The Photographic Portraiture of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry

Abstract

In the late Victorian period, portraits of performers held an uneasy position in the longue duree between the eighteenth century, when portraits of actors were regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, and the late twentieth century, when celebrity head shots became a symptom of the global obsession with famous people. Nearly 200 years separate Reynolds’s portrait of Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1789) from Andy Warhol’s silk screen depictions of Marilyn Monroe of the 1960s. In the meantime, the way that portraits were made, what they signified and how they drew upon the aura that surrounds performers changed exponentially. Reynolds’s portrait of Sarah Siddons is an iconic image, encompassing a range of referents from Aristotle to Michelangelo, and echoing the seated frontal pose favoured in portraits of kings and queens. The production of this portrait drew upon the burgeoning fandom of the late Georgian period: its creation was surrounded with apocryphal tales of the sitting itself - tales that resonated well into the nineteenth century when Henry Irving referred to the portrait in several of his many speeches and William Quiller Orchardson painted an imaginary glimpse of Siddons in Reynolds’s studio.1 Reynolds’s portrait was also copied and reproduced in numerous engravings designed for an elite public eager for an image of their favourite actress.