HSG

As we noted in our discussion of Countess Ekaterina Skavronskaia, only one living goddess rivalled this legendary beauty for the title of "the most desirable woman in the world" in the late 1700s, and that was the celebrated English rose, Emma, Lady Hamilton.

Today, Lady Hamilton is chiefly remembered as the lover of Horatio Nelson--the heroic British admiral who crushed the French navy at the Battle of Trafalgar, thus saving England from invasion, and ensuring Napoleon's downfall. But Emma was also the greatest artistic muse of her time. She was revered as the perfect embodiment of Classical beauty, and inspired the creation of countless artistic masterpieces.

Lady Hamilton was also a media celebrity before the mass media even existed, "always . . . surrounded by a crowd of admirers" (Sherrard 90). Wherever she went, "Emma was the centre of town gossip, with her every outing the subject of conversation," and perpetually had "all the world following her and talking of her" (Peakman 60), just as today's Hollywood starlets monopolize public attention.

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Emma first attracted notice through a dalliance with an English nobleman, and even as an early age, it was apparent to everyone who saw her that she had been blessed with the "beauty that nature bestows but once or twice in a century" (Barrington 31).

"Emma was luscious," history tells us, "with a lovely girlish face on a full woman's body barely concealed by the thin muslin dresses she wore" (Russell 31). And it was the juxtaposition of those soft facial features with a decadently opulent figure--a voluptuous goddess with the face of an angel--that made Lady Hamilton the definitive contemporary incarnation of timeless beauty:

Nothing could be more beautiful than her countenance or more commanding than her figure at this time; the first had an unusual mixture of angelic softness . . . the other . . . would equally have served for the splendour of an Imperial throne, or the couch of voluptuous sensuality. (Sherrard 232)

Her peaches-and-cream complexion, a "velvet skin of lilies and roses" (Barrington 375), endowed her with the fair features that have been revered as the epitome of feminine loveliness throughout history. In her letters, Emma herself marvelled: "I am remarkably fair, that every body says; I put on red and white" (Sherrard 93). She also possessed "long auburn hair (with a hint of gold) and blue-grey eyes" (Peakman 7). Society raved about her "rounded arms" (Barrington 96).

But above all, it was Emma's curvaceous form that established her fame. Contemporary accounts tell us that viewers were "much struck with her figure" (Sherrard 136), called "her figure uncommonly fine" (Hudson 82), and "lingered [on] her womanly figure in its flowing white" (Barrington 248). Indeed, the consensus was that "No one can deny Emma's beauty of face and form" (Sherrard 88). Her beauty even moved the Bishop of Derry to declare that "God was in a glorious mood when he made Emma" (Barrington 5).

Emma's allure was so extraordinary that the noted portraitist George Romney was commissioned to capture her beauty on canvas. The moment that he laid eyes on her, Romney was spellbound--so much so, that he spent the rest of his career immortalizing her beauty in one painting after another. The artist "was patently in love with his model," Romney's biographer records, but "it was a worshipful obsession on Romney's part, with Emma, like Dante's Beatrice, as the focus of his inspiration" (Cross 121).

Romney never freed himself of Emma's spell:

For many years, Romney continued to work on pictures of Emma even after she had left England. In all she sat for him almost 300 times and he made over 50 pictures of her. It was Romney's paintings of her which preserved her image and helped establish her enduring fame. Emma was Romney's muse, stirring him to greater art. (Peakman 22-23)

However, Emma was no lifeless mannequin. Her natural flair for dramatic expression made her "a collaborator, rather than a passive model" (Cross 121), a co-creator of her own artistic legacy. Significantly, Romney's attentions also increased her awareness of her own allure: "His interest flattered her vanity, especially as it was exciting for her to see her beauty appearing on canvas" (Cross 121).

Emma's vanity was considerable--as is that of any true goddess--and over time, her vanity grew in proportion with her beauty, making her even more desirable. History records that "she was perfectly well aware of her own beauty" (Sherrard 33); furthermore, that "flattery was as necessary to her as the air she breathed" (Russell 66), and that she had "an incessant need to . . . be admired" (Simpson 80).

