frame of the canvas, seems to have provoked her spasm of pleasure. That it may also express agony points to a form of violence which combines sexuality and death. All in all, the allegorical mode and the classical model fail to express Watts’s ideal insofar as it fails to eschew the personal element.

Frederic Leighton and Dorothy Dene: translating the actual into the ideal

21 In 1882, Leighton represented his favourite model Dorothy Dene as Antigone, the heroine of Sophocles', Euripides' and Aeschylus' plays. Dene was an aspiring actress whose career he and his friend and biographer Mrs Barrington entirely built. *Antigone* (Fig. 2) is a classical subject, but it is also a very resembling portrait of the young woman. Though not a portrait in the proper sense, it shows a living individual idealized thanks to the allusion to Antiquity. Dorothy Dene was a stage name for Ada Alice Pullan, a young working-class woman whom Leighton had met in 1878. Dene had become his ideal type of beauty but her closeness to him led to much rumour about the nature of their relationship. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy, she was famous in the press as Leighton's favourite muse but probably also as his potential lover. Leighton perhaps devised the work as a means to advertise Dene when she was embarking on her acting career, which included a "repertoire of tragic roles" (Newall 103). Leighton's *Antigone* fits the context of the stage and was probably inspired by a recent production of Sophocles' *Antigone*. Its theatrical composition was consistent with Leighton's admiration for history painting. The classical subject was meant to inscribe the painting within the grand genre and thus to ennoble the sitter.
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. Frederic Leighton, *Antigone*, 1882. Private collection.</figcaption></figure>

© Source: Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antigoneleigh.jpg

22 From the beginning of his career, Leighton had produced bust portraits of single female sitters with titles that more or less pointed to historical or literary figures. Yet in many cases, the models were detached from any decipherable literary or historical context. His portraits of Anna Risi, dated around 1859, were early representations of captivating and sensuous women placed close to the picture plane whose function was to elicit aesthetic pleasure. Leighton's titles alternately evoke types, such as *Pavonia* (private collection), or allude to Risi's status as a Roman woman and mention her name, as in *A Roman Lady (La Nanna)* (Philadelphia Museum of Art), *An Italian Lady* (private collection), *La Nanna (Sunny Hours)* (private collection) and *Nanna (Pavonia)* (the Royal Collection Trust). When placed next to the portraits which Risi's lover, Anselm Feuerbach, produced, one sees that Leighton moved away from the mere portrait and elaborated prototypes for the portrait-*cum*-subject pictures depicting sensual women that became a staple of Aestheticism (Prettejohn 20-6).

23 Leighton perpetuated this vein in paintings that were more academic and classical in manner, often depicting Pullan/Dene in antique garb. She had become Leighton's favourite model on account of her pure "Phidian" profile (qtd. in *Frederic, Lord Leighton* 147-48). Her face corresponded to the Grecian type of beauty that was sought-after by many aesthetic and classical artists. To Leighton, she gave life to an ideal of beauty based on antique sculptural models. He was also most probably emotionally attached to her. He also sponsored her when she wished to become an actress in the early-1880s, when *Antigone* was painted (Robbins 71).

24 *Antigone* displays Leighton's love of classical forms and his interest in subjects inspired by ancient tragedy (*Frederic, Lord Leighton* 196; Newall 103). But it is also the portrait of an identified model who was an actress impersonating the heroine of tragedy. The
antique subject allowed Leighton to idealize the woman. The tragic subject also enabled him to depict the complex interiority of a woman. The treatment of the figure conveys the emotions that are proper to tragedy. Her head is thrown back and her neck twisted and exposed. She seems to be watching a scene situated outside the picture-plane, most probably the protagonists of her tragic fate. The frown on her brow, her distraught eyes, her tightly pressed lips and the flush on her cheeks all express pathos, as fits an academic representation of a tragic play. The dramatic tone is enhanced by the play on colour and by the use of chiaroscuro. The contrast between flame-like and dark colours also reflects the tragic subject: the figure stands out against the murky background and her orange-yellow chiton contrasts with the black drapery that encloses her bosom and symbolises death. The chromatic harmony and her bright orange drapery – one thinks of Leighton's *Flaming June* of 1895 (Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico) – point to the influence of Aestheticism while the restricted palette inscribes the work within the grand style of historical painting. However, the painting is as much an evocation of the doomed sister of Polynices as a tribute to the beauty of Leighton's favourite blond-haired model.

