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  • Madame Récamier’s Serial Portraits: Celebrity as Cultural Currency
  • Heather McPherson (bio)

Mme Récamier was not the most beautiful woman in Paris, but the most in fashion. Her bizarre coiffure, her rare, almost mysterious appearances at the theater and in public places had given her…a celebrity that no other woman of her time possessed. All the English newspapers announced her arrival, and people came running from the three kingdoms to see the fashionable beauty.…Her portrait was sold everywhere.

Mathieu Molé, Souvenirs de jeunesse1

Madame Récamier’s renown is emblematic of the transformation of celebrity culture and its “feminine face” in the late eighteenth century.2 It also raises broader questions about how the celebrity apparatus operated and about the central role that images and the media played in producing and transmitting fame. How did an unknown banker’s wife from Lyon become the most celebrated beauty of the era and the toast of Europe? What factors help explain her meteoric rise and preeminence in the social stratosphere of post-revolutionary Paris? To what extent did Madame Récamier orchestrate the fabrication and dissemination of her image, and how did she retain her [End Page 163] cachet for over half a century? Adopting a cultural approach, this essay takes a closer look at the extraordinary international reach and durability of Madame Récamier’s celebrity, focusing on the reproduction and circulation of her image and the concept of serial portraiture.3 While other prominent women, such as Germaine de Stäel (1766–1817), achieved fame through intellectual, literary, or artistic accomplishments, or through marriage, as in the case of Joséphine Bonaparte (1763–1814), Madame Récamier (1777–1849) was famous primarily for her beauty and her ability to dazzle and charm. Writing in the 1820s, Etienne Delécluze expressed astonishment at Madame Récamier’s enduring celebrity and at the distinguished circle she continued to draw to her salon though she was no longer young and had lost her fortune.4

Neither inherited nor achievement-based, Madame Récamier’s celebrity was grounded, as Molé opined, in the convergence of beauty and fashion and in a complex dialectic of seduction and mystique, which was fueled by visual images and the media. In less flattering terms, some modern critics have characterized her beauty as “empty-handed,” or dismissed her celebrity as a “pseudo-event.”5 Although Madame Récamier’s legendary beauty is unrecoverable, the dazzling effects of her beauty and charm and the cult-like following she inspired were amply documented by her contemporaries and have continued to intrigue scholars.6 This essay reexamines how Madame Récamier’s public persona and celebrity were aligned with fashion and the neoclassical aesthetic, focusing on the celebrity apparatus and how her image was diffused and amplified through serial portraiture. I argue that her image, like her person, became a locus of public desire, which was widely reproduced and commodified, with celebrity functioning as cultural capital.7 The expanded reach of the press and the proliferation of images helped diminish the distance between celebrities and the public, fostering an intensified identification—a sort of “public intimacy.”8 The explosion of visual and print media, in conjunction with the public’s growing fascination with figures of art and fashion and the widespread preoccupation with theatrical staging and self-display, helped transform celebrity culture into a broad-based international phenomenon.9

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, portraiture dominated the thriving art market and played a central role in redefining selfhood and making personal identity legible, as Amy Freund has shown.10 During the 1790s, portrait painting became an arena for ambitious artists, like Jacques-Louis David, to showcase their talent at the annual Salons, and in turn, portraits by leading artists became highly desirable status symbols. As Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has argued, a new rhetoric focusing on female subjectivity, combining grand scale and intimate focus, emerged in the late [End Page 164] 1790s and early 1800s.11 In the case of Madame Récamier, portraitists had to contend with a meticulously fashioned “living work of art.”12 Fashion was an integral component of social and personal identity...

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