In her own letters, Emma excitedly recorded the effect that her beauty had upon everyone with whom she came into contact:

"He does nothing but entertains her with my beauty, the accounts of it" (Sherrard 93)

"as if I was the most perfect beauty in the world"

"I heard the Abbe say to the others I was perfectly beautiful"

"And so they all admired me" (Sherrard 111)

This bewitching vanity never abated throughout her life. A contemporary report describing the relationship between Emma and Nelson asserts that "Lord Nelson thinks of nothing but Lady Hamilton, who is totally occupied by the same subject" (Fraser 236). Another observer perceived that

there is something of the imperial air [about Lady Hamilton] . . . So a Roman lady might sit, indolently watching the sufferings of the amphitheatre, basking in the beams of her own beauty. (Barrington 331)

Another characteristic that Emma shared with every true goddess was a delight in being pampered and spoiled, and a craving for "living the good life"--the life that she knew she deserved. She found the means to do so in the person of Sir William Hamilton, the English Ambassador to Naples--and the man who would ultimately marry her, giving her the title of Lady Hamilton.

Emma's belief that Hamilton was "the key to the life of pleasure which she coveted" (Peakman 10) proved true, because Hamilton spared no expense in courting her. When she arrived at his Neopolitan villa,

He welcomed Emma the next day with open arms and treated her like a princess. A suite of four rooms had been prepared for her overlooking the bay, and carriages, servants and boats placed at her disposal. Every day there was some entertainment or amusement--dinners, operas, plays--a whirl of distraction and gaiety, with Sir William hovering round, anticipating her least wish. (Sherrard 83-84)

After becoming Lady Hamilton, Emma grew deliciously "capricious, spoilt and extravagant" (Sherrard 12), relishing a lifestyle that allowed her to be "petted and spoilt, living in magnificence and careless of money" (Sherrard 321).

Emma shared one other characteristic with the most beautiful women in history: an abiding love of self-indulgence. One contemporary said of Emma that "Her ruling passions seem to me vanity, avarice, and love for the pleasures of the table" (Hudson 165), and modern biographers state simply, "She ate and drank what she liked; she was a big girl" (Russell 23). One of Lady Hamilton's biographers, having catalogued her receipts, notes the extraordinarily sums that she spent on sundry delicacies: "wherefrom we can deduce . . . a healthy appetite for bread and butter" (Barrington 50). And Emma's own letters refer more often to her delight in self-indulgence than to any other passions:

"I stopt one hour with them and had all the good things to eat . . ." (Barrington 175)

"I am very well, look well, have a good appetite, and am better than ever I was in my life." (Sherrard 71-72)

"Tis true we dined every day at Court" (Sherrard 162)

"he put it off and gave me a dinner on board that nearly surpasses all description." (Sherrard 123)

In fact, Emma's diaries suggest that her life as Lady Hamilton oriented itself more around self-indulgence than around any other activity. She describes

going twice a week to town to give dinners, balls, etc. etc. returning here at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning after the fatigue of a dinner of fifty, and ball and supper of 3 hundred, then to dress early in the morning to go to Court to dinner at twelve o'clock as the Royal Family dine early . . . (Sherrard 162)

This passion, too, continued throughout Emma's life. In preparation for a visit from Emma, Nelson left the following instructions with his household: "See to it, Fanny, that there is a good table for Lady Hamilton is used to the best of everything, and especially good food" (Hardwick 161).

Inevitably, Lady Hamilton became more curvaceous by virtue of her self-indulgence: "Emma expanded daily in the atmosphere of warm caressing admiration which was her soul's delight" (Barrington 101). Visitors noted that she "appeared to be growing every day--in all directions at once" (Simpson 80).

But because this was the 18th century--a time when opulent, well-fed beauty, rather than emaciation and androgyny, represented the dominant ideal of feminine appearance--Emma's increasingly generous curves did not lessen her reputation as the most beautiful woman in Europe. Quite the contrary.