For Keren Rosa Hammershlag, the exposure of Dene's throat and neck and the emphasis on her visible vein enhance both an erotic and a tragic dimension: for this part of her body is the site of both kissing and killing (Hammershlag 122). Besides, the display of her throat shows that to his eyes, it was a central component of her beauty. In his biography, Barrington admired her throat and praised the acting capacities which gave the painting its power: "Her very beautiful throat [...] was reproduced worthily in many of his subject-pictures, and the true dramatic instinct she undoubtedly possessed enabled her to be of help in such pictures as *Antigone*." (Barrington 1906, 75) The painting seems to pay homage both to that part of her body and to her performing skills, notably because her mouth is open. Leighton's painting joins an academic tradition that emulated the canons of antique art and took inspiration from the classics; but it is also a portrait of Dene impersonating Antigone.

Choosing the grand manner implied that the heroine's emotions should be restrained. The art critic F.G. Stephens reckoned Leighton's lofty aims in this canvas:

> Sir F. Leighton has sent the heroic-size head and bust of *Antigone*, the face full of expression and noble in form. The head is turned sideways to our left and a little raised, the lips are open in the act of speaking, and the eyes render an ideal of passionate suffering and an appeal to the higher powers. The rosy and white carnations, the rich and ruddy lips, large and broad eyelids, are proper to the president's facial types. (Stephens 576)

Terms such as “heroic” or “higher powers” signal Leighton’s tribute to the elevated genre of history painting. The model has been transmuted into an “ideal” and her pathos respects artistic conventions. The work attracted much attention, notably from fellow artists, as shown in Frederick Sandys’s own version, *Study for Antigone* (1880, private collection). Sandys probably saw Leighton’s canvas, as his pencil and chalk sketch seems quite indebted to it: he used one of his favourite models for the figure, who adopts a comparable attitude, her head turned sideways and her sculptural throat exposed. This painting too pays homage to classicism.

Yet, Stephens also dwells on the touches of paint on Dene's face, pointing to Leighton's "facial types", which implies that the public would have recognized them. This opens up a tension: if Leighton's use of an antique model has given the actress-cum-model an elevated status, the individual sitter can still be identified. Leighton chose to depict a
classical subject in the format of a portrait. This was a potential gesture to promote his *protégée* and indeed, many beholders would have recognized Dorothy Dene. The "engagement" (Barlow 206) of the beholders with the figure represented on the canvas was that of a public apprised of Leighton's potential involvement with the aspirant actress. Leighton placed himself in the academic tradition inspired by Reynolds who, in *Ariadne* (date unknown, private collection), shows the figure looking away, in a way that also indicates the Greek heroine's plight. Like Reynolds, Leighton gave a historical figure the specific features of a real person.

29 Leighton's *Antigone* hesitates between the ideal and the real, academic abstraction and individual likeness, allegorical personification and resemblance. The portrait is ennobled by the "subject painting", identity, intimacy or subjectivity are transcended by the classical reference and the academic manner. As in the case of Watts's works, the painting reflects the male artist's Pygmalion-style impetus to fashion the image of his muse. The actress acquires a particular status and the female body is allegorically invested as an emblem of art and tradition. The woman's representation is therefore fraught with gendered considerations. Hers is a metaphorical body which is controlled and shaped; the meta-reflexion on art and tradition rests on the representation of an eroticized female model who, in the case of Leighton's work too, is also subjected to violence. For Antigone is doomed to die pitilessly.

