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Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) reigned over the London stage for three decades. She gained unprecedented renown during her lifetime and became a theatrical icon. But it was not just her stellar acting that ensured her iconic status and enduring fame. Siddons was frequently represented by the leading painters and sculptors of the day – Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, Thomas Lawrence, and John Flaxman – and her image was widely disseminated in hundreds of prints, caricatures, and objets d’art ranging from Prattware plaques to enamel patch boxes to Jasperware chessmen.1 Although fashionable artists literally lined up to paint her, unlike her illustrious predecessor, David Garrick, Siddons did not commission portraits herself.2 In eighteenth-century England the art of portraiture was a complex language of visual representation that was closely linked to social status, fashion, and the politics of display. Portrait painting, in which the sitter poses for and is subtly, or not so subtly, transformed by the artist, becomes doubly performative in the case of the actor or actress posing in character. The development of theatrical portraiture after mid-century was fueled by a new emphasis upon the individual actor and the rise of dramatic criticism in which acting technique, connoisseurship, and aesthetics became central concerns. More complex and less transparent than they appear, eighteenth-century theatrical portraits were both coded responses to performances, reflecting contemporary notions about acting and prevailing portrait conventions, and commercial commodities that capitalized on the subject’s celebrity and served as publicity devices.3
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