Thomas Lawrence’s Consumptive Chic: Reinterpreting Lady Manners’s Hectic Flush in 1794

Abstract

In his Lady Manners of 1794, Thomas Lawrence daringly coded his healthy sitter’s sensibility in a transgressive evocation of illness and disease, producing a startling, provocative new meaning: the sensitive, artistic woman as consumptively chic. Tuberculosis, then known as consumption or phthisis, has long been recognized as the great disease of romanticism, yet few scholars have noted the powerful aesthetic dimension of tuberculosis in the eighteenth century. Lawrence’s controversial depiction of Lady Manners, particularly his unusual treatment of her hunched posture, pale skin, thinness, hectic flush, and curled fingers, created discomfort in viewers by evoking the pathetic appeal of the tubercular beauty in a society portrait of a healthy woman.

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