30 What is perhaps ironical is that this was a context in which a woman's beauty possessed, as Pointon would have it, a special "commodity value": her beautiful face was inevitably "a sign value in the system of exchange between men" (143). Images of Dorothy Dene were then circulated as photographs and advertisements, and in some of them she adopted the contrived pose or simpering expressions she evinced in the subject paintings in which she posed as a legendary figure. In an advert for Allen and Ginger's cigarettes, Dene tilts her head sideways, again exposing the throat that had so impressed Leighton. A trade card promoting a cigarette brand, Ogden (ca. 1894, National Portrait Portrait Gallery), adopts the format of the portrait and shows her in profile, wearing antique clothes and jewels. Such ephemera adopted the conventions of high art. Stage photographs or *cartes de visite* such as the series of *Dorothy Dene* produced by Elliot and Fry's studio in the late 1890s (National Portrait Gallery) show the actress dressed in classical garb and posing theatrically. Her attitude, however, evokes melodrama rather than tragedy, another slippage from high to low art. Cultural categorizations are muddled in these visual productions, exactly as the "classical-subject performance" (Barrow 209) invaded the popular theatre. Exactly as antiquity became present both in serious and light drama, classical forms were no longer the preserve of academic painting but were amalgamated into commercial images.

## The failure of the ideal: Edward Poynter's portrait of Lillie Langtry

31 Celebrities like Lillie Langtry or Ellen Terry used visual representations to create a public image and a "collective fiction" (Eltis 171; Zeleny, 2017 288). Posing for artists was undoubtedly part of that strategy. Yet this could be quite complex since the actresses did not always control the artist's creative process. In 1881, Edward Poynter portrayed Lillie Langtry as *Helen* (https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/OB2.1968/). That she posed as the famed adulterous heroine of Homer's *Iliad* was
probably intentional. Langtry's scandalous love affairs with important society men were the talk of the town. Langtry was already a celebrity, and before it was even exhibited at the Royal Academy, the canvas was much publicized. Poynter posed the socialite, who was starting off as actress, as the heroine of Antiquity. But when compared with other images of her, such as photographs or Millais's picture (*A Jersey Lily*, 1878, Jersey Museum and Art Gallery) and Poynter's portrait (*Lillie Langtry*, 1877, Jersey Museum and Art Gallery), it fails to meet with the imperative of likeness.

32 Poynter, as a true academician, followed the codes of history painting in his work. The composition smacks of the theatre. Langtry poses with affectation and is dressed stunningly. A statue of Ares appears to be protecting her and she is framed by the vertical lines of studded doors and columns. Greek soldiers are depicted looting the city in what looks like a stage backdrop. The painting is saturated with warm colours that reflect the violent theme. Her gown is red, which connotes sensuality and passion. It contrasts with her pale carnation and blue melancholy eyes. Poynter, in *Helen*, was paying homage to a woman whose beauty was renowned as “pure Greek” (Wilde 42). Watts had depicted Terry’s body by transposing a Grecian sculpture; Leighton valued Dene’s beauty for what he saw as her Phidian type; likewise, Langtry attracted much praise because she corresponded to the most valuable canon of beauty in Western tradition.

33 Nevertheless, high art collides with the culture of commodified celebrity in *Helen*. Artistic canons prevail over reality at the expense of resemblance. Antiquity is meant to bring a timeless fame to the actress. And yet this *dispositif* did not work for all spectators. The art critic Edmund Gosse indeed commented on the painting disparagingly:

> [T]he public was carefully prepared, in terms sometimes too voluptuous to be quoted here, for the advent of a miracle of poetic beauty. We knew that Mr. Poynter, though always an uncertain painter, possessed the rare quality of style, and was moved by a high intellectual ambition. There was, therefore, no reason why he should not this year surpass himself, and exhibit a worthy Helen. But when we saw this fading dream of a popular beauty, with her staring eyes of weak blue, her vulgar red robe studded with stars of tinsel, and the ignoble attitude of her hands, we could but exclaim with Faustus –
> “Was this fair Helen whose admired worth
> Made Greece with ten years’ war afflict poor Troy?” (Gosse 695)

34 Gosse could obviously not reconcile the academic painter's elevated ideal with the individual portrait of a woman who was so closely associated with the culture of the marketplace. The fact that this was a face which everybody knew conflicted with the grand manner with which this classical subject was deliberately treated. Of course, Poynter chose to depict a Homeric figure who was the epitome of beauty but also of adultery - a fit subject for Langtry.

35 Other commentators commended Millais's portrait of Langtry, *A Jersey Lily*, for its naturalness (*Millais: Portraits* 209-11). What is ironical is that Langtry records that she had wanted to be "draped in classic robes or sumptuous medieval garments, in which I should be beautiful and quite transformed" (Langtry 53). She explains that it is Millais who had insisted that she should wear the simple black dress she customarily displayed in society. But this is what Henry James precisely disliked: "Mrs Langtry's admirable beauty is quite of the antique, classical, formal, and, to return to the word I began with
using, plastic order: but Mr Millais paints her as if he meant to make her pass for the heroine of a serial in a magazine" (qtd. in *Millais: Portraits* 211).

36

To James's eyes, portraying Langtry as an actual woman meant depriving her of her classical beauty. Lillie Langtry was indeed a celebrity, who advertised herself in postcards, photographs and *cartes de visite*. These ephemera, as in the case of Terry and Dene, also evince a degree of performativity and a gestural language that were modelled on examples drawn both from the theatre and from academic painting. Such images "exemplify[yl] the close relationship between the commodification of beauty and contemporary portraiture" (*Millais: Portraits* 197). Her face had therefore become iconic and it was most probably seen by everyone across the social scale, as she mentioned it in her memoirs: "The photographers, one and all, besought me to sit. Presently, my portraits were in every shop-window, with trying results, for they made the public so familiar with my features that wherever I went – to theatres, picture-galleries, shops – I was actually mobbed." (Langtry 46). *Helen* too raised the issue of her commodification as celebrity. Both portraiture and the theatre, like the socialite's life, involve a degree of impersonation and performance, and as a portrait, *Helen* enhances Langtry's social identity as performer.

Conclusion

37

The tension between the imperative of the genre of portraiture to represent an individual likeness and the cultural need to provide exempla, as Pointon would put it, becomes problematic with the advent of commodified celebrity. Portraiture is poised between resemblance and enhancement, "between the ideal and the actual, biography and portraiture, experience and representation" (Pointon 81-2). The aura of classical culture was still high in late-Victorian Britain and it was copied in low-art productions. Many of the photographs or *cartes* staging actresses, such as Henry Van der Weyden's images of Dorothy Dene or W. & D. Downey's prints of Lillie Langtry, appropriated established repertoires and codifications. The poses, gestures and expressions recall acting manuals and are reminiscent of the classical forms then revived in painting.⁵ The sitter's aura, therefore, rested on already-existing cultural icons. Her very celebrity also constituted her cultural authority. In a context in which "the Victorians read images intermedially" (Codell 499), what remains to be studied is whether these actresses retained a degree of control over the images of themselves that circulated widely. These women, nevertheless, were "celebrated and commercialized for their surface appearances, for a look or fashion that was often fleeting and hypersexualized" (Teukolsky 473) – and this whether they were pictured in the noblest genre of academic painting or the lowest media of advertising. Watts, Leighton and Poynter turned real women into paragons of the classical ideal. What these women's identities perhaps went through, after all, was a process of "re-tailoring" (to borrow from Codell's essay title) which the male artist devised in view to achieve his own fame.
# BIBLIOGRAPHY

## Works cited

[ANON.]. "The New Gallery. Winter Exhibition. Mr. Watts's Pictures." *The Athenaeum* 3610 (Jan. 2, 1897): 23-4.

ASLESON, Robyn, ed. *Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture*. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2003.

BARLOW, Paul. "Transparent Bodies, Opaque Identities: Personification, Narrative and Portraiture." *Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity*. Eds. Tim Barringer & Elizabeth Prettejohn. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 199. 193-219.

BARRINGTON, G.F. *Reminiscences*. London: G. Allen, 1905.

BARRINGTON, G.F.. *The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton*. London: G. Allen, vol. I & II, 1906.

BARROW, Rosemary. "Toga Plays and Tableaux Vivants: Theatre and Painting on London's Late-Victorian and Edwardian Popular Stage." *Theatre Journal* 2 (May 2010): 209-26.

