'Mdlle Parisot', John Raphael Smith after Arthur William Devis, copyright Victoria and Albert Museum.
By SARAH McCLEAVE
The tale of Mlle Parisot’s London reception holds two further images to consider. The featured image is a portrait drawn by Arthur William Devis (1762-1822). Depicting her in the guise of Hebe, goddess of Youth, it is a tribute to Parisot’s grace and elegance; although the beauty of her figure is evident, the painter appears to celebrate rather than exploit the dancer. A contemporary report, however, could not refrain from alluding to Parisot’s disreputable entourage:
Devis is engaged upon a Portrait of the beautiful PARISOT. It is to be a whole length, and there is already an active competition between old Q. [Lord Queensbury] and Lord G[rosvenor] who shall be the happy possessor.
True Briton, 10 June 1796
The nudge and wink of the newspaper notice may also point to a scheme to finance the portrait, which as a full-length image would normally be commissioned by a funder with deep pockets. Is it likely that an auction was intended to sell the original image? We can safely assume that Parisot herself did not commission it: her salary at 300 guineas per annum would not stretch to such luxuries and she was also reputedly supporting her mother and sister in France.1) And yet we can understand why she might want to encourage such an enterprise: Gillray’s satirical print of May 1796 – in which she appears as a saucy nymph encouraging the attentions of the married Didelot – would have been very damaging to her personal reputation. A serious portrait and its subsequent engravings could promote her on more flattering terms. For Devis, an artist who has recently returned from India, this project may have been imagined as a means to establish himself in a crowded London market. The connection to engraver and publisher John Raphael Smith (1751-1812) would have been particularly welcome, for the older artist was highly regarded in his trade, with a very successful publishing business. While Smith’s role implies an anticipation that the engravings of this prominent stage performer would sell well, finding a buyer for the original portrait would have been a bit of a gamble: the nearest precedent we have in the London art market of the period is the 1782 full-length portrait of Giovanna Baccelli by Thomas Gainsborough — but Baccelli was at that time living with John Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset, who commissioned or paid for at least two further portraits and a sculpture of that dancer during the course of their relationship. Parisot, according to the press of her day, stoutly discouraged the attentions of her elderly admirers so they lacked a lover’s genuine interest in commissioning the portrait. Grosvenor was in fact an avid art collector, but a surviving catalogue of his collection does not list any images of Parisot.2) Queensbury was better known for his interest in women and horses, and the extent of his art collection (if any) is currently unknown.
‘Mademoiselle Parisot’, Charles Turner after J.J. Masquerier, copyright Victoria and Albert Museum.
The racier image above, drawn by John James Masquerier, is a curious affair. According to the National Portrait Gallery, “John Masquerier was an accomplished portraitist who enjoyed a wide practice among the intellectual and artistic communities at the turn of the nineteenth century.” The bare bosom seems a direct reference to Parisot’s stage costumes rather than an inevitable feature of Masquerier’s style. (For comparison see his more respectful portraits of Emma, Lady Hamilton, or the actress/singer Rosoman Mountain, née Wilkinson.) Parisot’s bared teeth further suggests an intended salaciousness; it is difficult to credit that she would have willingly posed in this manner. Indeed, the portrait does not demonstrate the level of finish we find in the studio works by Masquerier, and it is plausible to speculate that he took a sketch of Parisot at the theatre, and when committing it to paint freely assigned a costume and facial expression that would maximise its commercial appeal amongst a certain clientele.
Parisot’s exploitation (this is a more apt word than ‘promotion’) in the visual arts is aptly conveyed by the image below, which conveys details of the bust portion of caricatures and portraits of herself and other female contemporaries as discussed in the blogs on this dancer. The Devis portrait suggests her artistic legacy; the remaining images tell us something of the times in which she lived.
For Parisot’s salary, see the True Briton [1793], 21 Mar. 1796; for her family situation, see “News.” Oracle, 18 Aug. 1796. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection, Gale. Accessed 21 Sept. 2021.
2. Westminster, R. Grosvenor., Young, J. (1820). A catalogue of the pictures at Grosvenor house, London: with etchings from the whole collection. London: Pub. by the proprietor.
Two interesting points arise from a closer examination of Richard Newton’s caricature of Parisot. It would be natural to take at face value the engraved titling of this print:
The impression in the British Museum adds the year 1796 but if you look closely (and you can!) you will see that the date is added in manuscript – though there is the ghost of an engraved date which certainly ends in a “6”. In the impression held in the Theatre Collection at Harvard the full date survives – “ … April 28 1796” though the “8” has been overwritten in ink to show an “0”. This is all very strange but if we apply George Chaffee’s dictum “Always read the image” I think we can explain away the anomaly in the engraved date.
If we look at the image – what do we see – we see Mlle Parisot dancing with two figures in the stage box but who are they? Well the British Museum impression, again in manuscript has the addition of “D. of Queensbury” and we might expect to see him as he appeared, and appeared readily identified, in a previous print which bears the titling “A Peep at the Parisot! with Q in the Corner!/ I Cruikshank / London Pub May 7 1796 by S.W. Fores No. 50 Piccadilly.” In that print he is also using a Dollond monocular to look up the dancer’s skirt. The second occupant of the box who is also observing the dancer through a glass is also readily identifiable – it is Shute Barrington (1734-1826), Prince Bishop of Durham – he whose intervention in a Lord’s debate on Divorce brought down a cascade of caricatures when he attacked French Opera Dancers
who by their allurement of the most indecent attitudes, and most wanton theatrical exhibitions, corrupted the people.
The Parliamentary Register, vol. 5 (London: J. Debrett, 1798). Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
The problem arises when we find that the noble prelate made his speech on 2nd March 1798, two years after the supposed engraving of the print!
I think that the solution is that Newton’s print was engraved in 1798 and fraudulently dated 1796 to match the Cruickshank caricature – subsequently the erroneous date was erased from the plate and in the case of the British Museum impression someone who knew of the existence of the earlier date simply attempted to restore it. It makes every pictorial sense that this print belongs with those of the well documented 1798 costume controversy.1
The Royal Collection contains a drawing which has been catalogued thus:
Mademoiselle Parisot, a ballet dancer, is watched by 2 old men, Duke of Queensbury and Barrington, Bishop of Durham (?). Copy of the print BM Sat. 8893.
I’m afraid I have not seen this drawing ‘live’ but (again through excellent internet access) I think that this is undoubtedly the original drawing by Newton for the print and not a copy made from it. It would make no sense to shift the figure in making a copy of the print and in any case the drawing is clearly very superior to the subsequent engraving and a most charming (and presumably more accurate) portrait of this dancer.
Detail of the Houghton Library copy of Newton’s ‘Mademoiselle Parisot’.
A Harvard impression gives “Oxford St April 20th [or 28th ] 1796″ which has been removed in the British Museum impression – I suspect that it was published in 1798 with a false date – hence its removal from the plate – why? Goodness knows.
Notes
Rauser, Amelia. 2020. The Age of Undress: Arts, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s. Yale University Press, pp. 84-85. Editor’s note: This source betrays the conflation of events relating to Mlle Parisot in 1796 and 1798 as observed above by Cavers.
Next post
‘Portraits of Mlle Parisot’ by Sarah McCleave will appear on 27 February.
On 15 October 1740, Barbara Campanini (billed as ‘La Barberini’) made her London debut at Covent Garden. The bills show her dancing with George Desnoyer and announce the performance as ‘the first time of her appearing on the English stage’.1 The performance was commanded by the King and attended by George II with his son Prince William and his daughters the Princesses Amelia, Caroline and Louisa. The bills do not tell us what the new Italian prodigy danced.