The terms used to describe her allure changed ("She had put on weight and was now more a goddess than a nymph" (Hardwick 44)), but the appreciation of her looks was just as ardent. Sir William Hamilton advised a friend who would be seeing Emma again after an interval of several years that she was "beyond description beautiful and striking and I think you will find her figure much improved since last you saw her" (Barrington 217). A certain Lady Elgin enthused that, "She looked very handsome at dinner, quite in an undress;--my father would say, 'There is a fine woman for you, good flesh and blood'" (Peakman 103). Visitors referred approvingly to her "large commanding figure" (Barrington 378), her "Olympian" figure (Hardwick 72), noting how remarkably "well-proportioned" it was (Simpson 158), and ardently praising its beauty: "She wore a dress of cloth of gold falling in supple splendour about her imperial figure and diamonds in her hair and about her neck" (Barrington 341).

In keeping with the eternally-recognized truth that weight gain is the best preserver of youth, Lady Hamilton's increasingly rich features also gave her a perpetually girlish quality, even well into womanhood. One visitor to the Hamiltons' Neopolitan villa concluded from her appearance that "She is four- or five-and-twenty in the bloom of youth," at a time when Emma was actually thirty-two (Hudson 103).

Far from diminishing her allure, her sumptuous curves won her renown as the living embodiment of Classical beauty. Long before plus-size models brought the Classical ideal back to life in our own day and age, Lady Hamilton revived the feminine aesthetic of Antiquity for her own time. She was revered as "a Roman beauty, opulent, luxuriant, dominating, the perfect classic re-animated for the rapture of the eighteenth century" (Barrington 101).

When she was introduced to Sir William Hamilton, her former lover framed Emma's wondrous appearance in expressly Classical terms. He acknowledged her as

the most amazing beauty that ever my eyes lit on . . . Contemplating her from the point of view of a student of the perfect standard of the antique I know no alteration I could have recommended either in face or figure . . . Her masses of hair spring from a brow as low and broad as the Clytie's, the length and roundness of her throat suggest our Roman Venus, the moulding of back and bosom the Venus [de Medici] . . . (Barrington 43-44)

A famous nun visiting with Emma told her, "Your figure and features are rare, for you are like the marble statues I saw, when I was in the world" (Sherrard 114). Some contemporary observers even considered her beauty superior to the Classical past. According to William Locke, "all the statues and pictures he had seen were in grace so inferior to her, as scarce to deserve a look" (Sherrard 136).

No one revered her Classical qualities more than did her besotted husband, Sir William Hamilton. A collector of Greek antiquities, and a scholar of some note, Hamilton conceived of Emma as Helen of Troy for the 1790s. "She was Hamilton's living embodiment of ideal Greek beauty," history tells us, "the Galatea to his Pygmalion, whom he regarded with the eyes of a connoisseur and who became his own living work of art" (Jenkins 84).

In her letters, Emma remarks on the ardour of Sir William's courtship:

You do not know how good Sr. Wm. is to me. he is doing every thing he can to make me happy. He has never dined out since I came here and indeed to speak the truth he is never out of my sight. He breakfasts, dines, sups, and is constantly by me, looking at my face. I can't stir a hand, a leg, or foot but he is marking it as graceful and fine. (Sherrard 85)

Emma's increasingly curvaceous figure was particularly adored by Hamilton. As Emma notes in another letter: "He thinks I am grown much more handsome than I was, he does nothing all day but look at me and sigh" (Sherrard 86).

True connoisseur of art that he was, Hamilton wanted the entire world to marvel at Emma's appearance. Emma records that "Sir Wm. is never so happy as when he is pointing out my beauties to [his friends]" (Sherrard 86). Hamilton veritably made it his life's mission to preserve Emma's image for posterity. He refurbished a room in his villa as a painter's studio, where artists from across Europe came to immortalize Emma in every artistic medium--paintings, sketches, marble, etc. "There are now five painters and two modellers at work on me for Sir William," Emma notes in her letters, "and there is a picture of me going to the Empress of Russia" (Sherrard 122).