BRYANT, Barbara. G.F. Watts Portraits: Fame & Beauty in Victorian Society. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004.

CODELL, Julie. "Victorian Portraits: Re-Tailoring Identities." *Nineteenth Century Contexts* 34 (Dec. 2012): 493-516.

COLVIN, Sidney. "Pictures in London and Paris, 1872." *Cornhill Magazine* 26 (July 1872): 33-47.

DENVIR, Bernard ed. *The Late Victorians: Art, Design and Society, 1852-1910*. London: Longman, 1986.

ELTIS, Sos. "Private Lives and Public Spaces: Reputation, Celebrity and the Late Victorian Actress." *Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660-2000*. Eds. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 169-88.

ERTEM, Fulya. "The Pose in Early Portrait Photography." *Image and Narrative* 7.1 (2006). URL: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting/fulya.htm [accessed Oct. 2023].

GOSSE, Edmund. "The Royal Academy in 1881." *Fortnightly Review* 35 (June 1881): 689-703.

GOULD, Veronica Franklin. G.F. Watts. *The Last Great Victorian*. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2004.

GOULD, Veronica Franklin. *The Vision of G.F. Watts*. Salisbury: The Watts Gallery, 2004.

HAMMERSCHLAG, Keren Rosa. *Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection*. Aldershot: Routledge, 2018.

HAZLITT, William, "On Different Sorts of Fame", *The Round Table. A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men and Manners*. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817, Online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55932/55932-h/55932-h.htm#Page_93 [accessed Oct. 2023].
INGLIS, Alison. "Deathless Beauty: Poynter's Helen, Lille Langtry and High Victorian ideals of beauty." *Love and Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria*. Eds. Angus Trumble. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2001. 71-82.

LANGTRY, Lillie. *The Days I Knew*. London, Hutchinson & Co, 1925.

LOSHAK, David. "G.F. Watts and Ellen Terry." *The Burlington Magazine* 728 (Nov. 1963): 476-87.

NEWALL, Christopher. *The Art of Lord Leighton*. London: Phaidon Press, 1994.

PERRY, Lara. "Nationalizing Watts: the *Hall of Fame* and the National Portrait Gallery." *Representations* of F.G. Watts. Art Making in Victorian Culture. Eds. Colin Trodd & Stephanie Brown. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 121-33.

PERRY, Lara. "The *Carte de Visite* in the 1860s and the Serial Dynamic of Photographic Likeness." *Art History* 35 (2012): 728-49.

POINTON, Marcia. *Hanging the Head, Portraiture and Social Formation in 18th-Century England*. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1993.

POMMIER, Édouard. *Théories du portrait, de la Renaissance aux Lumières*. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.

PRETTEJOHN, Elizabeth. *Rossetti and his Circle*. London: Tate Publishing, 2005.

ROBBINS, Daniel. "Leighton's Late Models." *Flaming June: Making of an Icon*. Exhibition catalogue. London: Leighton House Museum, 2016. 70-3.

ROSSETTI, W.M. "The Royal Academy Exhibition." *Fraser's Magazine* 66 (July 1862), 65-76.

STEPHENS, F.G. "The Royal Academy (Second Notice)." *The Athenaeum* 2845 (May 6, 1882): 576-8.

TERRY, Ellen. *The Story of my Life: Recollections and Reflections*. New York: Doubleday, 1908.

TEUKOLSKY, Rachel. "Cartomania: Sensation, Celebrity, and the Democratized Portrait." *Victorian Studies* 3 (Spring 2015): 462-75.

WILDE, Oscar. "Mrs. Langtry as Hester Grazebrook" [*New York World*, Nov. 7, 1882]. *The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde*. Vol. XIV. Miscellanies. Ed. Robert Ross. New York: Routledge / Thoemmes Press, 1993. 42-6.

ZELENY, Rachael Baitch. "Painting an Ethos: The Actress, the Angel in the House, and Pre-Raphaelite Ellen Terry." *Rhetoric Reviews* 4 (2013): 397-418.

