Ingres's studio between history and allegory: Rachel, antiquity, and tragedie

94. Maxime du Camp, Les beaux-arts a l'Exposition Universelle de 1855 (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1855), 263-64.

95. Nicholson, "The Ideology of Feminine 'Virtue,'" 56-57.

96. For Nattier, the allegorical signification of his portraits lay entirely in the formulaic (and often literally copied) assemblage of clothing and attributes. For an excellent discussion of Nattier's portrait techniques, see Xavier Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier 1685-1766, exh. cat., Musee National des Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, 1999.

97. See Michael R. Booth, "Sarah Siddons," in Three Tragic Actresses: Sid-dons, Rachel, Riston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10-65; and Robyn Asleson, "'She Was Tragedy Personified': Crafting the Sarah Siddons Legend in Art and Life," in A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum Publications, 1999). Reynolds's portrait signaled the sitter's special identification with tragedy and operated both as calling card and hopeful prediction of her future theatrical ascension. Wind, "Hume and the Heroic Portrait," 45.

98. The importance of Le Brun's frontispiece for Reynolds is noted in Aliverti, La naissance de l'acteur moderne, 166.

99. Ibid.; and Wind, "Hume and the Heroic Portrait," 45.

100. The strangeness of the pose may be explained by the fact that Amaury-Duval modified Le Brun's seated pose by mapping it onto a standing figure.

101. See Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1997.

102. Theophile Gautier, "Musee de la Comedie Francaise," in Les beaux-arts en Europe, vol. 1, 149. Amaury-Duval was well positioned vis-a-vis developing archaeological and ethnographic practices, as he was one of the two artists attached to the archaeology section of the 1829 French scientific expedition to Morea led by J. J. Dubois. See Peltre, Retour en Arcadie, 89-112.

103. Mirecourt, Rachel, 63. The subject of Rachel's gender identity is broached repeatedly in nineteenth-century accounts of the actress, while the question of her sexual orientation emerges less frequently. For a compelling example of the latter, see Arsene Houssaye's roman a clef in which the heroine, Esther (Rachel), has a sapphic affair with the courtesan Rhea: La comedienne (Paris: E. Dentu, 1884), 173-79. More recently, theater historian John Stokes has posited that Rachel distinguished herself from the tradition of French tragediennes in part by challenging prevailing conceptions of gender and by radically "occupy[ing] a theatrical space identified with the male presence." Stokes, "Rachel Felix," in Booth, Three Tragic Actresses, 68, 66.

104. See, for instance, Denis Diderot's biting criticism of Nattier's Portrait of a Lady as a Vestal (1759), now in the North Carolina Museum of Art, for its "voluptuousness." Diderot, Salons, ed. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhemar, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), quoted in Nicholson, "The Ideology of Feminine 'Virtue,'" 62.