Emma Hamilton's 'Attitudes', Plate V

Lithograph after the etching by Thomas Piroli made from the drawings by Frederick Rehberg, originally published, 1794 - this edition 1891.

Image size: 8" x 7" approx. Mounted in cream acid-free board: 13 1/4" x 11 1/2"

Generally good, clean condition throughout.

Emma’s ‘Attitudes’ were based partly on classical mythology, no doubt influenced by Sir William Hamilton, but owe much to her early experience as an employee at Dr Graham’s ‘Temple of Health’ in London and her performances dancing naked for Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh’s friends on his dining table.

Goethe described her perfomance: She wears a Greek garb becoming her to perfection. She then merely loosens her locks takes a pair of shawls, and effects changes of postures, moods, gestures, mien, and appearance that make one really feel as if one were in some dream. Here is visible complete and bodied forth in movements of surprising variety, all that so many artists have sought in vain to fix and render. Successively standing, kneeling, seated, reclining, grave, sad, sportive, teasing, abandoned, penitent, alluring, threatening, agonised. One follows the other and grows out of it. She knows how to choose and shift the simple folds of her single kerchief for every expression, and to adjust it into a hundred kinds of headgear.

£25.00 mounted