ZELENY, Rachael Baitch. "The Rhetoric of Ellen Terry's Alter Ego." *Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric* 3 (Summer 2017): 285-313.

## Exhibition catalogues

*Frederic, Lord Leighton: Eminent Victorian Artist*. Exhibition catalogue. Eds. Richard Ormond, Stephen Jones, Christopher Newall, Leonee Ormond & Benedict Read. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1996.

*Millais: Portraits*. Exhibition catalogue. Eds. Peter Funnell, Malcolm Warner, Kate Flint, H.C.G. Matthew & Leonée Ormond. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1999.
## NOTES

1. See in particular Asleson and Pointon for a study of such works.

2. For a study of the portraits of courtesans and actresses, see Asleson's edited volume, and in particular, Martin Postle, "'Painted Women': Reynolds and the Cult of the Courtesan", in Asleson 22-55, and Joseph Roach, "Patina: Mrs Siddons and the Depth of Surface", in Asleson 195-209.

3. Both works are in the David Loshak Collection and probably date from the early 1860s, see Loshak 484.

4. *Daphne* is a more classical and less erotic variation on that model (c. 1879-82, Tate Britain).

5. See Ertem for the link between the poses in painting and in early photography.

## ABSTRACTS

The late-Victorian neoclassical artists George Frederic Watts, Frederic Leighton and Edward Poynter posed three famous actresses, Ellen Terry, Dorothy Dene and Lillie Langtry, in paintings whose subjects were drawn from Antiquity. The choice of mythological or tragic themes would categorize these works as "subject paintings" and not as portraits and yet the actuality of and likeness to the sitter blur such classifications. Building on research on 18th-century portraiture, this article studies a number of works that help address issues linked to their unstable categorisation as portrait or "subject picture". Besides, two of the artists were romantically involved with the sitters, which raises autobiographical issues. All in all, the painters resorted to Antiquity in order to ennoble the celebrities at a time when models and actresses were frowned upon. However, this artistic ambition collided with the commodification of these actresses' faces in the context of marketplace culture.

Les artistes néoclassiques de la fin de l'époque victorienne, George Frederic Watts, Frederic Leighton et Edward Poynter, firent poser trois actrices célèbres, Ellen Terry, Dorothy Dene et Lillie Langtry, dans des tableaux dont les sujets étaient tirés de l'Antiquité. Le choix de thèmes mythologiques ou tragiques implique que ces œuvres appartiennent au genre des « subject paintings » et non dans celle des portraits, et pourtant, la ressemblance avec un modèle au visage connu brouille ces catégorisations. Cet article, qui s'inscrit dans des travaux portant sur le portrait au XVIIIe siècle, se propose d'étudier quelques œuvres situées entre le portrait et les « subject pictures » pour mettre au jour les enjeux de leur instabilité générique. En outre, le fait que deux de ces artistes entrenaient une relation amoureuse avec leur modèle soulève des enjeux autobiographiques. Par ailleurs, ces peintres eurent recours à l'Antiquité pour ennoblir ces célèbrités à une époque où modèles et actrices étaient encore mal considérées. Mais dans le contexte de la culture du marché, cette ambition artistique est à mettre au regard de la marchandisation du visage de ces actrices.
## INDEX

**Mots-clés:** peinture victorienne, portrait, antiquité dans la peinture, actrices, Leighton (Frederic), Poynter (Edward), Watts (George Frederic), sujets littéraires et mythologiques

**Keywords:** Victorian painting, portraiture, subject pictures, classical painting, actresses, Leighton (Frederic), Poynter (Edward), Watts (George Frederic)

## AUTHOR

### ANNE-FLORENCE GILLARD-ESTRADA

Université de Rouen Normandie, Laboratoire ERIAC

Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada is Professor at Rouen University (ERIAC). Her research and teaching interests include British literature, aesthetics, art criticism and painting in the 1860s-1890s. She has published articles and co-directed books on Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic and classical movements. She has a book forthcoming on the “Greek” body in British paintings of Antiquity (1860-1900) and its reception in Victorian art criticism and periodicals.