La Barbarina (as she is usually called) had, in fact, arrived in England some months earlier. She had made notable appearances at Cliveden on 1 and 2 August 1740 before Frederick, Prince of Wales and his wife Augusta. According to a report in the London Daily Post for 5 August 1740, the main entertainment was ‘a Dramatic Masque call’d Alfred, written by Mr. Thomson, in which was introduc’d Variety of Dancing, very much to the Satisfaction of their Royal Highnesses and the rest of the Spectators’. The royal couple were said to have been particularly impressed with ‘the Performance of Signora Barberini (lately arriv’d from Paris) whose Grace, Beauty, and surprising Agility, exceeded their Expectations’. Her engagement for these performances must surely have involved George Desnoyer, dancing master to Prince Frederick and his family.2
The Italian ballerina’s engagement by Covent Garden preceded her appearance at Cliveden for it was under discussion as early as December 1739.3 The Daily Gazetteer for 25 July 1740 printed ‘Part of a Letter from Mr. Rich to a Friend’ dated from Paris on 16 July 1740 which showed that an agreement had already been made:
Dear Sir,
I reached Paris on Friday last, and the next Morning went with your Friend Mr. — to pay a Visit to the Signiora Barberini: And not to enter into the Particulars of our Treaty, I shall only tell you at present, that we have agreed and signed Articles, and she sets out with me for England in four or five Days. I am, Sir,
Your Obliged Humble Servant,
John Rich
The Daily Gazetteer’s reporter added that the dancer ‘happens to be an Italian Beauty, who greatly surprised the French Nation with her elegant Performances in the Opera at Paris last Winter’.
Signora Barbarina had made her debut at the Paris Opéra on 14 July 1739 dancing in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Fêtes d’Hébé. The composer had written an entrée vive, a loure, a minuet and a gavotte to show off her virtuosity.4 Her debut was reported in the Mercure de France for July 1739:
La Dlle Barbarina, a young dancer from Parma, hardly sixteen years old, drew a great crowd, with an Entrée that she danced with many graces, as well as precision and lightness; she performed entre-chat à huit with surprising vivacity, and the style of her dancing is in the same line as Mlle Camargo.
The writer drew attention to her many attractions, adding that these allowed one to believe that ‘she would become a dancer of the first rank, if she wasn’t already’.5 In the August issue, the Mercure de France provided another report of Signora Barbarina’s dancing. This time she had given a pas de deux after Les Fêtes d’Hébé partnered by another Italian dancer (who was not named but was presumably her teacher Antonio Rinaldi, known as Fossano):
These two excellent sujets are generally applauded by an enormous crowd: it must be admitted that one could see nothing so surprising and singular as this pantomime and burlesque dancing.
These reports reveal that the dancing skills La Barbarina brought to London were both technical and expressive.
Barbara Campanini danced at London’s Covent Garden Theatre from October 1740 to April 1741, before returning to the Paris Opéra for some months. She was back at Covent Garden in October 1741 and stayed until May 1742, although she was absent from the stage from November until mid-January apparently because of illness. La Barbarina returned to London for the 1742-1743 season, dancing in the Italian operas at the King’s Theatre, her last stage appearances in England. For the purposes of this post, I will concentrate on her two seasons at Covent Garden.
Barbara Campanini was not the first Italian performer to come to London, although almost all her predecessors had been first and foremost exponents of the commedia dell’arte and not virtuosic dancers. She marked a change which would take root over subsequent decades.
Initially, the bills were silent as to the dances given by La Barbarina and Desnoyer, but on 3 November 1740 they were advertised in the duet Italian Peasants. This was easily their most popular dance, with at least 20 performances during the 1740-1741 season, and may have come from La Barbarina’s own repertoire. Italian Peasant dances quickly became established on the London stage, perhaps as a result of her performances. Also popular was the Tirolese or Tyrolean Dance ‘between a Hungarian and two Tyroleans’, first given by La Barbarina, Desnoyer and Haughton on 28 November 1740. This had twelve performances in 1740-1741 and another eight in 1741-1742, although it seems to have had no lasting influence in London. Was La Barbarina the Hungarian with the two men as the Tyroleans, or was the piece more complicated than that? The music for Italian Peasants and the Tyrolean Dance was included in the first volume of The Comic Dances by Johann Adolf Hasse and others published in 1741. The music for both of these dances has three sections, each with a different time signature, giving them the form of a short suite.
Over the course of her two seasons at Covent Garden, La Barbarina performed in some fifteen solo, duet or group dances as well as three afterpieces. Her solos included a Louvre, first given on 20 December 1740 and repeated a number of times during the season. It may, possibly, have been the dance she performed in Paris to Rameau’s specially composed loure for her in Les Fêtes d’Hébé. The duet Louvre ‘and Minuet’ that she performed several times with Desnoyer and others, almost always at benefit performances, was probably Pecour’s Aimable Vainqueur which had become a favourite in London’s theatres. There was also her Tambourine, generally given as a duet with Desnoyer, which has attracted notice from several scholars in recent years.
While these dances may have come from, or been closely related to, La Barbarina’s own earlier repertoire, the group dance the Rural Assembly may have owed as much (if not more) to her partner Desnoyer. This ‘new Grand Ballet’ was introduced on 21 January 1742 within a performance of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It was subsequently performed within As You Like It and The Way of the World before settling into the entr’actes alongside a variety of mainpieces. Desnoyer was a ‘Chasseur’ supported by dancing ‘Pastors’ and Shepherdesses, while La Barbarina was a ‘Nymph of the Plain’ accompanied by a ‘Cottage Nymph’ (danced by her sister Signora Domitilla) with ‘Two Nymphs of the Vale and a Sylvan’. This ‘Grand Ballet’ had 26 performances between 21 January and 2 June 1742 but was not revived subsequently, probably because of the loss of its two leading dancers (Desnoyer retired from the stage at the end of the season, while La Barbarina returned to London only to dance at the King’s Theatre). The music, published in the second volume of Hasse’s Comic Tunes, again has three sections but seems too short to support what was apparently quite an ambitious divertissement if not a short pastoral ballet.
Over her two seasons at Covent Garden, La Barbarina appeared in three afterpieces. Pan and Syrinx, given on 16 and 17 December 1740, may well have been a small opera – perhaps that by Theobald and Galliard last given during the 1726-1727 season. Orpheus and Eurydice (first performed on 24 October 1741) was described in the bills as ‘a New Dramatic Entertainment of Dancing combin’d with a New Pantomime in Grotesque Characters’ in which she danced yet another Nymph. The Royal Chace was a popular pantomime, but according to the newspaper advertisements La Barbarina seems mainly to have performed her most successful entr’acte dances alongside it. Although, on 2 February 1741, she was billed as a Garden Nymph within the cast list and on 6 February the advertisements included ‘a new Dance between a Garden Swain and Nymph’ by her and Desnoyer. In all, she danced within or alongside The Royal Chace at 26 performances during 1740-1741.
How did Barbara Campanini dance in these entr’acte choreographies? In particular, what was it about her style and technique that provoked William Hogarth to depict her as well as Desnoyer so cruelly in his satirical sketch ‘The Charmers of the Age’?
‘The Charmers of the Age’, Richard Livesay after William Hogarth, Wikimedia Commons.
There is a question mark over Hogarth’s sketch, for the original does not survive and we have only an etching made nearly twenty years after the artist’s death. The sketch has been dated to 1742, when La Barbarina and Desnoyer were dancing together in London and Hogarth (presumably) saw them on stage. Although they are depicted side by side, they cannot be said to be dancing a duet for Hogarth shows them in quite different positions. Both are apparently jumping, but in such different styles that it is hard to escape the conclusion that Hogarth was simply exaggerating what he most disliked about their respective techniques.
Although he included the figure of Desnoyer in several other works, this was Hogarth’s only image of La Barbarina. She is shown in the air with her legs in a wide second position, which might relate to the modern step known as pas échappé or she could be executing an entrechat beginning and ending in that position – unless Hogarth was deliberately visualising her in a step from the Italian grottesco tradition that he had seen performed by others. The point of the image is actually the opportunity it provides for an obscene pun, with the artist capitalising on La Barbarina’s virtuosity to achieve this. Hogarth set out his views on dancing in his 1753 treatise An Analysis of Beauty. His preference was for ‘serpentine or waving lines’ rather than the rigidly straight limbs in ‘The Charmers of the Age’. He also gave as his opinion that ‘such uncouth contortions of the body as are allowable in a man would disgust in a woman’, suggesting that his sketch was also intended to reveal La Barberina’s dancing as too expansive and forceful – too masculine – for his taste.
During her career, the ballerina was the subject of several portraits. The best-known of these is probably the full-length, life-size portrait by Antoine Pesne, painted around 1745 not long after she had been engaged to dance for Frederick II in Prussia.
Portrait of Barbarina Campanini by Antoine Pesne. Wikimedia Commons.
