Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton, née Amy Lyons

A l'exposition Napoléon, à la Grande Halle de la Villette, son ennemi Horace Nelson.
( avec encore ses deux yeux, ce qui ne gâche rien ...   )

...   et ensemble, sur fond de Vésuve .

Présenté à l'occasion de la vente aux enchères Napoléon Bonaparte, The British Sale, organisée par la maison Bonhams, le 27 octobre prochain, à Londres :

A Berlin blue-ground tête-à-tête with depictions of Lady Hamilton, Admiral Lord Nelson's mistress
circa 1800
Reserved with pale yellow-ground panels depicting Lady Hamilton in various attitudes after the Antique edged with gilt husk bands and surrounded by foliate scrollwork pedestals, the blue-ground feet, shoulders and covers with gilt and pale pink bands, comprising: an oval tray, a teapot and cover, a coffee pot and cover, a milk jug and cover, a sugar bowl and cover, a tea canister with metal and cork stopper and cover and two covered cups and saucers, the tray: 35.4cm long; the coffee pot: 16.5cm high, sceptre marks in underglaze-blue, various impressed numerals and incised triangles, incised IIII to tray.

Provenance
The depictions of Lady Hamilton's attitudes are after prints by engraver Tommaso Piroli after drawings by Friedrich Rehberg. Another Berlin tête-à-tête depicting the same prints was sold at Christie's London, 9 July 2001, lot 267.


Lot Essay

Emma Hart (1765-1815), born Amy Lyon, was the daughter of a blacksmith who was raised by her mother and grandmother. She became the mistress of the Honourable Charles Francis Greville (1749–1809), second son of the Earl of Warwick, who introduced her to his friend, the painter George Romney, who made her his lifelong muse and started painting her in a variety of guises. Through the popularity of Romney's works of art and her striking beauty, she became well-known in society circles.

Eventually Greville decided to marry young heiress, Henrietta Middleton, and in due course persuaded his uncle, Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), the British Envoy at the court of Naples, to take on his mistress.
Sir William had met Emma in London during his last trip to the UK. Without telling Emma his plans Greville sent her and her mother to Naples in 1786, where Sir William put them up in an apartment at the Palazzo Sessa. After a while Emma realised Greville had cast her off and accepted her new status as Sir William's mistress. They eventually got married on 6 September 1791.

During her time as his mistress, she started performing her attitudes, a type of tableau vivant, posing in a gold-edged black box in various costumes and poses imitating the Antique. This new type of performance quickly caught on and charmed the upper classes of Europe.


In 1787 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited Sir William and wrote :  The Knight Hamilton has now found the peak of the joy of nature and art in a pretty girl. He has had a Greek gown made for her which clothes her perfectly, to which she lets her hair fall freely, takes a couple of shawls and does a mixture of poses, gestures, expressions etc., so that one thinks one is dreaming. Standing, kneeling, lying, serious, sad, coy, rakish, penitent, beckoning, threatening, fearful etc., one follows the other. He finds in her all the Antique, all the pretty profiles of Sicilian coins, even that of the Belvedere Apollo (quoted from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italienische Reise - Ausgabe beider Bände (reprint 2016), pp. 165f.).


In 1798 Lady Hamilton famously began an affair with Lord Nelson, which would last through her husband's death in 1803 until his death in 1805. She fell deeply into debt trying to keep up her position in society, eventually moved to France and died not long after in 1815.


* Source et infos complémentaires : Bonhams London - Napoléon Bonaparte, the British Sale



Exemples de gravures de Tommaso Piroli desquelles sont repris les décors de ce service en porcelaine :

Emma, Lady Hamilton's Attitudes, Plate VIII
Tommaso Piroli
1794
Engraving and etching on ochre prepared paper
26.2 x 20.2 cm (sheet of paper)
Image : The Royal Collection Trust

Description
A print of Lady Hamilton, in one of her famous 'attitudes'. She stands with a young child, holding a tambourine above her head. Emma, Lady Hamilton, performed her classically-inspired 'attitudes' from 1787 to audiences of invited guests in Naples, where her husband Sir William was British Envoy.
In 1794, the attitudes were the subject of a set of engravings by Tommaso Piroli, here printed on ochre prepared paper to echo the Greek vase paintings on which Lady Hamilton based her act. This print is one of a set of twelve plates produced by Piroli after Friedrich Rehberg.

