It is difficult not to sensationalize Emma Hamilton’s biography. From her birth in 1765 into the abject poverty of a mining town located just outside of Liverpool, to her swift but impermanent rise to the very apex of fashionable European society, Emma Hamilton became one of the most famous women of her time. She charmed the European elite with her performances of a dance/pantomime hybrid, dubbed her Attitudes, in which, dressed as a Grecian goddess, she struck poses and took on the expressive personae of famous characters from antiquity. The exhibition Emma Hamilton Dancing, currently on show at Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library, seeks to situate Emma Hamilton and her Attitudes within the larger context of dance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. More specifically, the exhibition explores the essential dichotomy that attended dance and the dancing body, which were at once both celebrated and reviled. This paradox has particularly strong relevance for Emma Hamilton herself, a woman whose life was defined by boundary crossing and the ambivalence it elicited from high society.

The objects on view are predominantly works on paper, including books, prints and etchings, mostly from the collection of the Walpole itself, or from Yale University’s Center for British Art. Curated by John Cooper, Clare-Mellon Fellow in the History of Art at Yale University, the exhibition begins with four prints hung on a wall painted the terracotta colour of Greek red figure vases, the same hue that dominates the publication of Sir William Hamilton’s vase collection, two copies of which are also on display. Prints after two of George Romney’s paintings from the 1780s of Emma Hamilton, Sensibility (Emma Hamilton as Nature) and The Seamstress, are displayed, both made toward the beginning of her life in the public eye. These alternate with later caricatures published by the biting satirist, James Gillray, in 1801. Romney was the first artist in London to become obsessed by Emma Hamilton, and he painted her more than 60 times over the course of nine years. The Seamstress seems a particularly apt choice. As noted in the exhibition, Hamilton was depicted through the course of her life as a host of both mythological and Christian figures, including each of the Muses (especially Thalia), Calypso, a bacchant, Cassandra, Ariadne, Lady Macbeth and even the Virgin Mary. It is fitting that an exhibition dedicated to her self-fashioned image would begin with one of the few depictions of Emma Hamilton in which she is relatively close to herself.  

This initial selection also encapsulates the central dichotomy of Emma Hamilton’s public persona, especially with regards to Gillray’s depiction of Hamilton as Dido in Despair! A now engorged Hamilton, playing the role of Dido abandoned by Aeneas, watches as her lover, the naval hero Horatio Nelson, sails with his fleet away from the Bay of Naples, even as her husband, the aged William Hamilton, sleeps in the bed beside her. Hamilton, beloved by artists and admirers alike for her beauty and talent, was censured later in life when she began to gain weight, and Gillray was quick to caricaturize her failure to maintain the physical ideal so much a part of her early allure. In what is perhaps the exhibition’s most compelling juxtaposition, Cooper presents two editions of prints illustrating Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes side-by-side for the first time. Initially commissioned by William Hamilton, the drawings of Emma’s Attitudes made by Friedrich Rehberg and engraved by Tommaso Piroli for publication in 1794 show the starlet in twelve of her classicizing and expressive postures. Quickly becoming the most famous representations of the art form that Hamilton had invented, they were satirized thirteen years later in 1807, again by James Gillray. Gillray’s exceptionally sensitive, fluid line, which surely rivals that of Rehberg, now shows an almost grotesquely inflated Emma Hamilton, even as she strikes the same poses as those from Rehberg’s prints. In the introduction to what he calls the ‘second edition’ of the Attitudes, Gillray writes that since the publication of Rehberg’s work, the ‘celebrated Beauty of our time…has so grown in grace and encreased in loveliness, that it would be injust in the highest degree not to portray her as she really is…’ [sic]. With these opening images, Cooper convincingly sets up the terms of the exhibition and its exploration of the very fine line between acceptance and censure when it comes to the performing, especially female, body at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century.

At this point, the show turns to the broader context of dance and its reception in Europe throughout the period. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dance was being formally codified through the publication of technical manuals that sought to disseminate particular postures and dance positions. Carlo Blasis’ Code of Terpsichore: the art of dancing, comprising its theory and practice… and his Manuel complet de la Danse, both on display in one of the exhibition’s central vitrines, present a series of line engravings, whose style, it is argued, has much to do with the neoclassical line drawings made famous by the publications of William Hamilton’s Antiquities. Texts such as these were meant as educational reference works, delineating ‘postures, steps, and attitudes for Serious, Demi-Caractère, and Comic dancers.’ Yet the other objects selected for display alongside Blasis’ manuals suggest the extent to which dance performance was held to be quite suspect. George Murgatroyd Woodward’s Durham Mustard Too Powerful for Italian Capers, or the Opera in an Uproar from 1807 references a recent court case on divorce law during which the Bishop of Durham asserted that the French had ‘sent among us female dancers, who, by the allurement of the most indecent attitudes and most wanton theatrical exhibitions succeeded but too effectually in loosening and corrupting the moral feelings of the people.’ The image depicts the bishop charging toward the ebullient dancers, crosier threateningly raised as though to run them off the stage. In a more mocking interpretation of the influence of the Attitudes, a print after a painting by J.B. Gearing, titled Elegant Attitudes for Fugel Men and published in 1804, depicts several absurd suggested poses for the fugelman, a soldier whose job it was to be positioned at the front of a formation of drilling soldiers in order to provide a model for their exercises. In the print, fugelmen are depicted with awkwardly exaggerated poses, from the bayonet raised high above the head, leg kicked up, to a soldier standing at ease by pointing his weapon to the sky and leaning precariously backward.

According to the exhibition wall text that introduces a selection of prints depicting various types of ballroom dancing – which flourished in Europe during the period – numerous treatises were published extolling its social and physical benefits. As the wall text informs visitors, dancing was held to ‘improve vigor, bearing, and that gracefulness that was the hallmark of superior people.’ Yet, as the images themselves often suggest, the dancing body could often be seen as ‘odd, comic, perverse, exaggerated,’ at once ‘lauded and reviled.’ For example, George Cruikshank’s La Belle Assemblée, or Sketches of Characteristic Dancing of 1817, presents a taxonomy of various forms of English dancing. Yet framed above the dancers of British society are depictions of other forms of ‘dance’ with labels that identify the specific type. These involve depictions of animals dancing, including dancing dogs, a dancing bear, and a dancing horse, as well as depictions of dancing in its association with acrobatics or even with madness. To this latter category belong images of rope dancing, or tight-rope walking, dancing mad, and St. Vitus’ Dance, otherwise known as dancing mania, which was a kind of mass-hysteria characterized by an almost orgiastic impulse to dance and convulse. It is clear from these selections that the line between socially acceptable dance and Dionysian madness could be particularly thin.

By the end of her life, Emma Hamilton’s downfall produced the best example of schadenfreude imaginable for Europe’s high society. Poorly provided for in the wills of either her husband, Sir William Hamilton, or her lover, Lord Horatio Nelson, Emma Hamilton became increasingly desperate. After spending time in what essentially amounted to a debtor’s prison, London’s The Rules, a safe-zone of sorts for the moneyed gentry fallen on hard times, she fled England for Calais. She lived out the brief remainder of her days in poverty, fighting the physical effects of dysentery, which had also claimed the life of William Hamilton seven years earlier. She died impoverished, but with her daughter by Nelson at her side. 

Emma Hamilton Dancing is at the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT, from 16 October 2013 to 4 April 2014.