EMMA, MISTRESS OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON, DEVELOPES HER PERFORMANCE CALLED "THE ATTITUDES" BASED ON ANTIQUITY : SHE AIMS TO MARRY SIR WILLIAM

1787

Amy Lyon, born into the poorest of the poor, because her mother was a Mistress, was able to develop into a beauty, but her rough and bumpy life included unpaid servitude, a bout with the theatre, work as a tavern prostitute, and becoming the Mistress of Honorable Charles Greville who grew bored of her. She bore a child at sixteen to Greville who was sent away to be raised, but was passed along to his relative, the older man, Sir William Hamilton. Hamilton had the beautiful young woman model for painters, sculptors, and cameo makers, and was proud of her progress as a singer and dancer, as well as an increasingly cultured and sophisticated entertainer at his dinner parties in Naples. He wowed his guests with a spectacle. Emma doing her Attitudes, which she modeled on the paintings she saw in Pompeii and antiquities being sold in Naples.

Excerpt pages 140-141 : ... When they were all assembled, he called them to hush and servants snuffed a few of the candles.  In the gloom, they could just catch the sight of a female figure draped in white, her dark hair flowing around her shoulders.  As she came closer, they recognized Mrs. Hart, Sir William's pretty, witty mistress, who had been laughing at all their jokes, flushed with gaiety, entertaining them with anecdotes about England. But now she was pale and ethereally composed. Taking up the shawls that lay at her feet, she began to swathe them around her, to kneel, sit, crouch, and dance. They quickly realized she was imitating the postures of figures from classical myth. First she pulled the shawls over her like a veil and became Niobe, weeping for the loss of her children; then using them to make a cape, she was Medea, poised with a dagger, about to stab. Then she pulled the shawls around her into seductive shapes, becoming Cleopatra, reclining for her Mark Antony. ...

She combined her dance training and her modeling at the Temple of Health and for Romney with influences she collected in Naples to create her Attitudes, an extraordinary fusion of eightieth-century dance with classical costumes and references, and a truly innovative art form.

THIS IMAGE IS FROM THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ART - UNITED STATES

The Attitude of Lady Hamilton 1791

Pietro Antonio Novelli - artist

After she showed Goethe her performance in 1787 word got out that he loved it and hundreds came to see Emma perform. She was twenty-two at the time and for the next thirty years she was asked to perform them. For the next few years she gained in confidence in all ways, as a performer, entertainer, hostess, and Mistress, one who was determined to make Sir William Hamilton marry her.  She obviously succeeded in doing so, as she comes to us as Lady Emma Hamilton.  As I read Author Kate Williams' wonderful biography of the woman who started out life as Amy Lyon, I'm rooting for her.

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