Emma Hamilton as Artists' Model
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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 relat
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ed they had reached an almost equal extreme in the opposite direction:
The ladies of Emma's youth wore head-dresses of anything up to three feet in height and stiff, long-waisted stays. Romney always preferred nature and truth; he allowed Emma's hair to fall free, and clothed her in simple drapery, after the manner of ancient Greece. His picture of her as Cassandra in the Shakespeare Gallery had a direct influence on public taste, and no doubt the other pictures, so far as they were seen, had a similar effect.
She gave no fewer than 300 sittings in her four year at Edgeware Road, and the last picture Romney painted of her was as a Spinstress.
Aside from her beauty, one of the primary reasons why Emma was the model of choice for so many artists was simply that she was in their company. Her meeting with Romney was fortuitous and would set the tone for subsequent relationships with artists who admired her beauty when they met. Her husband was a collector of art and knew many of the artists of the day in Naples and England. by 1798 Hamilton had amassed over two hundred pictures and drawings including works by such masters as Canaletto, Rembrandt, Raphael, Veronese, Rubens, Velazquez, Claude Lorraine, Poussin, Tintoretto,
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3314
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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