Provenance:
Purchased by King George IV when Prince Regent from Colnaghi and Co, 15 April 1816


Emma, Lady Hamilton's Attitudes, Plate III
Tommaso Piroli
1794
Engraving and etching on ochre prepared paper
26.3 x 20.1 cm (sheet of paper)
Image : The Royal Collection Trust

Provenance:
Purchased by King George IV when Prince Regent from Colnaghi and Co, 15 April 1816

Emma Hamilton, c'est un personnage que j'aime beaucoup ! J'ai un faible pour ceux qui ont créé leur destin, fut-ce avec des moyens peu honnêtes.
J'ai écouté le podcast de Ferrand et vu le "Secrets d'Histoire" qui lui a été consacré, plusieurs fois même, c'est une émission parfaite pour coudre ou broder ^^ Mais j'avoue que je préférais les émissions d'il y a quelques années, quand ils montraient des extraits de films plutôt que des évocations au ralenti...

Prochainement en vente aux enchères...

Emma Hamilton as a Bacchante, wearing classical dress, pouring from a Greek vase
Robert Fagan (1761 - 1816)
oil on canvas
unframed: 96.5 by 76 cm.; 38 by 29⅞ in.


Catalogue note

Robert Fagan was born to an Irish family, from Cork, in around 1761. He grew up in Covent Garden and enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy Schools in 1781. In 1783 he travelled to the Continent, visiting France and the Low Countries and eventually reaching Italy in 1784. He settled in Rome where he worked as a portrait painter, and in 1790 he married seventeen-year-old Anna Maria Ferri, the beautiful Italian daughter of an employee of Cardinal Rezzonico, and they lived together in the artist's quarter of Via Babuino. (1)

Fagan was soon seduced by the excavations that were taking place in Italy, and in 1794, he started to ship classical works of art to England. He became a close acquaintance of Sir William Hamilton, British Ambassador to Naples, who advised him during the French invasion of northern Italy in 1796 and eventually appointed him as an agent to protect and recover all English property following the war.

Emma Hart married Sir William Hamilton in London in 1791 but they lived together in Naples. Emma, originally a working-class girl from the Wirral, had been the muse of George Romney, the fashionable British portrait painter. Renowned for her beauty and her classical features, she was unsurprisingly a popular model for visiting artists in Naples.
French artist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who travelled there in 1790, painted Emma several times, including as a Bacchant (2) and as Ariadne, commenting on ‘her great quantity of beautiful chestnut hair’.

During the 1790s, Fagan had become well-known for painting British aristocratic women, and accounts record him as having painted Lady Clifford, Mrs Villiers (later Lady Clarendon), Lady Malden and Lady Webster (later Lady Holland).

In Fagan’s portrait of Emma Hamilton, she is dressed as a follower of Bacchus, the Greek God of wine and festivity. Holding a graceful pose, she gestures elegantly towards the wine she pours onto the hot, steaming coals below. Fagan paints her hair gathered by a red and gilt-thread headband, on which an ivy garland rests. Emma stands in a frontal pose with a strong and unfaltering stare.


Fagan’s painting shows Emma adopting one of her so-called ‘attitudes’, a series of poses in which she played out scenes from classical works of art. (3)
Regularly taking on the guise of powerful women from ancient literature, her intense performances as figures such as Medea and Circe became popular with large audiences of grant tourists in Naples.