La Barbarina is shown dancing in an elaborate dress overlaid with a leopard skin. She holds a tambourine aloft in her left hand and seems to be gesturing to it with her right. Her head is turned slightly to her right although she looks out of the canvas at her audience. Her feet and legs replicate those of La Camargo in Lancret’s famous portrait now in the Wallace Collection in London, although the positions of her arms and upper body differ. Was Pesne making a mute comparison between the two ballerinas, or had Camargo’s pose already been adopted as emblematic of a stage dancer? Apart from the energy and sense of movement in La Barbarina’s figure, Pesne’s portrait only hints at the ‘surprising Agility’ of this Italian prodigy that so disturbed William Hogarth.
Notes
1) Information about performances, including quotations, is taken from The London Stage 1660-1800. Part 3: 1729-1747, ed. Arthur H Scouten (Carbondale, 1965), unless otherwise indicated.
2) Moira Goff, ‘Desnoyer, Charmer of the Georgian Age’, Historical Dance, 4.2 (2012), 3-10.
3) For these earlier negotiations, which reveal that La Barberina was to be engaged for two seasons at Covent Garden, see Lowell Lindgren, ‘Musicians and librettists in the correspondence of Gio. Giacomo Zamboni (Oxford, Bodleian Library. MSS Rawlinson Letters 116-138)’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 1991, No. 24, 1-194 (pp. 175-176).
4) For the additional dances, see under ‘Campanini, Barbara’, in A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, edited by Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans (Carbondale, 1973-1993); also, see under ‘Barbarina, La’ in International Encyclopedia of Dance, edited by Selma Jeanne Cohen (New York, 1998). Study of the musical sources, however places the revisions before Barbarina’s arrival, ‘from 23 June [1739] with rev[ised]. 2nd entrée’; see under ‘Rameau, Jean-Philippe: Works’, by Graham Sadler and Thomas Christensen in Grove Music Online, retrieved 22 December 2021 from https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000022832.
5) Mercure de France, July 1739, p. 1632: ‘la Dlle Barbarina, jeune Danseuse de Parme, qui n’a pas seize ans accomplis, attira un très grand concours, par une Entrée qu’elle dansa avec beaucoup de graces, & plus encore de justesse & de legereté; elle passe l’entre chat à huit avec une vivacité surprenante, & son caractere de danse est dans celui de Mlle Camargo’, ‘qu’elle deviendra une Danseuse du premier ordre, si elle ne l’est déja’. Translations by the author.
6) Mercure de France, August 1739, p. 1850: ‘Ces deux excellens Sujets sont generalement aplaudis par un concours prodigieux: it faut avoüer qu’on n’a peut être encore rien vû, dans ce caractere Pantomime & burlesque, de si surprentant ni de si singulier’.
7) For Italian dancers in London, see Sarah McCleave, ‘Danzatori italiani a Londra nel settecento’, La Danza Italiana 3, ed. José Sasportes (2011), 63-136.
8) Johann Adolf Hasse, The Comic Tunes &c. to the Celebrated Dances. Book I (London, [1741]), pp. 16-21. See also Judith Milhous, ‘Hasse’s “Comic Tunes”: some dancers and dance music on the London stage, 1740-1759’, Dance Research, 2.2 (Summer 1984), 41-55.
9) The ballroom dance Aimable Vainqueur, choreographed by Guillaume-Louis Pecour to music from Campra’s opera Hésione, was first published in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation in 1701. It was regularly republished until 1765 and was often performed at benefit performances in London’s theatres until the 1770s.
10) For a short discussion of the tambourin with references to other accounts of the dance, see Samantha Owens, ‘“Grace, Beauty, and Surprising Agility”: Representations of Barbara Campanini, 1742-1748’, in With a Grace not to be Captured: Representing the GeorgianTheatrical Dancer, 1760-1830, ed. Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorp (Turnhout, 2020). Music and Visual Cultures 3, 105-119 (pp. 105-107).
11) Hasse, The Comic Tunes &c. Book II (London, [1741]), pp. 8-9.
12) The attribution to Hogarth is accepted by Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works (London, 1989), no. 153.
13) For the figure of Desnoyer in ‘The Charmers of the Age’ and other works by Hogarth, see Moira Goff, ‘The Celebrated Monsieur Desnoyer, Part 2: 1734-1742’, Dance Research, 31.1 (2013), 78-93 (pp. 89-90).
14) Raoul Auger Feuillet, Chorégraphie (Paris, 1700), p. 86, ‘Table des Entre-chats et demy Entre-chats’.
15) William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, 1997), p. 110.
16) For a survey of the surviving portraits of Barbara Campanini, see Owens, ‘“Grace, Beauty, and Surprising Agility”’, pp. 113-119.
Images
‘The Charmers of the Age’, caricature of Barbarina Campanini and Desnoyer. Richard Livesay (engraver) after William Hogarth. Published by Richard Livesay [London], 1 March 1782. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.
2) Portrait of Barbarina Campanini by Antoine Pesne (Circa 1745). From the collection at Sans Souci Palace, Potsdam. Photographer unknown. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.
Next post
‘Watching the Nautch Girls of India’, by Aryama Bej, will appear in January 2022.
‘Mrs. Wybrow, [Charles] Hayter del. – [Richard] Cooper sculp’
It is certainly a mark of contemporary celebrity to have had a souvenir image to hand on to future generations, perhaps even more so in dance as it is in large part a visual medium; yet, there are many dancers, even important ones, who were famous in their day but have no identified pictorial remembrance. Mrs Wybrow, the subject of this blog, has a single known image preserved for posterity – though of course somewhere (if it survives) the original miniature by Charles Hayter (from which the engraving was made), may be hiding – and there may of course be further images as yet undiscovered.
Mrs Wybrow made her London debut on 1st July 1787, and in distinguished company: she was billed dancing with James Harvey D’Egville, his younger brother George, and Maria Theresa De Camp the niece of the formidable Madame Simonet, (she who danced Medea for both Vestris and for Noverre). Mrs Wybrow was then a young Miss Blanchet, and if her age (52) is given correctly when she died in 1826,1 she made her debut aged about 12. Since child dancers were generally introduced to the stage at around the age of 5 or 6, Clarissa Blanchet’s debut seems rather late; St Paul’s burial records indicate that she died aged 48, which would place her debut at the more reasonable age of 9 years. Miss Blanchet (sometimes Blanchett) was recorded as the pupil of Peter Daugeville, father of James and George, then Ballet Master at Drury Lane, however she had been formally indentured as an apprentice to Gabriel F Giroux ballet- master of the Theatre Royal Haymarket.2 None of her billing sports the “pupil of ” which commonly advertises a juvenile debut.
Juvenile dancers – often the children of performers – mostly had a direct connection to the theatre in which they performed. The ballet-master would begin their training for the stage and, with his own students, would form both a ready-made juvenile corps de ballet ‘on stage’ (and an informal teaching establishment ‘off’), most of which would be handed on to the new ballet-master when his predecessor moved on. If the juvenile dancer was formally apprenticed, or a private pupil, they would naturally move on with their original master. Private pupils and apprentices would expect to receive training to a professional standard with a percentage (probably a large one) of any salary they might make due to their master whilst under pupillage or indenture. James D’Egville, who brought a bevy of young pupils to any theatre where he was employed, secured by this means a considerable extra income. The other side of this arrangement enabled young dancers to gain stage experience, to say nothing of exposure (both professional, and personal); for any dancer who showed promise there were many opportunities to catch the eye of potential managements, potential husbands or even ‘protectors.’
In 1788 Clarissa Blanchet danced regularly with the young D’Egvilles and Miss De Camp at Drury Lane, and the following season with James Byrne at Covent Garden. She returned to Drury Lane as a dancer and actress in the winter of 1791, though her role of “Queen of the Amazons” in David Garrick’s ‘dramatic romance’ Cymon may have been more of a mime role.
Early in her career young Miss Blanchet was taken up by a soldier, one Captain Morris, with whom she lived for some years before her marriage to William Wybrow. For any moderately successful female performer the decision to live with a partner rather than marry them was more often a practical rather than a moral dilemma: the moment any woman married all of her property, including her person, became the absolute property of her husband. On the death of Mr. Wybrow, Clarissa lived with the (notorious) Earl of Craven. She married again on 22nd July 1810 to a Henry Foley of Manchester at St George’s Hanover Square; later (sometime before August 1812 ) she was married again – to an Attorney, called Dobson; and after his demise to a Mr White “whose name she died with.”3 The many gaps in her performance record may indicate a withdrawal from the stage due to marriage; if so, none were of long duration and she was even billed as dancing at the Sans Pareil Theatre on the night before her marriage at St George’s.