Although Emma had an insatiably sensual nature, and a Classically voluptuous figure, her soft, angelic facial features simultaneously gave her beauty a spiritual quality. In this, she belonged more to the Renaissance than to Antiquity--a harmonious blending of Christian and Classical principles.

Emma herself particularly responded to this assessment of her appearance. In her letters, she recalls how Hamilton once told her that "if he did not feel and see and know that I am a substance, he would think I was an angel" (Sherrard 122). One visitor informed Emma that God was "so good as to make your face the same as he made the Blessed Virgin's," and in another case, Emma relates how "two priests came to our house and Sir William made me put the shawl over my head and look up, and the priest burst into tears, and kissed my feet, and said God had sent me on purpose" (Sherrard 125).

Emma merited her reputation as a "living work of art" not only by virtue of her Classical beauty, but also because she devised a unique form of performance art, one involving brief scenes of acting and dancing, which became famous throughout Europe as "Lady Hamilton's Attitudes."

The Victoria & Albert Museum, which possesses contemporary sketches depicting Emma's "Attitudes," describes these performances as a

series of theatrical mimes and poses in which she represented various figures from classical literature, myth and history . . . While performing her 'attitudes', Emma created a living gallery of statues and paintings by clever manipulation of her long shawl, her pose and facial expression, and the use of props, such as a vase. She acted a succession of characters, for example from a Roman maiden making an offering, to a devotional saint, to the classical figure Medea slaying her child. The audiences - connoisseurs and Grand Tourists - for whom Emma performed her poses, would all have recognised the various characters familiar to them in the form of classical sculptures and in depictions in Old Master paintings. Her audiences were profoundly impressed both by how she seemed able to bring to life the characters shown in famous works of art and the emotional intensity she conveyed in a performance.

No less a luminary than the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the supreme poet of the day, attended one of Lady Hamilton's performances. In his Italian Journey, Goethe describes the impression that Emma made upon him:

She is very lovely, and has a good figure. [Sir Hamilton] has had a Grecian costume made for her that suits her to perfection, and she lets down her hair, takes a few shawls, and varies her postures, gestures, expressions, etc., until at last the onlooker really thinks he is dreaming. In her movements and surprising variety one sees perfected what so many thousands of artists would have liked to achieve. Standing, kneeling, sitting, lying, grave, sad, roguish, wanton, penitent, enticing, menacing, fearful, etc.., one follows upon the other and from the other. She knows how to choose and change the folds of her veil to set off each expression, and makes herself a hundred different headdresses with the same cloths. (Goethe 171)

With this deft use of poses and facial expressions, and the manipulation of her wardrobe, what Lady Hamilton was actually doing while performing her Attitudes was . . . modelling (long before fashion modelling even existed). In a very real sense, then, she deserves to be regarded as the world's first plus-size model.

Not only was Emma the predecessor of today's plus-size models in the fact that her figure exhibited Classical proportions, and that she employed modelling techniques in performing her "Attitudes," but also because "Emma's pictures had a bearing on the trend of fashion" in her time (Sherrard 33), and effectively became the Vogue magazine of the day.

Moreover, Lady Hamilton's paintings specifically reoriented fashion towards designs that better adorned the fuller female figure:

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. (Sherrard 33)

Anticipating elements of today's "New Femininity" in fashion, Emma popularized longer hairstyles possessing "voluptuous volume," and an avoidance of any body-constricting "shapewear" ("stiff, long-waisted stays"), instead preferring gowns that were body-conscious, and closely embraced her generous curves. One infatuated observer enthused how "the thin white shirt clung to her opulent figure" (Hardwick 54). And Emma herself recorded that during one soirée, "though I was in an undress, only having on a muslin chemise very thin, yet the admiration I met with was surprising . . . all allowed they never had seen such a belissima creatura in all their life" (Sherrard 120-21).

