In this volume, Heather McPherson examines the connections among portraiture, theater, the visual arts, and fame to shed light on the emergence of modern celebrity culture in eighteenth-century England.

Popular actors in Georgian London, such as David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, and John Philip Kemble, gave larger-than-life performances at Drury Lane and Covent Garden; their offstage personalities garnered as much attention through portraits painted by leading artists, sensational stories in the press, and often-vicious caricatures. Likewise, artists such as Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence figured prominently outside their studios-in polite society and the emerging public sphere. McPherson considers this increasing interest in theatrical and artistic celebrities and explores the ways in which aesthetics, cultural politics, and consumption combined during this period to form a media-driven celebrity culture that is surprisingly similar to celebrity obsessions in the world today.

This richly researched study draws on a wide variety of period sources, from newspaper reviews and satirical pamphlets to caricatures and paintings by Reynolds and Lawrence as well as Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, and Angelica Kauffman. These transport the reader to eighteenth-century London and the dynamic venues where art and celebrity converged with culture and commerce. Interweaving art history, history of performance, and cultural studies, Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons offers important insights into the intersecting worlds of artist and actor, studio and stage, high art and popular visual culture.

About the Author

Heather McPherson is Professor of Art History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Reviews

"[Siddons] was among the first celebrities to emerge from show business with the help of portrait painting. This year, she plays a starring role in [this] handsome book, Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons."

-Robert Fulford National Post

"By skillfully crossing disciplines and emphasizing the correlation between celebrity and fame in late eighteenth-century English society, McPherson provides an admirable scholarly contribution that places the late eighteenth century at the core of a palimpsest that resonates into our own time."

-Joan Coutu Journal of British Studies

"One of the most important takeaways from this book is the multi-layered meaning of 'performance,' allowing readers to think more critically about the construction of identity in public and private life."

-Amanda Strasik XVIII New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century

"Heather McPherson undertakes a critical reevaluation of the connection between portraiture and theatrical personalities in eighteenth-century England, successfully revealing a complex multidirectional network of influence. She suggests a direct link between the eighteenth-century cult of celebrity and our own contemporary obsession with images of celebrities-in performative roles; on magazine covers; in reality television; amid scandals and triumphs. Suddenly, the eighteenth century doesn't seem as distant or alien to this age of digital imagery and instant access, nor do we seem particularly advanced despite our technological advantages."

-Andrew Graciano,editor of Exhibiting Outside the Academy, Salon, and Biennial, 1775-1999: Alternative Venues for Display

"A smart, satisfying book. Heather McPherson eloquently demonstrates why the cross-pollination of the visual arts and theater resonates far beyond narrow conceptions of the stage or visual histories of particular performers, opening up, instead, valuable avenues for a richer understanding of Georgian exhibition culture as fueled by an ever-shifting, developing public."

-Craig Ashley Hanson,author of The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism

"Heather McPherson provides an ambitious and supple exploration of the complicated relationships between portrait painting and theatrical performance in eighteenth-century London. By juxtaposing paintings by Reynolds, Kauffman, Gainsborough, and Lawrence with contemporary caricatures, theatrical prints, memoirs, and memorabilia, she is able to evoke the origins of artistic celebrity. At the heart of her nuanced and wide-ranging study is the intriguing role of performance within the artist's studio as well as on the boards of the London stage."

-Richard Wendorf,director of the American Museum in Britain and author of Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society

"In her authoritative and truly interdisciplinary study of art and the stage in eighteenth-century Britain, Heather McPherson makes the gossamer of celebrity as tangible as the painted canvas or the printed page, the passionate gesture or the spectacular tableau, showing how carefully such stars as Garrick, Reynolds, Siddons, and Lawrence worked together to launch our 'performance-based and image-driven' culture of publicity."

-Joseph Roach,author of It and Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance

"Beautifully produced, conscientiously researched, and wide-ranging, Heather McPherson's book offers a thorough account of eighteenth-century celebrity culture, in which art and theatre are entwined. The book tracks the sometimes uneasy relationships between studio and stage, from the changing conditions of exhibition and spectatorship to portraits, caricatures, performances, and posthumous commemorations. The resulting picture of emerging celebrity culture is packed with pertinent details and astute analysis."

-Tom Mole,author of Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy

"For those of us who are familiar with Heather McPherson's scholarship on the inextricable relationship between visual art and the theatre in eighteenth-century England, it is a thrill to see her impressive new volume, a majestically illustrated and beautifully researched analysis of the emergence, growth, and nuances of celebrity culture, particularly in the 1780s."

-Laura Engel Eighteenth-Century Fiction

"This is a book that provides both an exploration of the mechanisms through which celebrity was created in the eighteenth century and a more theoretical reflection on the notion of celebrity, the kind of reflection that can only come with the sort of deep engagement that McPherson has developed with the topic over many years, the kind of reflection that our age sorely needs."

-Ersy Contogouris Eighteenth-Century Life

Book Information
ISBN 9780271074078
Author Heather McPherson
Format Hardback
Page Count 272
Imprint Pennsylvania State University Press
Publisher Pennsylvania State University Press
Weight(grams) 1247g
Dimensions(mm) 254mm * 203mm * 25mm