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Emma Hamilton as Artists' Model

Emma Hamilton was not herself an artist. She was instead an actress by profession, but she would become the model of choice for a number of important artists of her time. Her career as a model actually began long before when the was still a child, and it was her beauty throughout her life that was the prime lure for various artists who wished to capture her on canvas. She would also be known for her part in a romantic scandal involving Lord Nelson, though her amoral exploits were also well-known long before that particularly celebrated instance came into being. She was also a close friend to the Queen of Naples, Marie Caroline, the sister of Marie Antoinette, and at least one biographer has ascribed many of her amoral activities to that friendship:

Long before the vote had been accorded to them, the sex of which Cleopatra, Poppaea Sabine and Georges Sand were members, had played their part in politics, all the more potently for being almost in secret. And in English History no woman played a more vital, or a more damaging, role than the beautiful amoral wife of Sir William Hamilton. And she played this role. . . for reasons quite other than have bene ascribed to her; not for patriotism; not for love of Nelson; not even for love of herself; but rather to please the Queen whose favors, to use her own words, she adored.

The topic of interest here is not her political life as such, however, but her role as an artist's model. An examination of her relationship with various artists and of the pictures they painted of her will consider why she was painted by so many and what influence she had on paintings and painters of her era.

Emma Hamilton was born to the wife of a North Country blacksmith, and the date of this event remains in some doubt. The child was baptized in April 1765 and given the name of Emily. Both her parents were illiterate and marked the register rather than signing it. The father died before the child...

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Emma Hamilton as Artists' Model. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:15, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681539.html