Portrait of a Lady? Ruin & Reputation in the Georgian Era, No 1 Royal Crescent, Bath
Sarah Cheverton is impressed by a small exhibition that exposes the darker side of women’s lives in Georgian England
Portrait of a Lady? Ruin & Reputation in the Georgian Era is in two small rooms at the top of No 1 Royal Crescent, a Georgian townhouse in Bath re-created in the style of the late 1700s.
Visitors can choose to visit just the exhibition (£4 for adults) or combine it with a tour of the house (£8.50), and both options offer great value for money.
The main focus of the displays is a diverse and fascinating private collection of mezzotint portraits, lent by businessman Edward Bayntun-Coward and curated by author and broadcaster Hallie Rubenhold. The exhibition builds on Rubenhold’s 2005 book, The Covent Garden Ladies, an account of the infamous Harris’s List, which detailed the names and activities of London prostitutes.
Fans of her book will be delighted that a copy of Harris’s List makes it into the exhibition, but the portraits take centre stage. Mezzotint predated photography and was popular in 18th-century Britain, allowing the easy reproduction of images for publication or pleasure.
From actresses to chamber maids, prostitutes to women of the aristocracy, all were equalised in the popular print shops of the time, where Georgian gents purchased such portraits with the same avidness with which fans today consume images of female celebrities in magazines or on social media.
The portraits are presented just as they would have been in the original print shops. Visitors are challenged to work out for themselves if they can tell a lady of “reputation” from one of “ruin” and can check their answers in the comprehensive exhibition catalogue (from the museum shop and a recommended buy). I enjoyed looking for clues in the portraits that might provide a visual code to a woman’s social status, as did other visitors.
One of the themes of the exhibition is how the portraits reduced women of all classes to their looks or sexuality or, in many cases, both. While social status may have differed among them, becoming a society “lady” was certainly no guarantee of personal freedom.
Women’s lives were extremely limited: they could not vote, enter higher education or a profession. They had limited land tenure and were recognised as the property of their husbands. Little surprise then that many women became fiercely enterprising in employing the gifts they were permitted by broader society to use to improve their life chances.
While the exhibition is only a stone’s throw from the Jane Austen Centre, visitors find themselves a long way from the chivalry found in her novels. The exhibition reveals the lie of prim Miss Bennet; it is even less kind to Mr Darcy.
Many of the women who came flooding to London as domestic servants found themselves at the mercy of the master of the house and in no position to refuse his advances.
A market sprang up for salacious portraits of domestic servants and a section of the exhibition explores the lives of these young women, who were often disgraced and then forced into prostitution.
Even lower-class women who managed to build and maintain a trade became prostitutes to survive. Girls commonly entered prostitution around puberty, becoming dependent on wealthy men to take them into their keeping and passed from man to man before dying at an early age. Harris’s List catalogued these women and the price of their company.
No woman escaped scrutiny. The private lives of aristocratic women were pored over in Georgian publications such as Town and Country, which was the equivalent of today’s Heat or OK! magazines. The bigamy of Elizabeth Chudleigh, who illegally married her lover, the second duke of Kingston, made national headlines with her subsequent trial.
Other women combined careers on the stage with real-life roles as mistresses to powerful men, but none escaped the prurient gaze of wider society. Mary Robinson, a successful actress and poet, was known in her time as “the English Sappho” but is remembered by most only as the mistress of George IV.
While men of all classes were quick to avail themselves of prostitutes, their actions went unscrutinised. A delightful highlight of the exhibition is a wall that names and shames many such men – including a number of Members of Parliament and two kings – in order to redress this historic imbalance.
Portraits are the main focus of the exhibition, but the limited space in the two galleries is put to enterprising use, peeling away the modern cliches of courtesans and mistresses to reveal the real fragility of the women’s lives. Displays feature objects and archives, including costumes, clothes and the working equipment of tradeswomen.
A display on cosmetics explains the cost of beauty, such as the slow poison of lead that was injected into women’s skin as face powder. A ballad about Kitty Fisher, a successful and enterprising young prostitute, plays to visitors as they move through the exhibition.
Although the space is used well, it forces a reliance on text-based panels, even within the display cabinets. This may prove challenging for some visitors, particularly for those coming to the exhibition rooms as the last point in their tour of the house.
Few visitors stayed for long while I was there, particularly the younger ones.
This is a shame as the subject matter invites comparison with the image-obsessed lives of today. With a little more space, this exhibition could have made more of the link between the overly scrutinised Georgian women and today’s celebrity culture.
The Portrait of a Lady? is an easy-to-miss gem, but well worth going out of your way to visit. The museum's receptionist told me it “is something a bit different for us”. After visiting this compact but illuminating exhibition, I hope that it is a departure the museum soon repeats.