Each of Emma's lovers delighted in spending outrageous sums on her wardrobe, happily buying her any outfit she desired. Emma's letters describe this phenomenon, and testify to her acute fashion sense:

Sir W. Has given me a camel's shawl like my old one. I know you will be pleased to hear that and he has given me a beautiful gown, cost 25 guineas, India painting on white satin . . . and is going to buy me some muslin dresses loose to tie with a sash for the hot weather, made like the Turkish dresses, the sleeves tied in folds with ribbon and trimmed with lace, in short he is always contriving what he shall get for me. (Sherrard 86)

Even while Nelson was at sea, leading the British navy in its life-or-death struggle against Napoleon's fleet, his letters reveal that he devoted as much thought to the fashions and accessories that he could obtain for Emma as he did to naval strategies:

I have sent to Naples, to try and get some shawls from the King's manufactory: and have requested Mr. Falconet to ask his wife to choose some for you, and also some fine Venetian chains. I only wish, my dear Emma, that I knew what you would like, and I would order them with real pleasure; therefore, pray tell me. (Nelson 85)

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In his Encomium of Helen, the Roman orator Isocrates describes how the beauty of Helen of Troy was the genesis of Greek civilization, in both its artistic and martial aspects. On the one hand, "she stood over Homer at night and directed him to write about those who had campaigned against Troy," thus giving birth to Classical literature and art, and on the other, "it is owing to Helen that we are not the slaves of the barbarians. For we shall find that it was because of her that the Greeks became united in harmonious accord." Helen was the ideal that gave Classical civilization form and purpose.

Emma likewise inspired both the art of her time, and the military salvation of her country. Her marriage to Sir William Hamilton resulted in a comprehensive artistic record of her beauty, which propagated a Classical revival; while her relationship with Admiral Nelson motivated England's great protector to vanquish Napoleon's forces on the high seas.

Nelson himself once declared that "If there were more Emmas there would be more Nelsons" (Sherrard 327), thereby providing a fitting epitaph for this English Helen of Troy. Perhaps today's plus-size models can become the Helens of Troy, or the Lady Hamiltons, of our own time, giving our rudderless culture its bearings, and restoring its sense of itself.

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REFERENCES:

Barrington, E. The Divine Lady: A Romance of Nelson and Emma Hamilton. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1925.

Cross, David A. A Striking Likeness: The Life of George Romney. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000.

Fraser, Flora. Beloved Emma: The Life of Lady Hamilton. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italian Journey. Trans. Robert R. Heitner. Eds. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons. Goethe: The Collected Works 6. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Hardwick, Mollie. Emma, Lady Hamilton: A Study. London: Cassell, 1969.

Hudson, Roger, ed. Nelson and Emma. London: The Folio Society, 1994.

Jenkins, Ian and Kim Sloan. Vases & Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection. London: British Museum P, 1996.

Nelson, Horatio. Nelson's Letters to Lady Hamilton. London: Sisley. [19--?]

Peakman, Julie. Emma Hamilton. London: Haus Publishing, 2005.

Sherrard, O.A. A Life of Emma Hamilton. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1927.

Simpson, Colin. Emma: The Life of Lady Hamilton. London: Bodley Head, 1983.

Russell, Jack. Nelson and the Hamiltons. London: Anthony Blond, 1969.

Emily

Yes, Lady Hamilton was the equivalent of a paparazzi darling in her time. But how different her example was, from the example provided by the tanorexic celebrities of our own day and age! Whereas modern celebrities encourage women to punish themselves with starvation and exercise-torture, the celebrities of past centuries showed women that they could embrace their natural figures, and eat whatever they liked -- and as much as they liked.


How remarkable (and wonderful) to experience the attitude towards the female body that prevailed in another time -- a saner and better time than ours, a time when a woman's beauty was considered "much improved" when her figure became fuller.

In addition to the Helen of Troy comparison, I think one could also liken Lady Hamilton to Venus, the goddess of beauty. Venus was romantically involved with both Vulcan, the artificer, and Mars, the god of war. Those two neatly parallel the roles that Sir William Hamilton, the classicist, and Nelson, the warrior, played in Emma's life.