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 professionalize both the theatre and the practice of fine art. Gill Perry shows how artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner or Lawrence produced complex images of female performers as fashion icons, coquettes, dignified queens or creative artists. The result is a rich interdisciplinary study of the Georgian actress. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces - the closet, the gallery, the library - and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth-century studies, especially for those studying portraiture and country houses. -- .

This volume brings together the varied artistic, critical and cultural productions by women scholars, critics and artists between 1790-1900, many of whom are little known in the canonical histories of the period. It looks at women working outside conventional canons, and are shown how they negotiated relationships with canonical forms of artistic production across the different disciplines, focusing in each case on the gendered associations and exclusions and the implied structures of sexual difference, which may or may not be revealed. Women discussed include authors like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sydney Morgan and Anna Jameson, actresses such as Elizabeth Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Mary Robinson, women critics like Margaret Oliphant and Mary Cowden Clarke, historians such as Agnes Strickland, Lucy Aikin, Mary Anne Everett Green, Elizabeth Cooper and Lucy Toulmin Smith, the writers and readers of Women's magazines, educationalists such as the Shiress sisters and translators like Anna Swanwick, as well as many others.