The German poet and antiquarian Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited Sir William and Emma at Palazzo Sessa in 1787, where he describes the set she created for such performances: ‘I was greatly intrigued by a chest which was standing upright. Its front had been taken off, the interior painted black and the whole set inside a splendid gilt frame. It was large enough to hold a standing human figure, and that, we were told, was exactly what it was meant for… standing against this black background in dresses of various colours, [Emma] had sometimes imitated the antique paintings of Pompeii and even more recent masterpieces’.(4)

On the same visit, Goethe describes a ‘secret treasure vault’, full of antiquities, from which Emma has selected a red-figure oinochoe for this pose, which dates to the fifth century BC, and a decorative bronze tripod.

There is another portrait of Emma Hamilton by Robert Fagan which shows her in the less distinguished guise of a Neapolitan peasant and is signed ‘Roma 1793’. (5)

Notes :

1. A portrait of Anna Maria Ferri by Robert Fagan is in Tate Britain.

Anna Maria Ferri, the Artist’s First Wife
Robert Fagan
Oil on canvas, c.1790–2
Image : 2021 Tate Images

2. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante


Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
1790-2, oil on canvas c. 1790-92
Image : Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool.

3. Her attitudes are depicted in drawings by the Italian artist Pietro Antonio Novelli.

The Attitudes of Lady Hamilton
Pietro Antonio Novelli (1729 - 1804)
pen and brown ink on laid paper
Image : 2021 National Gallery of Art  

4. J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey 1786-1788, translated by W. H. Auden and E. Mayer, London 1962, pp. 15-16.

5. Portrait of Lady Emma Hamilton as a Neapolitan Peasant

Portrait of Lady Emma Hamilton as a Neapolitan Peasant
Robert Fagan
oil on canvas, 1793
1793, oil on canvas
45 x 36 cm., private collection
Image : Web Gallery of Art

* Source et infos complémentaires : Sotheby's London - Auction Irish Art (23 November 2021)

Merci pour ces partages cher LNLN, même si je goûte assez peu le dernier portrait

Gouverneur Morris a écrit:

Ses poses et personnifications furent si célèbres qu'ils en devinrent des motifs de décoration, jusqu'en Prusse :

clichés personnels

En écho avec le service que tu as posté juste au dessus LNLN

Vu à l'expo Angelica Kauffmann :




clichés personnels

Mais quel délicieux tableau ! Merci, cher Momo. Il n'y a pas, dans toute sa fascinante galerie de portraits, deux Lady Hamilton qui se ressemblent, mais qu'à cela ne tienne la belle inspirait les artistes.

Ah ! Merci pour cette image du portrait que je regrettais, deux pages en amont, de ne pas avoir retrouvé :

La nuit, la neige a écrit:Comme je suis en ce moment dans les portraits peints par Angelica Kauffmann, j'en profite pour poster ici une étude du visage de la belle Emma Hamilton :

Portrait of Emma Hamilton
Angelica Kauffmann
Drawing, c. 1791
At lower right, inscribed (partially effaced) "[...] Drawing / by Angelica Kauffman / of Lady Hamilton / sometime aft. 1792" in graphite.
Photo : The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pour l'instant, je n'ai malheureusement pas retrouvé l'image du portrait abouti peint par l'artiste. Il est en collection privée. Nous pouvons cependant l'imaginer grâce à cette gravure :


Lady Emma Hamilton as Thalia
After painting by Angelica Kauffman
Engraving by Raphael Morghen, 1797
Photo : Thorvaldsensmuseum.dk

Il suffisait de le demander à notre grand reporter ! Merci...

Oh je suis ravi alors

Et nous donc!

J’espère que je ne fais pas une redite…

J’apprends, au détour de la bio de la Du Barry par Emmanuel de Waresquiel, que son portrait en Sybille par EVL fut commandé par le duc de Brissac  Le parallèle que cet historien ne peut que faire ensuite entre les deux courtisanes est très intéressant.