Mrs Wybrow’s subsequent career was as one of the great Columbines of her generation — in the Theatres Royal; on the English Boards (the minor London theatres); and in the many Circuses where pantomimes and ballets were common fare during this period. She is often noticed in newspaper accounts which begin to be more regular and more detailed during her lifetime:
… [at] the SANS PAREIL THEATRE, in the Stand; and what renders the attraction doubly powerful is the never-to-be-equalled gracefulness of Mrs. Wybrow’s Columbine (Morning Advertiser, Tuesday 28 August 1810).
Outside London Mrs Wybrow’s career is more difficult to follow, and it is possible that she was dancing on the Continent, or closer to home but under a different name. She was certainly dancing in Dublin in 1810 with some of the pupils of her old dancing partner James D’Egville:
The comic Pantomime of Cattles [Castles?] in the Air succeeded; out is irresistibly laughable, and kept the audience almost in a continued roar. Mrs. Wybrow in Columbine Cowslip, transcends any thing conceived hitherto perhaps in this country of that species of performance. She is the first in her line that has appeared on [the] Dublin stage. Her vivacity, attitudes and agility, excited uncommon admiration and delight (Dublin Evening Post, Tuesday 23 January 1810).
And, later that same year, in Manchester, when she may well have met her second husband:
Mrs. Wybrow’s Night. Bradbury’s Amphitheatre, Spring Gardens,. MANCHESTER. … In the course of the evening (by particular Desire and for that Night only), Mrs WYBROW will dance her admired Broad Sword Hornpipe, as originally danced by her at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden (Manchester Mercury, Tuesday 29 May 1810).
Off stage she was also recorded as “having run a respectable lodging house in Villiers Street, Strand.”4 Shortly before her death, the former Mrs Wybrow was living on Finchley Common, travelling to her London home in Tavistock Row (by Covent Garden Market) for medical treatment where she died. Her remains were buried on the 6th of July 1826 only a few yards from her home in the yard of St Paul’s Covent Garden – ‘The Actors Church.’
From an ‘Opera Centric’ point of view Clarissa Wybrow (née Blanchet) could be considered a minor player in 18th and 19th century dance – but her celebrity during her lifetime is clear and the legacy of her Columbine – particularly in partnering James Byrne’s pivotal Harlequin – set a standard for dancing in the wide range of venues in which contemporary audiences could always be sure to find dancing of the first quality.
Notes
1) The Examiner, Sunday 30 July 1826.
2) Indenture payment recorded (Middlesex) on 3rd November 1785.
3) Obituary, Oxford University and City Herald, 29 July 1826.
4) Obituary, Oxford University and City Herald, 29 July 1826.
Image
First print: Published by E. Orme. 30th March 1808; second print: Published by John Bell Southampton Street, Strand. March 1st 1813.
Next post
Moira Goff’s post on Barbarina Campanini will appear on 24th December 2021.
In An Essay towards an History of Dancing, John Weaver had described Scenical Dancing as ‘a faint Imitation of the Roman Pantomimes’.1 In his scenario for The Loves of Mars and Venus, he explained the accomplishments of these performers from classical antiquity to his audience:
… these Mimes and Pantomimes were Dancers that represented a Story or Fable in Motion and Measure: They were Imitators of all things, as the Name of Pantomime imports, and perform’d all by Gesture and the Action of the Hands, Fingers, Legs and Feet, without making use of the Tongue. The Face or Countenance had a large Share in this Performance, and they imitated the Manners, Passions, and Affections, by the numerous Variety of Gesticulations.
Weaver went on to refer to the ‘Rules of the Drama in their mute Performances’ and to their ‘confining each Representation to a certain Action, with a just Observation of the Manners and Passions, which that Action naturally produced.’2
These quotations provide clues to the skills he prized in Hester Santlow, who he elsewhere praised as
a Dancer … where Art and Nature have combin’d to produce a beautiful Figure, allow’d by all Judges in our Art to be the most graceful, most agreeable, and most correct Performer in the World.3
Weaver surely needed little persuading that she was a performer who had a mastery of the ‘Force and Beauty of graceful Motion, and handsome Gesture’ – skills that were the foundation of Scenical Dancing.4
There are two scenes in The Loves of Mars and Venus for which Weaver prescribes specific gestures: scene two in which Venus and Vulcan perform a ‘Dance being altogether of the Pantomimic kind’; and scene six in which Mars, Venus and Vulcan express a series of Passions as Vulcan enjoys his revenge. In both Weaver builds the action around the contrasting gestures of Venus and Vulcan.
In scene two, the passacaille is succeeded by ‘a wild rough Air’ and the Graces and Cupid run off leaving Venus alone on stage. The scene takes on a very different atmosphere:
Enter to Venus, Vulcan: They perform a Dance together; in which Vulcan expresses his Admiration; Jealousie; Anger; and Despite: And Venus shews Neglect; Coquetry; Contempt; and Disdain.
This is the dance ‘of the Pantomimic kind’. On the following pages of the scenario, Weaver describes the gestures used by Vulcan and Venus. There are nine for Vulcan, expressing more powerful and varied Passions than the five for Venus, which are mainly variations on the theme of rejection. Put together, they show the progress of this mute argument, which begins with Vulcan’s Admiration of his beautiful wife and ends with a gesture of Detestation towards him by Venus as she leaves the stage.5 The pair could have moved through some conventional dance figures and even performed some steps with their successive gestures, although the music would surely not have conformed to a particular dance type.
Scene six brings Weaver’s ‘Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing’ to a conclusion as Vulcan exacts his revenge on his wife and her lover and their fellow deities enter as witnesses:
Vulcan shews them his Prisoners. Shame; Confusion; Grief; and Submission, are discover’d in the Actions of Venus; Audacity; Vexation; Restlessness; and a kind of unwilling Resignation; in those of Mars. The Actions of Vulcan, are of Rejoicing; Insulting; and Derision.
None of Vulcan’s actions are included among the gestures described on the last page of the scenario, although the Shame, Grief and Submission of Venus are there. Here, the three leading characters probably performed their actions and gestures simultaneously without really moving round the stage, until Neptune persuades Vulcan to forgive Venus and Mars and they are reconciled before the final Grand Dance.6
Weaver apparently drew on John Bulwer’s rhetorical treatises Chirologia and Chironomia, first published together in 1644, although this source seems to have been overlooked by researchers.7 Rhetoric, of course, provides a link to acting. Another such link is Charles Gildon’s The Life of Thomas Betterton published in 1710, which refers to some of the gestures described by Weaver.8
As an actress as well as a dancer, Hester Santlow would have been familiar with many of the gestures that Weaver describes. During the 1716-1717 season, she played 21 different acting roles (the majority of which were in comedies) and among them were 14 roles that she kept throughout her acting career. Her ‘line’ in tragedy was the pathetic heroine, such as Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Selima in Rowe’s Tamerlane, both plays were staples of the repertoire. In comedy, she was often cast as the young, witty heroine, for example Harriet in Etherege’s The Man of Mode and Angelica in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple. These roles, in particular, provide clues to her representation of Venus in Weaver’s The Loves of Mars and Venus. It is worth noting that both Selima and Harriet had earlier been played by the singer-actress Anne Bracegirdle, who had acted and sung Venus in Motteux’s The Loves of Mars and Venus. Motteux’s masque was one of Weaver’s sources for his ballet and he may well have seen Mrs Bracegirdle as Venus.9
Etherege’s The Man of Mode provides some hints towards Mrs Santlow’s performance of Venus’s ‘Coquetry … seen in affected Airs, given her self throughout the whole Dance’.10 In the first scene of act three, Harriet and Young Bellair feign courtship and he advises her how to behave:
At one motion play your Fan, roul your Eyes, and then settle a kind look upon me.
…
Now spread your Fan, look down upon it, and tell the Sticks with a Finger.
…
Clap your hand up to your bosom, hold down your Gown. Shrug a little, draw up your Breasts and let ‘em fall again, gently, with a Sigh or two,
…
Clap your Fan then in both your hands, snatch it to your Mouth, smile, and with a lively motion fling your Body a little forwards. So—now spread it; fall back on the sudden, cover your Face with it, and break out into a loud Laughter—take up! Look Grave, and fall a fanning yourself—11
Such a sequence, practised when she played Harriet, provided a store of actions that Hester Santlow could draw on for the Coquetry of Weaver’s Venus.
