Abstract
This chapter examines silhouettes and waxworks by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women artists in order to consider the ways in which these mysterious artifacts represent traces of the embodied presence of specific individuals. Viewing a silhouette connects the observer directly to the moment of the object’s creation—staging a kind of reenactment scenario across time. The extraordinary skill and technique of silhouette artists such as Isabella Beetham (1750–1825) and her daughter Jane Read (c. 1773–1800) provide insight into modes of late eighteenth-century style, gesture, and expression. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to waxworks, specifically to Madame Tussaud’s self-portraits . Encountering waxworks involves a sense of tangibility that disrupts the boundaries between spectators and objects. Silhouettes and waxworks are both quintessential tourist objects because they are things that are specifically connected to technologies of presence. I argue that the particular properties of silhouettes and waxworks as media are analogous to how women have appeared and disappeared in the archives, as well as the ways in which women’s embodied experiences are mediated through material representations that both preserve and obscure their presence.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Als, Hilton. 2007. The shadow act. The New Yorker 83 (30) (8 October). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/08/the-shadow-act. Accessed 1 June 2018.
Berridge, Kate. 2006. Madame Tussaud: A life in wax. New York: William Morrow.
Biographical and descriptive sketches of the whole length composition figures, and other works of art, forming the unrivalled exhibition of Madame Tussaud. 1823. Bristol: J. Bennett.
Bradley, Georgie. 2014. How do I become… a wax sculptor? The Guardian, January 21.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”. New York: Routledge.
Carpio, Glenda. 2008. Laughing fit to kill: Black humor in the fictions of slavery. New York: Oxford University Press.
Crawshaw, Carol, and John Urry. 1997. Tourism and the photographic eye. In Touring cultures: Transformations of travel and theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry, 176–195. London: Routledge.
Engel, Laura. 2011. Fashioning celebrity: Eighteenth-century British actresses and strategies for image making. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Heller, Billy. 2001. The whole ball of wax: Step right up to the stars at Madame Tussaud’s. New York Post, February 24.
Hess, Jonathan M. 2017. Deborah and her sisters: How one nineteenth-century melodrama and a host of celebrated actresses put Judaism on the world stage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Huet, Marie-Hélène. 1993. Monstrous imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kara Walker: My complement, my enemy, my oppressor, my love. 2007. Whitney Museum of American Art. https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/KaraWalker. Accessed 1 June 2018.
Kornmeier, Uta. 2008. Almost alive: The spectacle of verisimilitude in Madame Tussaud’s waxworks. In Ephemeral bodies: Wax sculpture and the human figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli, 67–82. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.
MacCannell, Dean. 1999. The tourist: A new theory of the leisure class. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Madame Tussaud: A legend in wax. 2017. Rodama: A Blog of 18th Century & Revolutionary French Trivia. http://rodama1789.blogspot.com/2017/04/madame-tussaud-legend-in-wax.html. Accessed 2 June 2018.
McKechnie, Sue. 2014a. Beetham, Isabella, Mrs. (McKechnie Section 3). Profiles of the Past. http://profilesofthepast.org.uk/mckechnie/beetham-isabella-mrs-mckechnie-section-3. Accessed 1 June 2018.
———. 2014b. Read, Jane (McKechnie Section 6). Profiles of the Past. http://profilesofthepast.org.uk/mckechnie/read-jane-mckechnie-section-6. