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  • "To Draw The Naked":Paintings of Female Character in Pope's An Epistle to a Lady and Montagu's The Turkish Embassy Letters
  • Joshua Grasso (bio)

Women appear everywhere in eighteenth-century England: as lovers, whores, thieves, servants, wives, daughters, and, as the century progresses, authors. Yet we rarely have the sense of seeing a woman as she might have seen herself. She is always glimpsed in the act of performance, an actress strutting across the stage dressed in the borrowed rags of Cleopatra, or in more demure circumstances, Diana. What did it mean to paint a woman as she truly was, without the artificial eye of a man editing, arranging, and satirizing her appearance? A visual example of this problem can be seen in Sir Joshua Reynolds's 1756 painting of Suzanna Beckford. Painted to commemorate her wedding, the portrait attests to Suzanna's immense wealth (inherited from her father, Richard Love) and her unquestioned social status. Yet it is less her turquoise dress and lace that astonishes us, than her pose: an imperious stance with one hand on her hip, as she stares commandingly "off stage," perhaps in the act of summoning her servant. David Mannings and Martin Postle remark that the pose, highly unorthodox for a woman, is clearly modeled on Sir Anthony van Dyck's portrait of William, Lord Russell (Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue). Is it not hard to see the "man" inside the woman, as we could easily replace the dress with a gentleman's outfit and periwig and disguise her sex. So what was he up to? Why flatter Suzanna Beckford in the borrowed clothes of a Dutch master and his decades-deceased lord?

Though Reynolds undoubtedly meant the allusion to appeal to his fellow artists and connoisseurs, I find it uniquely metaphorical for the role of women in eighteenth-century art. Who, after all, is Suzanna Beckford? Is she kind, virtuous, coquettish, cruel, unfeeling? By way of commentary, Reynolds places Suzanna not in a domestic setting but in a dramatic, Classical background. The darkness behind her only faintly swallows up stairs and Roman column on one side, and a drawn, voluminous curtain on the other. This is clearly a stage piece, with Suzanna as its most expensive prop. As a Rococo statue, she is enshrined both as an object of antiquity and an emblem of her husband's wealth (as if she were collected on the Grand Tour). She can now be admired, handled, critiqued, and made to enact, for all time, her part in the eighteenth-century marriage market. What her own thoughts were she never recorded. We are left with Reynolds's testimony, [End Page 5] which shows us a curious man-woman; on the one hand bold and imperious, on the other, a mere etude of the Dutch Masters. What seems to have interested Reynolds most about Suzanna was not the woman's true nature but her reflective properties. This is not a woman who lived per se, but a creation of pure art, embodying an aesthetic rather than a personality.1 We can no longer see the woman without the man, whether that man is van Dyck, Reynolds, or Mr. Beckford himself.

In this paper, I will examine two literary "paintings" of women, each one attempting to lift the veil of society to expose a woman's character to the world. In an age that questioned whether or not women had souls, could any artist see women objectively, as agents with their own characters, ideas, and aesthetics? As Alexander Pope writes in his famous study of women, An Epistle to a Lady (1735), "Artists! Who can paint or write, / To draw the naked is your true delight" (187-88). Pope uses "naked" in this sense to mean the disrobing of pride and pretence to show the true character of a sitter, which might be expressed in any number of roles or portraits. However, Pope fails to see women as artists in their own right, but creatures that men viewed, instructed, and painted according to fashion. Like Reynolds, he wanted women to reflect the ideas and philosophy of male society, and was not above brutally satirizing those who...

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