There are very few illustrations of actors and actresses in performance before the late 18th century, so it is difficult to demonstrate visually a link between Weaver’s gestures and Mrs Santlow’s acting skills. Frontispiece illustrations to plays developed significantly when John Bell began to publish Bell’s British Theatre from 1776.12 Among the plates made to accompany Bell’s editions are two that suggest the continuity of the conventions governing gestures. One shows Ann and Spranger Barry as Selima and Bajazet in Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane.
Frontispiece plate from Nicholas Rowe, Tamerlane (London, 1776), in Bell’s British Theatre, Vol. 3.
The scene is from act five and Mrs Barry as Selima is suing for mercy.13 The other shows Mrs Hartley in the title role of Rowe’s Jane Shore.14 Hester Santlow never appeared in the play, but Mrs Hartley’s gesture, from act four, is recognisably Weaver’s Detestation which he describes as a ‘more passionate Form’ and a ‘redoubled Action’ in which ‘both the turn’d-out Palms are so bent to the left side, and the Head still more projected from the Object’.15
Frontispiece plate from Nicholas Rowe, Jane Shore (London, 1776). Bell’s British Theatre, Vol. 1
Gestures similar to Weaver’s can also be found in Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia published in London in 1806. For example, he describes and depicts Shame which ‘in the extreme sinks on the knee and covers the eyes with both hands’ and ‘Mild resignation’ which ‘falls on the knee, crosses the arms on the breast, and looks forwards and upwards to heaven’, adding in both cases that he is showing a ‘feminine expression’ of the Passion.16 Writing some 90 years after Weaver, it is reasonable to assume that Austin is referring to conventions that had changed significantly. Yet, there are enough resemblances within his gestures between Austin’s gestures, those that can be seen in 18th-century depictions of actors and Weaver’s descriptions to suggest a continuous tradition. Austin’s mention of the ‘feminine expression’ of particular Passions opens the possibility that Hester Santlow used her own conventions of gesture, from her work as an actress, in The Loves of Mars and Venus. The action in John Weaver’s ‘Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing’ may have owed more to her than we can ever know.
NOTES
1) John Weaver, An Essay towards an History of Dancing (London, 1712), p. 168. All of Weaver’s published works are reproduced in facsimile in Richard Ralph, The Life and Works of John Weaver (London, 1985), to which references will also be given. For this quotation see p. 665.
2) John Weaver, The Loves of Mars and Venus (London, 1717), pp. x-xi. Ralph, John Weaver, pp. 739-740.
3) John Weaver, Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (London, 1721), p. x. Ralph, John Weaver, p. 869.
4) Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. xi. Ralph, John Weaver, p. 740.
5) Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, pp. 20-23. Ralph, John Weaver, pp. 752, 754-756.
6) Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, pp. 27-28. Ralph, John Weaver, pp. 760, 762.
7) John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the naturall language of the hand … whereunto is added Chironomia: or, the art of manuall rhetoricke (London, 1644). Studies of Bulwer’s treatises have focussed on the influence of his sign language in the teaching of deaf people, they await detailed scrutiny by historians of acting as well as dancing.
8) See Ralph, John Weaver, pp. 135-136 for Gildon and Weaver’s Essay.
9) For Mrs Santlow’s acting repertoire in relation to The Loves of Mars and Venus see Moira Goff, ‘In pursuit of the dancer-actress’, in Women’s work: making dance in Europe before 1800, ed. Lynn Matluck Brooks (Madison, Wis., 2007), 183-204 (pp. 191-194).
10) Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. 22. Ralph, John Weaver, p. 755.
11) George Etherege, The Man of Mode (London, 1676), pp. 35-36.
12) See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, The publication of plays in London 1660-1800 (London, 2015), chapter 6.
13) Nicholas Rowe, Tamerlane (London, 1776)
14) Nicholas Rowe, Jane Shore (London, 1776)
15) Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. 23. Ralph, John Weaver, p. 756.
James Roberts (artist) and John Thornthwaite (engraver), frontispiece plate from Nicholas Rowe, Tamerlane (London, 1776) in Bell’s British Theatre, vol. 31. Copy courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Queen’s University Belfast.
On 2 March 1717, The Loves of Mars and Venus a ‘Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing’ by John Weaver was given its first performance at Drury Lane. The new afterpiece was innovative and even experimental, for it told the story of the love affair between Mars and Venus and the revenge taken by Venus’s husband Vulcan using only dance and mime, with no spoken or sung words to explain the plot or the action. Weaver himself was Vulcan, with the dancer Louis Dupré as Mars and the dancer-actress Hester Santlow (1693 or 1694 -1773) as Venus. In his scenario, published to accompany performances of the entertainment, Weaver acknowledged ‘I have not been able to get all my Dancers equal to the Design’.[1] The one performer in Weaver’s cast who was undoubtedly equal to his demands was Hester Santlow. She would continue to play Venus in revivals of the afterpiece until 1724 and she would take leading roles in both of his subsequent ‘Dramatick Entertainments’, as Eurydice in Orpheus and Eurydice in 1718 and Helen of Troy in The Judgment of Paris in 1733. Mrs Santlow seems to have been central to John Weaver’s attempts to reform stage dancing in London.
In An Essay towards an History of Dancing, published in 1712, John Weaver devoted his final chapter to ‘Modern Dancing’. He provided his own analysis of genres of stage dancing, proposing the reform of English theatrical dance by adopting what he called ‘Scenical Dancing’. He described his new genre thus:
Scenical Dancing, is a faint Imitation of the Roman Pantomimes, and differs only from the Grotesque, in that the last only represents Persons, Passions, and Manners; and the former explains whole Stories by Action.
According to Weaver, ‘Grotesque Dancing’ was ‘wholly calculated for the Stage and takes in the greatest Part of Opera-Dancing’. He linked grotesque dancing to the principal characters of the commedia dell’arte, referring to their performers as ‘modern Mimes inimitable’. Weaver also mentioned ‘Serious Dancing’, which he defined in terms of skill rather than the expression he saw as integral to the other two genres.[2]
Hester Santlow had begun her career as a dancer at Drury Lane in 1706, making her debut as an actress at the same theatre in 1709. By the 1716-1717 season, she was both a leading dancer and a leading actress with the company and able to draw on a repertoire of more than twenty-five dramatic roles as well as a range of both serious and grotesque entr’acte dances.[3] Mrs Santlow’s most popular entr’acte dance was a solo Harlequine and there are many depictions of her as this character, the best-known of which is now among the theatre collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
We have no corresponding portrait of her as a serious dancer, although some of the choreographies that she performed were recorded and published in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation. These give us an idea of the professional dance skills that Hester Santlow brought to the role of Venus in Weaver’s ballet. As an actress, Mrs Santlow would have had a variety of expressive gestures at her command. She had all the performance skills needed to excel in Weaver’s Scenical Dancing.
Weaver’s afterpiece has six scenes. Venus first appears in scene two:
After a Simphony of Flutes, &c. the Scene opens and discovers Venus in her Dressing-Room at her Toilet, attended by the Graces, who are employ’d in dressing her. Cupid lies at her Feet, and one of the Hours waits by. Venus rises, and dances a Passacaile: The Graces joyn her in the same Movement, as does also the Hour.[4]
The scenery, from the theatre’s existing stock, may have placed Venus in a setting more suited to the heroine of a Restoration comedy than the goddess of love, but her passacaille must have been intended to evoke the sophistication and grandeur of French opera. Hester Santlow’s repertoire as a dancer-actress had made her familiar with both.
No music (with the possible exception of one tune) and no choreography for The Loves of Mars and Venus are known to survive, so we must look to other sources to envisage Weaver’s new afterpiece.[5] He later ascribed the music for The Loves of Mars and Venus to Henry Symonds and Charles Fairbank, with Fairbank (who was also a dancer) responsible for the ‘musical Airs of the Dancing Parts’.[6] It is possible, if not likely, that Fairbank made arrangements of existing music as well as supplying new compositions of his own. He might well have turned to a French passacaille as a dance already familiar to London audiences.
