Art and the Making of Celebrity

The cult of celebrity is a defining feature of our times: the media that create, support, and sometimes destroy celebrity figures have become so powerful and all-encompassing that today, one can be famous simply for being famous. In Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons, Heather McPherson, professor of art history at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, shows that it is in the eighteenth century that celebrity began to acquire its contemporary valence.

This welcome publication is the latest in McPherson's decades-long engagement with the question of celebrity, specifically at the intersection of theater and painting. It brings together some material that has previously been published as well as new research in order to shed light on the culture that produced and sustained celebrity, including the theatrical stage, the practice of portrait painting, the Royal Academy and other exhibitions, reproductive prints, and graphic satire. McPherson's focus on three key figures—the painter Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), and the actors David Garrick (1717–79) and Sarah Siddons (1755–1831)—goes beyond a mere analysis of the mechanisms that allowed them to attain and maintain celebrity status: it also reveals the overlap between the worlds of the studio and the stage, as well as the similarities in the social status and trajectories of these artists and actors. Her examination is supported and reinforced by the study of other figures from the period, as is exemplified by the cover, which features a detail from the portrait of actress Elizabeth Farren (ca. 1759–1829) painted by Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830).

McPherson draws on writings in the histories of art, the theater, and celebrity to reveal how visual arts and the theater came together to create celebrity status in the second half of the eighteenth century. She shows both the extent to which and the mechanisms by which reputations and visual representations were intertwined. She is particularly attentive to issues of gender, which made public display—whether on canvas or on the stage—a fraught terrain for women, as female portraiture was an unstable form, and actresses were often considered morally loose. With the blurring of public and private, portraits of female actresses became even more unstable sites. And as celebrity in the eighteenth century became increasingly media driven and feminized, McPherson argues, it became imperative for a figure such as Siddons to control her image, a word used here both in the sense of her reputation and of the visual representations of her.

In the book's introduction, "Studio and Stage in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons," McPherson specifies that she considers celebrity here not as a set of biographical studies, but rather "as a dynamic sociocultural phenomenon produced by a multidirectional matrix of factors, evolving over time, but also possessing a period-specific, culturally identifiable footprint" (7). She goes back to the Renaissance to trace the historical and social context in which the modern notion of celebrity developed, and insists that, in the eighteenth century, both the growing population and the expanding print media shaped celebrity. This was accompanied by the development of the theater and of exhibition spaces, spaces that involved seeing as well as being seen. As McPherson indicates, the term "celebrity," which is now both used as a noun and an adjective, first entered the dictionary in the mid-eighteenth century (9). She communicates to her reader right from the start the intricate relationships among the many different agents involved with the celebrity figures in the book. With the rise of the theatergoing public, for instance, Siddons became a marketable commodity, which profited portraitists such as Reynolds, whose representations of her helped elevate their own status as portrait painters; it profited the printmakers who produced reproductive prints after those portraits; this, in turn, increased her visibility, and thus her market value both as an actress and as a portrait subject. Each reputation, therefore, helped build and was built on the others.' Siddons's commodity status...