Today is national Museum Day. For theater fans, allow me to strongly recommend a stroll around the Thomas Lawrence exhibit on the second floor of the Yale Center for British Art.
The show is extravagantly labeled Regency Power and Brilliance, but the hype is warranted because Lawrence was the coolest celebrity portrait artist of his day. This was a time before paparazzi—“Excuse me, sir, could you climb this hill and stay there the rest of the afternoon so that I might paint you in an indecorous posture?”—but Lawrence brings some of that vitality to his work. His paintings also became the late 18th century equivalent of pin-up posters. The Yale show demonstrates how his works were turned into stipple engravings and mass-produced.
There’s no doubt that Lawrence was besotted with the rich and famous.
The painting which greets you at the start of the exhibition—first major American retrospective of ol’ T.L. in nearly 20 years—exemplifies the sort of subject matter that attracted him. It’s of Elizabeth Farren. She was destined to become the Countess of Derby. But when this painting was done in 1790, she was known as a leading actress of the London stage. She’d played Miss Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer in 1777 (when that Goldsmith comedy was already a few years old), Lady Teazle in Sheridan’s A School for Scandal and Lydia Languish in the same playwright’s The Rivals, Betty Modish in Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband, every Shakespeare heroine from Juliet to Portia to Twelfth Night’s Olivia and dozens of other major roles at major Drury Lane theaters.
Lawrence paints Farren not onstage but outdoors, in a climate which may be hard to clarify—it seems cloudy, sunny, windchilled and warm all at once. Whatever weather it is, she seems inappropriately dressed for it. She’s pulling a wrap up around her neck, is a little hunched as if warding off the elements, and her gown drags along the dirt.
In short, she’s acting, creating a character who may be in the wrong place in a questionable costume but is nonetheless captivating. Thomas Lawrence gets her innate drama queenliness. His painting of her caused a sensation. And it still does.
While Lawrence naturally gravitated to commissions from the high-born and titled, he had a natural affinity for famous performers. The Yale exhibit has you craning your neck to read the descriptive cards posted by each grand portrait, so you can figure out who these impressive-looking folks were. The YCBA has arranged many wonderful displays of 18th and early 19th century portraits, but their previous exhibit which this Thomas Lawrence one most reminds me of is the Lord Snowdon photo show the museum hosted in 2001. There’s that same sense of the artist enhancing an already rich personality, rather than vainly trying to make somebody look better than they are.
Elizabeth Farren isn’t the only actor on view. She’s not even the only one to become a countess after Lawrence painted her. Among the other theater types:
• Emilia, Lady Cahir (“Later Countess of Glengall”), who apparently indulged in amateur “country-house theatricals.” In this unfinished portrait, Lawrence is attempted to throw her as three distinct characters.” A pencil note on the canvas says he’s done it “in a fit of folly.”
• British theater superstar Sarah Siddons (shown in a print by William Say fashioned after a Thomas Lawence painting), posing with her hand on a copy of a book of plays by Thomas Otney.
• Siddons’ brother John Philip Kemble, in the role of Cato the Younger for the hit play about the Roman statesman by Joseph Addison. The play had been around for about a century when Kemble helped build his reputation as a heroic leading man with it. Lawrence’s portrait is huge and glowing, like a close-up in a Technicolor movie.
I’ve visited the YCBA’s Thomas Lawrence exhibit over a dozen times since it opened in February. When it closes on June 5, it will feel like the theater season is really over.