This exhibition is curated by Gill Perry, Professor of Art History at the Open University, whose most recent book is Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art and Theatre 1768-1820; and Lucy Peltz, the National Portrait Gallery’s Curator of Eighteenth-Century Portraits, who was reported in the Guardian as stating that the exhibition highlights ‘themes close to the Gallery’s heart – gender, identity, representation and the history of celebrity culture.’ For most visitors to The First Actresses, however, it is the pictures themselves that have drawn them to the National Portrait Gallery. The first room, a rather grey and sparsely-hung area, is concerned with what most theatre historians would consider to be the first actresses. The visitor is greeted by two paintings by Simon Verelst of Nell Gwyn, a singularly unattractive one of her in dishabille and another showing her half naked, both dating from the 1680s. The actress-dancer-singer Moll Davis, Gwyn’s rival both on stage and as the king’s mistress, is luckier here, being represented in a fine and beautifully-coloured portrait by Lely. These portraits, of course, were painted not because of their sitters’ fame as actresses or to promote their stage careers but because they were mistresses of Charles II. They date from some years after the actresses had left the stage. The only other painting in the room is John Ellys’s attractive image from the early 1720s of Hester Booth dancing in female harlequin costume. As Miss Santlow, she made her debut as an actress in 1709. The room also contains a print of Gwyn with her two sons by the king and Hogarth’s 1738 engraving of strolling actresses dressing in a barn. Portraits of early actresses are scarce, but in view of its title the exhibition could surely have included images of Anne Bracegirdle, Anne Oldfield and the great tragic actress Elizabeth Barry, who created the roles in Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage and Otway’s The Orphan and Venice Preserved in which Siddons later starred.

With the next room, ‘Covent Garden Ladies’, the exhibition jumps to the second half of the eighteenth century, with a number of beautifully-finished exhibition portraits, the most striking of which is Reynolds’s superb depiction of Frances Abington as the teenage Miss Prue in Congreve’s Love for Love, brought from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale. The exhibition’s website comments that the popularity of ‘breeches roles’ provoked lively debates about feminine decorum and the display  of women’s bodies on stage. Nevertheless, the two attractive images here of Dorothy Jordan in masculine disguise, as Hypolita (shown only half length) and as a softly romantic Rosalind, seem perfectly decorous. Strangely, this room also includes two actors in drag, David Garrick in the farcical scene he added to The Provoked Wife and the fencing master Henry Angelo as the elderly Mrs Cole in the afterpiece The Minor at his friend John Bannister’s  benefit in March 1792, Angelo’s one and only theatrical appearance. These two paintings are perhaps relevant to the chapter ‘Beauty, Ageing and the Body Politic’ in the accompanying book, but in the exhibition itself they make little sense. 

Sarah Siddons, of course, dominates the room entitled ‘The Actress as Muse’. Her 1804 portrait by Lawrence, from Tate Britain, confronts the visitor – a tremendous, more than life-size column in black velvet with red coral jewellery, Shakespeare’s and Otway’s works on the table beside her. Diagonally opposite is a studio copy from the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands Park of Reynolds’s famous Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, her pose based on Michelangelo’s figure of the prophet Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Reynolds exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy in 1784, asked 1,000 guineas for it and finally sold it for 700, a record price for one of his paintings. The comic muse is represented by Hoppner’s portrait of Dorothy Jordan as Thalia, supported by Euphrosyne repelling a satyr, from the Royal Collection. A room, then, of magnificent images of late 18th cenutry actresses that are more often seen only in reproductions. Hamilton’s enormous painting of Mary Wells in The Merry Wives of Windsor, much too large for its subject, seems out of place here and it would have been better replaced by the NPG’s own Sarah Siddons with the Emblems of Tragedy by Beechey. The room is completed with a rather solemn white marble bust of Elizabeth Farren as Thalia and a portrait of Elizabeth Inchbald, included in tribute to her career as a playwright as well as an actress. One whole wall of the next room, ‘Caught in the Act’, is given over to amateurs. Gillray’s satirical prints Dilettanti Theatricals and Pic-Nic Orchestra are on either side of a depiction, in gouache and chalk, of a trio of young ladies playing at being the three witches in Macbeth: a strange choice of subject since these roles were always taken by men in the theatre throughout the eighteenth century. The room also has six representations of actresses in character, three of which involve Frances Abington, including the famous screen scene from School for Scandal. This is the one painting here that shows us what the audience actually saw on stage.The others are valuable for costume and gesture, but not for stage sets – apart from the traditionally overturned chair in the closet scene from Hamlet.

The final room is rather strangely entitled ‘Divas and Dancers’, although the only performer here who might be thought of as a diva is the great singer Elizabeth Billington, rather ironically shown in a most un-diva-like pose, sitting quietly in white muslin with music drooping from her hand. (Gillray’s caricature of her as a plump, squalling and ostrich-plumed Mandane is included in the accompanying book but not in the exhibition.) The actress-singers Sophia Baddeley, Elizabeth Bannister and Anna Maria Crouch could certainly never be called divas. Gainsborough’s large full-length of Giovanna Baccelli, dancing in costume and stage make-up, invites the visitor into the room. Her lover, the Duke of Dorset, commissioned this portrait, and Judith Milhous, in her article ‘Picturing Dance in Eighteenth-Century England’ in Music in Art (2011), estimates that it cost the duke 100 guineas. Milhous shows there how very few dancers could afford to commission portraits of themselves. This must also apply to actresses, so it would have been interesting to have had some consideration of the financial dealings behind the images. This final room has one other dancer, Garrick’s wife Eva Maria, shown here with her husband in one of those paintings by Reynolds in which the deterioration of the lady’s face colouring is very marked. The much finer Hogarth double portrait, in the Royal Collection, shows a younger Mrs Garrick looking  much more the charming dancer she was before her marriage. The room also includes the concert singer Elizabeth Linley, painted at least twelve years after her marriage to Sheridan and consequent retirement from public performance. It is rather stretching things to regard Elizabeth Sheridan as an actress, but one of the pleasures of the exhibition is the chance to see Gainsborough’s enchanting, romantic image without making the journey to the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

An exhibition, then, with much to provoke thought and to interest and delight in its pictures of actresses of the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century. The wall captions and the book have a tendency to lecture the reader, and the book, alas, cannot be used as a catalogue to guide one around the exhibition, since it lists the images only as references to the book’s chapters and does not indicate their positions in the exhibition. It is fully illustrated, including many images not in the exhibition, and its essays by Gill Perry, Joseph Roach and Shearer West explore the ways in which actresses figured in the celebrity culture of the period. As a closing thought, why do the captions in the exhibition and in the book describe the double portraits with the actor’s name first? In an exhibition about actresses, should we not have ‘Elizabeth Hopkins as Gertrude, with William Smith as Hamlet’ and ‘Eva Maria Garrick, with her husband David’?