Visual Art as Celebrity Memoir: The Paradox of Peg Woffington’s Sick-bed Portrait

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ABSTRACTMargaret Woffington (1717?–1760) was one of the most popular actresses on the eighteenth-century English stage. She initially made her name in breeches roles, and as a versatile comedian, but would later re-train in classical tragedy. Brilliant and beautiful, she was discovered in 1730s Ireland, then blazed a trail through the London theatre scene until 1757 when she suffered a stroke while performing in As You Like It. Woffington never returned to the stage but lingered, bed-ridden, until her death in 1760. Throughout the 1750s and 1760s she was subject to titillating gossip and highly fictionalised memoirs that depicted her as a prostitute. While considering the aesthetic debate around sensibility described by Diderot in his famous Paradoxe sur le comédien, I look at how visual art might offer an alternative reading of this actress’s life—indeed, how portraiture can be considered a genre of life-writing because it offered actresses an opportunity to shape their images for public consumption (a relatively new phenomenon in the eighteenth century). Here I focus on an unusual portrait, Peg Woffington in Bed (circa 1758), by an unknown artist, arguing that this intimate scene was a shrewd autobiographical performance that brought the actress in line with a more sentimental age. A curious mixture of private and public, the painting not only affirms Woffington’s status as a formidable tragedienne but expunges perceived sexual misdeeds through the power of emotion.