Although she is not billed as dancing a passacaille until 5 April 1720 (when she performed a solo for John Weaver’s benefit), Hester Santlow had become familiar with the form as early as 1706, when she danced a duet with Mrs Elford choreographed by Anthony L’Abbé to the passacaille from Lully’s opera Armide. L’Abbé later created a solo for her to the passacaille from Desmaret’s opera Vénus & Adonis, which she may have performed around the time of The Loves of Mars and Venus.[7] L’Abbé’s choreography hints at dancing expressive of ‘Persons, Passions, and Manners’ as well as exploiting Mrs Santlow’s technical skills. It reveals the qualities she would have brought to her performance as Venus in Weaver’s ballet and provides clues to the choreography she performed in scene two.[8]
Anthony L’Abbé, Plate one, ‘Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis’
Venus has two more dances in Weaver’s ballet, an Entry in scene four and a final Grand Dance in scene six. Scene four is set in ‘A Garden’, although Weaver characterises the action as ‘alternate, as representing Love and War’. The Entry is begun by the four Followers of Mars, who are joined by the Graces (and presumably the Hour as well) and then by Mars and Venus. Although Weaver prescribes no specific gestures, he obviously saw this dance as expressive, for he describes how ‘the Fire, Robustness; and Strength of the Warrior is seen mixt with the Softness and Delicacy of Love’ adding that the dance concludes ‘with every Man carrying off his Woman’. It may have been a suite of dances, beginning with the Followers of Mars and culminating in a duet between Mars and Venus before finishing with all ten dancers together. Hester Santlow and Louis Dupré had been the lead couple in the group dance Myrtillo, first given at Drury Lane on 14 October 1715 within the afterpiece Myrtillo and Laura but soon performed separately in the entr’actes. The surviving music for this dance is a suite.[9] Since at least six of the ten dancers in the Entry in scene four of The Loves of Mars and Venus also danced in Myrtillo, there is the possibility of a connection between the two.
The Grand Dance which ends The Loves of Mars and Venus is performed by ‘Mars, with the rest of the Gods, and Goddesses’.[10] Weaver leaves us to infer that this is a piece of serious dancing, symbolising the restoration of harmony between the deities after Vulcan has forgiven Mars and Venus. Such Grand Dances already had a long history on the London stage, with notable examples in the dramatic operas of Henry Purcell (which Weaver is likely to have known). There were nine performers in his Grand Dance, suggesting that Mars, Vulcan and Venus may have danced singly and together, with the other deities forming a corps de ballet. Mars and Venus, if not Vulcan, will surely have provided a display of French serious dancing for the stage.
The Loves of Mars and Venus was performed forty-four times between 1717 and 1724. The dancers who performed Mars and even Vulcan (Weaver’s role) changed over that period, but Hester Santlow retained the role of Venus. She went on to take the leading female roles in Weaver’s subsequent dramatic entertainments of dancing, showing his dependence on her skills as both a dancer and an actress.
Other dancing masters at Drury Lane acknowledged her mastery by casting her in leading roles within new afterpieces which tried to emulate Weaver’s. She was Daphne in John Thurmond Junior’s Apollo and Daphne; or, Harlequin’s Metamorphoses, given on 20 February 1725, and Andromeda in Roger and Weaver’s Perseus and Andromeda: With the Rape of Colombine; or, The Flying Lovers, given on 15 November 1728. Roger choreographed the serious part of Perseus and Andromedaand later cast Hester Santlow as Diana in a pantomime afterpiece, Diana and Acteon, which he created for his own benefit performance on 23 April 1730. It is possible to see her dance-drama skills being deployed in two of the entr’acte dances she performed with her last dancing partner George Desnoyer, the Grand Ballad d’Amour and Le Chasseur Royal given during the 1731-1732 season.[11]
John Weaver visited and worked in London intermittently after 1712. Scenical dancing was used and developed in Drury Lane’s afterpieces and entr’acte dances by Hester Santlow, and her performances influenced dancing at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and elsewhere. As the leading dancer and a leading actress at Drury Lane for more than twenty years she ensured the ultimate success of Weaver’s reforms in London’s theatres.
Notes
[1] John Weaver, The Loves of Mars and Venus (London, 1717), p. x. All of Weaver’s published works are reproduced in facsimile in Richard Ralph, The Life and Works of John Weaver (London, 1985), to which references will also be given. For this quotation see p. 739.
[2] John Weaver, An Essay towards an History of Dancing (London, 1712), pp. 162, 164, 168. Ralph, John Weaver, pp. 655, 658, 665.
[3] For details of Mrs Santlow’s career, see Moira Goff, The Incomparable Hester Santlow (Aldershot, 2007).
[4] Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. 20, Ralph, John Weaver, p. 752.
[5] The country dance tune ‘Mars and Venus’ in The Dancing Master: or, Directions for Dancing Country Dances. The Third Volume (London, [1728?]), p. 31, and its possible inclusion in The Loves of Mars and Venus is discussed by George Dorris, ‘Music for the Ballets of John Weaver’, Dance Chronicle, 3.1 (1979), 46-60 (pp. 50-53). The tune is also associated with the actor Henry Norris, who may have been one of the Drury Lane ‘Comedians’ who danced the Cyclops in Weaver’s ballet in 1717.
[6] John Weaver, Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (London, 1721), p. 143, also reproduced in Ralph, John Weaver, p. 1017.
[7] Goff, Hester Santlow, p. 79. For the notation, see Anthony L’Abbé, A New Collection of Dances. Originally published by F. le Roussau London c.1725, intro. Carol G. Marsh (London, 1991), pls. 46-56.
[8] Moira Goff, ‘Imitating the Passions: Reconstructing the Meanings within the Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis’, Preservation Politics: Dance Revived, Reconstructed, Remade, ed. Stephanie Jordan (London, 2000), pp. 154-165.
[10] Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. 27. Ralph, John Weaver, p. 760.
[11] Hester Santlow’s repertoire and her contribution to dancing on the London stage is discussed in detail in Moira Goff, ‘Art and Nature Join’d: Hester Santlow and the Development of Dancing on the London Stage, 1700-1737’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 2000).
Next Post
‘Hester Santlow “Scenical Dancing”: The Drama’, by Moira Goff, will appear on 24 November.
James Gillray, ‘Modern Grace, or the operatically finale to Alonzo e Cora’. From the New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/81e29940-b1a1-0133-dea2-00505686a51c.
In spring 1796 Parisot continued to attract interest, not only for her own comely person, but for her relationships with others. James Gillray’s print as shown above depicts (from left to right) Madame Rose Didelot, Charles-Louis Didelot, and Parisot in the finale to the King’s Theatre’s May 1796 production of Alonso e Cora (chor. Giacomo Onorati).
This print is a caricature on several levels; first, let’s consider the movement style of the dancers. Rose Didelot, described in one source as the ‘last of the old school, la belle ecole de VESTRIS’ (1), is depicted in a relatively upright pose reminiscent of the noble style. Parisot – described as offering ‘less formal graces’ (2) – is seen in a more extended attitude. But it is the dynamic between the dancers that is the actual focus of the caricature. Mme Didelot’s husband is orientated completely towards the younger dancer, with his hand and foot forming a suggestive frame that points to Parisot’s genital region. Parisot’s head is inclined flirtatiously towards Didelot while Mme Didelot looks on in evident disapproval. The exposure of one of Parisot’s breasts was a comment on her scanty costumes, which weren’t necessarily of her choice. The perhaps too acute Gillray adroitly portrays a dynamic.
Despite the very public nature of this pictorial comment, no crisis was reported regarding the Didelots’ marriage, and all three dancers returned to the King’s Theatre in autumn 1796. In May 1797 the King’s Theatre staged a new ballet, Sappho and Phaon, that can in retrospect be considered another document in the story of this ‘love triangle’. Didelot is advertised as the choreographer, and is clearly credited as the creator in the published scenario (3). In this publication, Didelot himself describes the mythical story of Sappho:
The celebrated Sappho left nothing to posterity but a few pieces of poetry … We only learn that she loved Phaon, and that he was ungrateful; left her for one of her pupils; returned to her more through pride than love, and abandoned her once more– that she followed him even to Sicily, and that, unable to gain his heart, she threw herself into the deep from the rock of Leucate (4).
Didelot saw fit to cast his wife as the unloved Sappho, and himself as the ‘ungrateful’ Phaon. He used the Advertisement of the ballet scenario to point out that he decided to make the mythically beautiful Sappho ugly, in order to highlight the moral allegory in his imagined denouement, and to render Sappho ‘more interesting [and] to show the goodness of her heart’ (4). Quite.
