In another delve into the world of Georgian society, Barrie Sheppard introduces us to Miss Kitty Fisher. Barrie writes: The NGV has its Cleopatra about to drop her pearl of greatest price into a flute of vinegar, done to impress a sceptical Mark Anthony looking on.
So does Kenwood House, that beautiful edifice on the edge of Hampstead Heath in London, remodelled by Robert Adam in the 18th century – remember Brian Martin’s superb photograph of it a few weeks back.
It is “Miss Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl”, painted by Joshua Reynolds in 1759. Miss Kitty was twenty (or twenty-one) at the time; Reynolds was 36.
The three-quarter-length portrait shows Kitty, seated, about to drop the pearl into a small tureen she holds on her lap. Turned away and looking doleful, she appears unable to look at what she is about to do. Around her shoulders she wears a dark shawl thrown back from her shoulders to reveal her bare neck and chest down to the line of her bosom, Her forearms are bare too. The neckline of her dress is trimmed, appositely, with an edge of encrusted pearls. Her elegant fingers dropping the pearl are masterly rendered.
Kitty was a notorious attention-seeker – an “attention whore”, as some described her. Preposterous stories about her attention-seeking behaviour abounded. She was said to have made a sandwich with a 100 pound note, and to have hidden the diminutive Lord Mountford under her hooped petticoat to spare him a confrontation with the imposing Lord Sandwich, a much larger and intimidating man.
She was also a whore of another kind. The Town and Country Magazine claimed she was introduced to the life of a courtesan by Augustus Keppel, 1st Viscount Keppel, a close friend of Reynolds. Another publication, the Public Advertiser, published an outrageously indecent account of her goings on, titled “The Juvenile Adventures of Miss Kitty F – r”, She, unwisely, replied, denying of course, its accusations the effect of which was counterproductive, stirring its readers to eagerly await more in a subsequent edition.
Tom Taylor, 19th Century journalist and editor of Punch, wrote of her that she was “the most celebrated Traviata of her time”, identifying her with Violetta, the courtesan in Verdi’s opera La traviata.
Reynolds’ pocketbook (work diary) of 1759 records more than 20 sittings for the portrait. Generally, he required just two or three at the most; So much time did she spend at his studio, that some believed she acted as his model; some suspected she was his mistress.
Reynolds painted her many times before her premature death in 1767. The last, an unfinished portrait, is held in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. It is, according to David Manning, Reynolds’ late twentieth Century biographer, Reynolds’ most “overtly erotic” portrait.
Leonard Smelt, sub-governor to the royal princes, once commented to Reynolds that he wondered if he, Reynolds, was able to “resist the allurements of the beauty which daily exhibited itself in his painting room”. Reynolds replied that, just as Shakespeare’s gravedigger Hamlet said he had grown callous (indifferent) about death, so he, Reynolds, had grown callous about beauty because of his frequent contact with it.
It wasn’t so easy for Reynolds’ friend, the widowed Samuel Johnson. When David Garrick, actor and Director of the Drury Lane theatre, staged Johnson’s play Irene, Johnson told him during the season that he would no longer come backstage because “the breasts and silk stockings of your actresses excite my genitals”.
Thanks , Barrie – enough said!