Sarah Cheverton is a writer and researcher
Main funders: Heritage Lottery Fund; George Bayntun
Exhibition design: Kate Rogers
Curator: Hallie Rubenhold
Technician: Bruce Tozer
Printing: N3 Display Graphics
Framing: The Framing Workshop
Exhibition ends 14 December
Visitors can choose to visit just the exhibition (£4 for adults) or combine it with a tour of the house (£8.50), and both options offer great value for money.
The main focus of the displays is a diverse and fascinating private collection of mezzotint portraits, lent by businessman Edward Bayntun-Coward and curated by author and broadcaster Hallie Rubenhold. The exhibition builds on Rubenhold’s 2005 book, The Covent Garden Ladies, an account of the infamous Harris’s List, which detailed the names and activities of London prostitutes.
Fans of her book will be delighted that a copy of Harris’s List makes it into the exhibition, but the portraits take centre stage. Mezzotint predated photography and was popular in 18th-century Britain, allowing the easy reproduction of images for publication or pleasure.
From actresses to chamber maids, prostitutes to women of the aristocracy, all were equalised in the popular print shops of the time, where Georgian gents purchased such portraits with the same avidness with which fans today consume images of female celebrities in magazines or on social media.
The portraits are presented just as they would have been in the original print shops. Visitors are challenged to work out for themselves if they can tell a lady of “reputation” from one of “ruin” and can check their answers in the comprehensive exhibition catalogue (from the museum shop and a recommended buy). I enjoyed looking for clues in the portraits that might provide a visual code to a woman’s social status, as did other visitors.
One of the themes of the exhibition is how the portraits reduced women of all classes to their looks or sexuality or, in many cases, both. While social status may have differed among them, becoming a society “lady” was certainly no guarantee of personal freedom.
Women’s lives were extremely limited: they could not vote, enter higher education or a profession. They had limited land tenure and were recognised as the property of their husbands. Little surprise then that many women became fiercely enterprising in employing the gifts they were permitted by broader society to use to improve their life chances.
While the exhibition is only a stone’s throw from the Jane Austen Centre, visitors find themselves a long way from the chivalry found in her novels. The exhibition reveals the lie of prim Miss Bennet; it is even less kind to Mr Darcy.
Many of the women who came flooding to London as domestic servants found themselves at the mercy of the master of the house and in no position to refuse his advances.
A market sprang up for salacious portraits of domestic servants and a section of the exhibition explores the lives of these young women, who were often disgraced and then forced into prostitution.
Even lower-class women who managed to build and maintain a trade became prostitutes to survive. Girls commonly entered prostitution around puberty, becoming dependent on wealthy men to take them into their keeping and passed from man to man before dying at an early age. Harris’s List catalogued these women and the price of their company.
No woman escaped scrutiny. The private lives of aristocratic women were pored over in Georgian publications such as Town and Country, which was the equivalent of today’s Heat or OK! magazines. The bigamy of Elizabeth Chudleigh, who illegally married her lover, the second duke of Kingston, made national headlines with her subsequent trial.
Other women combined careers on the stage with real-life roles as mistresses to powerful men, but none escaped the prurient gaze of wider society. Mary Robinson, a successful actress and poet, was known in her time as “the English Sappho” but is remembered by most only as the mistress of George IV.
While men of all classes were quick to avail themselves of prostitutes, their actions went unscrutinised. A delightful highlight of the exhibition is a wall that names and shames many such men – including a number of Members of Parliament and two kings – in order to redress this historic imbalance.
Portraits are the main focus of the exhibition, but the limited space in the two galleries is put to enterprising use, peeling away the modern cliches of courtesans and mistresses to reveal the real fragility of the women’s lives. Displays feature objects and archives, including costumes, clothes and the working equipment of tradeswomen.
A display on cosmetics explains the cost of beauty, such as the slow poison of lead that was injected into women’s skin as face powder. A ballad about Kitty Fisher, a successful and enterprising young prostitute, plays to visitors as they move through the exhibition.
Although the space is used well, it forces a reliance on text-based panels, even within the display cabinets. This may prove challenging for some visitors, particularly for those coming to the exhibition rooms as the last point in their tour of the house.
Few visitors stayed for long while I was there, particularly the younger ones.
This is a shame as the subject matter invites comparison with the image-obsessed lives of today. With a little more space, this exhibition could have made more of the link between the overly scrutinised Georgian women and today’s celebrity culture.
The Portrait of a Lady? is an easy-to-miss gem, but well worth going out of your way to visit. The museum's receptionist told me it “is something a bit different for us”. After visiting this compact but illuminating exhibition, I hope that it is a departure the museum soon repeats.
Sarah Cheverton is a writer and researcher
Project data
Cost: £8,770Main funders: Heritage Lottery Fund; George Bayntun
Exhibition design: Kate Rogers
Curator: Hallie Rubenhold
Technician: Bruce Tozer
Printing: N3 Display Graphics
Framing: The Framing Workshop
Exhibition ends 14 December