In another flash of gifted casting, Parisot featured as the goddess of love Venus; her character was moved to tutor the famously beautiful Phaon in the arts of love in the opening scene. Indeed, the scenario afforded the character of Phaon the opportunity to make love to each of three female leads (the third was one of the Hilligsbergs) during the course of the ballet – hence its title-page designation as a ‘ballet érotique’. And while Sappho is offered the chance of revenge under Venus’s protection in Didelot’s dénouement, we might wish to note that she explicitly rejects the possibility of Phaon’s death, or even the milder punishment that he be rendered ugly. One can appreciate the appeal of a ballet where a philandering lover meets no consequences for Monsieur Didelot. And who can blame a man who would stray from an ugly partner? This piece of art was mirroring life all too closely, for by August both the Courier (8 August) and Observer (13 August) breathlessly reported:
There has been a fracas between some of the dancers at the Haymarket, on account of an illicit pas de deux. The enchantress was none other than the divine Parisot; and of the forsaken one it may be said, in the phrase of Shakespeare:
Against the blown Rose
They do stop their nose,
That kneel’d unto the buds.
Within days, Parisot is reported as returning to the continent (Morning Chronicle 16 August 1797). When the non-renewal of her contract was announced, the True Briton (18 November 1797) declared that the ‘gratification of the public’ was not taken into account, revealing that Parisot, ‘the greatest attraction of last year’, had offered ‘her services’ for the coming season. The choice of language here (gratification, services) is suggestive, although not as overtly so as this grotesque anticipation of Parisot’s marriage that was published during the performance run of Didelot’s ‘ballet érotique’:
Madame PARISOT is going to enter into the holy state of Matrimony before next winter. She will be able to exhibit some new motions and attitudes (5).
The reception of this young dancer in words and images during her first stint in London reveals some troubling trends in then-current attitudes towards young, nubile female dancers. Parisot was fodder for the press and the caricaturists, an objectified body for elderly peers of the realm to covet, and a pliant conquest for an older, married colleague. And it was she who took the rap for their affair, being obliged to leave a position upon which she and her family were financially dependent. #MeToo. #Parisot. To be continued.
Notes
‘London’, St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post 4-6 May 1797. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection. Gale.
True Briton 29 May 1797. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection. Gale.
True Briton 5 May 1797. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection. Gale. See also C.L. Didelot. 1797. Sapho & Phaon: grand ballet erotique, en quatre actes. Composé par M. Didelot. Et donné pour la Iere fois sur le Théâtre du Roi, Hay-Market, le 6 avril 1797. La musique composée par M. Mazzinghi. Les décorations par M. Greenwood. Les habits par M. Sestini. De l’imprimerie de Baylis , 15, Greville Street, Holborn. Se trouve chez A. Dulau and Co. Wardour – Street. Soho. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Didelot, ‘Advertisement.’
Morning Post (London), 16 May 1797. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection. Gale.
Image
Modern grace, or the operatical finale to the ballet of Alonzo e Caro [sic]; [London], H. Humphrey, 1796 / J[ames] G[illra]y d[elineavit] et f[ecit. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. (1796 – 1840). Irina Baronova collection of dance prints Retrieved from https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/81e29940-b1a1-0133-dea2-00505686a51c. Accessed 23 October 2021.
Next post
The first of a pair of posts on the dancer Hester Santlow, by Moira Goff, will appear on 10th November.
Mlle Rose Parisot (1777?-after 1837) was a young French dancer whose reception in London is well documented in the contemporary press, and also through satirical prints as well as two portraits. From her King’s Theatre début in February 1796 she attracted attention for her looks and the physicality of her movement, as this Morning Chronicle review (10 Feb. 1796) reveals:
Madamoiselle PARISOT, a new dancer from Paris … is a most beautiful figure, about 18 years of age, and with a face full of expression. A little divertissement has been got up to introduce her to the public, and she displayed powers in the grand character extremely striking. Her attitudes are graceful, her step firm, her balance is positively magical, for her person was almost horizontal while turning as on a pivot on her toe. From the specimen of last night, she is a great acquisition to the Theatre; and if her talent for acting be equal to her dancing and figure, they will be able to give us ballets in good style.
Parisot had previously served as première danseuse in Rouen and had also danced in Paris (2). Press reports in London suggest that she was obliged to become professional through the events of the French Revolution (3), further indicating that she supported her mother and a sister. There’s no sense, however, that she enjoyed any familial protection, or indeed that she had any valuable guidance or support during what would prove to be a turbulent career for this young foreign dancer. The Morning Chronicle review touches on two issues that would dominate her reception: her beautiful figure, and the unusual attitude she introduced to the London stage. Towards the end of her first London season we are told ‘Parisot, the beautiful Parisot, captivates, by her curvets and her attitudes, all the hearts in Fop’s Alley’ (4). Her winning combination of curves and poses stimulated strong responses from a certain kind of theatre spectator.
Richard Newton, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
This blog post reproduces two satirical prints of Parisot’s spectators (5). Above we have Newman’s print, which shows Parisot being ogled by the then 72-year-old William Douglas, 4th Duke of Queensberry. It’s likely the cleric pictured is Shute Barrington, Bishop of Durham, who openly censored the immorality of current stage practices. Below we have Isaac Cruickshank’s ‘A Peep at the Parisot – with Q in the Corner’. So once again the faithful Duke of Queensbury – an inveterate gambler popularly known as ‘Old Q’ – is in attendance. As the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (5 May 1796) reported, ‘the Duke of QUEENSBERRY looks not at any other garter than that appertaining to the enchanting leg of PARISOT’. The experienced satirist Cruickshank focuses on those enchanting legs, the outline of which can be appreciated underneath Parisot’s costume. By drawing the opening in her skirt – a detail we don’t have in the Newman – Cruickshank brings a greater immediacy to the scenario. We apprehend the young dancer’s level of exposure without seeing beneath the skirt ourselves.
While the furore that Parisot’s attitudes caused was a lively enough introduction to the London theatre scene, she had to cope with an even more significant scandal the following season.
To be continued.
Notes
1) ‘Arts and Culture.’ Morning Chronicle [1770], 10 Feb. 1796. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection, Gale Primary Resources, accessed 26 Sept. 2021.
2) The Biographical Dictionary of Actors indicates Parisot’s pre-London experience; for a most interesting blog that includes some detail about her press coverage from the age of 14, see Naomi Clifford, ‘Mademoiselle Parisot’s shocking pirouettes put London in a spin’, in Books and Talks (blog), 10 Sept. 2018. https://www.naomiclifford.com/portfolio/mademoiselle-parisot/, accessed 26 Sept. 2021.
3) ‘News.’ Oracle, 18 Aug. 1796. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection, Gale Primary Resources, accessed 26 Sept. 2021.
4) ‘News.’ Sun, 9 June 1796. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection, Gale Primary Resources, accessed 26 Sept. 2021.
5) For further on these men, and the notion that they are the object of the satire rather than the dancer, see Caitlyn Lehmann, ‘Madame Rose Parisot, “Attitudinarian”‘, in vintage pointe (blog), no date. https://vintagepointe.org/madam-rose-parisot-attitudinarian/, accessed 26 September 2021.
Images
Richard Newton. 1796. ‘Madamoiselle Parisot.’ London: William Holland. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Accessed 21 April 2021.
It was words that were later set to her hornpipe tune that led to Nancy Dawson’s posthumous reputation. In the eighteenth-century it became a popular and innocuous ballad tune, used for numerous new sets of words, satirical, political, amorous, Masonic and commercial, as well as for airs in musical pieces for the theatre. The tune also became popular among sailors, being used in the navy to call the men for their ration of grog (7), and was used for shanties, some of course indecent. The tune was also used for the bawdy song ‘Nancy Dawson was a whore’ in which Nancy entertains sailors of every age and rank from a midshipman to the commodore. We have been unable to trace this song in print before its appearance in Nancy Dawson’s Cabinetof Choice Songs [1842?], where it is headed ‘a very celebrated and out-and-out ditty, not to be had in any other collection’ (8). (No other song in the book has anything to do with Nancy Dawson.) Several of the correspondents to Notes and Queries in the nineteenth century appear to have been familiar with this song. For instance, in April 1876, J. Standish Haly remembered it ‘being sung with “rapturous applause” when he was a boy at the Royal Naval College, and he added ‘The Memoirs of Miss N— D— must refer to some one else’. Between 1866 and 1958, various writers to Notes and Queries believed that the first eight lines of the indecent song were engraved on her tombstone, before being obliterated or hidden by a later rector. Surprisingly, Nancy Dawson’s supposed tombstone continues to affect her reputation, for the final sentence of her current Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry states: ‘The size and prominence of her tombstone have prompted speculation about liaisons in her later years’. This statement is taken from the Biographical Dictionary of Actors, for in 1966 one of the editors visited the site of her burial, now St George’s Gardens, and was spun a yarn by the ground keeper that the largest monument in the garden, a six metres high obelisk, was her memorial (9). The enormous obelisk in fact dates from 1729, two years after she was born (10).
The obelisk wrongly associated with Nancy Dawson. Photo: Wilson.
It is ironic that Nancy Dawson would not have a modern reputation, good or bad, were it not for writings about her long after her death. Her undoubted skill as a hornpipe dancer would merit only limited coverage in modern reference books, her entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Actors would be shorter and she would almost certainly not have been allocated an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Notes
7) Dear, I. C. B., and Peter Kemp, TheOxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 376.
8) Nancy Dawson’s Cabinetof Choice Songs, being a collection of some of the most superlative, amatory, flash, luxurious, and dainty ditties, ever before printed (London: W. West, [1842?]). In the British Library catalogue, the author of the collection (C.116.a.45) is given as Nancy Dawson!
9) Burnim, Kalman A. ‘Nancy Dawson’s tombstone’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, First series, 5.1 (1966), 59.
10) She was almost certainly born in Axminster, Devon, where Ann, daughter of William Newton, was baptized on 27 January 1727. See: Chapman, Geoffrey, A History of Axminster to 1910 (Honiton: Marwood, 1998), 135-6.
Image 1) ‘Nancy Dawson’, her hornpipe. From The New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/49d8b010-3448-0131-1b38-58d385a7b928
Nancy Dawson had a seven-year career, dancing on the London stage from 1756 to 1763. She became a celebrity overnight in October 1759, when Covent Garden’s dancer Francis Miles fell ill and she replaced him as the performer of the hornpipe in the Newgate scene of the prisoners in chains in The Beggar’s Opera (1). Her popularity attracted the immediate attention of gutter journalists and print sellers. Dawson’s only speciality on stage was her hornpipe, so it is perhaps surprising to find that this dancer, with a short career and limited range, appeared in the 1888 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, where she is described as ‘of shrewish temper, heartless and mercenary, and of notoriously immoral life’ (2). Moreover, between 1860 and 1958 she figured over thirty times in Notes and Queries, with various respectable contributors showing a strong interest in the more lurid aspects of her reputation, much of which seems to have been acquired long after her death.
Two very similar anonymous celebrity ‘biographies’ quickly appeared, The Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Nancy D―n (London: R. Stevens, 1760) and The Authentic Memoirs of Celebrated Miss Nancy D*w*n (London: Tom Dawson, [1762?]) (3). A review of The Genuine Memoirs in the London Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer of October 1760 dismissed the publication as ‘ridiculous, yet pernicious’ (p. 560), and indeed, like other catchpenny ‘memoirs’ of the time, it consists of a good deal of scurrilous invention. However, her supposed low-life origins and amours were generally accepted as fact until the editors of the Biographical Dictionary of Actors consulted Dawson’s will. Her father, William Newton, was not a pimp and porter, nor had her drunken mother died in a gutter, for he ran a stay-making business in the Covent Garden area and Nancy left suitable bequests to her father and to his wife, her ‘dear mother’.
Prints of Nancy Dawson were rapidly produced. The Genuine Memoirs included a crudely executed frontispiece showing her dancing among the thieves in The Beggar’s Opera and prints for sale in the shops quickly followed. There were essentially two different images, one showing her about to begin her stage hornpipe (see Image 1, above) and one that is clearly based on Reynolds’s portrait of the courtesan Kitty Fisher (see Images 2-3, below). In both, she is wearing the straw hat that was part of her hornpipe costume. In time, assumptions as to her character came to be drawn from these prints. In February 1866 a correspondent to Notes and Queries described the image showing her about to dance on stage as depicting ‘a young lady of saucy appearance … in the act, apparently, of asking someone to walk in’, while in 2012 Kevin Bourque, in Blind Items: Anonymity, Notoriety, and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Celebrity assumed that the use of the image of Kitty Fisher showed that Nancy Dawson, too, was a notorious courtesan, rather than seeing it as a way of quickly and cheaply producing a print of a stage celebrity (4).
Kitty Fisher(Image 2, above)by Joshua Reynolds.
Nancy Dawson (Image 3, below) by Charles Spooner.
Three years before her first advertised stage appearance Ann [Nancy] Newton married James Dawson, a mariner, who seems to have soon disappeared from her life (5). The scandal associated with her in her lifetime arose from her affair with the popular comic actor Edward Shuter, which was repeatedly referred to in song lyrics and satires. The catchy tune to which she danced her hornpipe was named after her and verses in her honour were fitted to it, beginning ‘Of all the girls in our town … There’s none like Nancy Dawson’. Here ‘Shuter droll’ is represented as standing in the way of other lovers, while another set of verses (‘Come all ye bucks and bloods so grim’ — see Image 4, below) states ‘She’s only for N―d S―r’s arms / The smiling Nancy Dawson’. In 1763 G. A. Stevens, who had quarreled with Shuter, wrote a tedious general satire entitled The Dramatic History of Master Edward, Miss Ann, and Others, in which Nancy does not appear until page 137. The couple are shown quarreling and coming to blows, and this section of Stevens’s satire seems to have been responsible for the description of her character in the Dictionary of National Biography entry as shrewish and mercenary. The relationship between Nancy Dawson [Dawsonia] and Ned Shuter [Shuterius] also features in the anonymous satire The Battle of the Players (London: W. Flexney, 1762).
Image 4‘Nancy Dawson’, her hornpipe, detailfrom Image 1.
Nancy worked with Shuter from autumn 1757, when she joined the Covent Garden company (6), and it is likely that they were still lovers when they appeared in Dublin together in summer 1763, a few months before she left the stage. Her will was made in May 1767, a month before her death, and the Biographical Dictionary of Actors (BDA) states that she left Shuter a mourning ring but did not notice that she also left him ‘all my Money in the publick Funds belonging to the Glass Cases in both my parlours’ and asked for him to be one of the pall bearers at her funeral (7). She may, of course, have had other lovers but no names survive. Nancy Dawson seems to have kept her friends, for at her last benefit she danced a double hornpipe with John Walker, the Drury Lane dancer and dancing master who taught her the hornpipe (8). She asked for Walker to be a pall bearer and left mourning rings to him and his dancer wife.
To be continued.
Notes
1. For a full account of Nancy Dawson’s life and reputation, see Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson, ‘Nancy Dawson, her hornpipe and her posthumous reputation’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, 30.1-2 (2015), 55-71.
2. S.v. ‘Dawson, Nancy’ by A.V. [Alsager Richard Vian], in Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen, 63 vols. (London: Smith, 1885-1900), vol. 14.
3. The Life of Lavinia Beswick, alias Fenton, alias Polly Peachum (London: A. Moore, 1728) is a similarly unreliable work about Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly in The Beggar’s Opera.
4. Kevin J. Borque, Blind Items: Anonymity, Notoriety, and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Celebrity, Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin (2012); Nancy Dawson was also paired with Kitty Fisher in Whore Biographies, vol.4, edited by Julie Peakman (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006).
5. The marriage took place on 1 January 1753 (National Archives, Kew, Marriage records of the Fleet).
6. Will of Ann Dawson of Saint George the Martyr , Middlesex, 24 May 1767, PROB 11/929/346, National Archives, Kew.
7. I.C.B. Dear, and Peter Kemp, TheOxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 376.
8. Nancy Dawson’s Cabinetof Choice Songs, being a collection of some of the most superlative, amatory, flash, luxurious, and dainty ditties, ever before printed (London: W. West, [1842?]). In the British Library catalogue, the author of the collection (C.116.a.45) is given as Nancy Dawson!
Images
Anonymous. ‘Nancy Dawson’, her hornpipe. London: Robert Sayer, [c.1762]. Engraving. From The New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/49d8b010-3448-0131-1b38-58d385a7b928. Accessed 24 August 2021. Public domain.
Charles Spooner. ‘Nancy Dawson.’ London: Robert Sayer, [c.1763]. Mezzotint. From The New York Public Library, https://nypl.getarchive.net/media/nancy-dawson-43e358. Accessed 24 August 2021. Public domain.
Detail from Image 1, above.
Next post
‘The reputation of Nancy Dawson part 2’ will appear on 10 September 2021.
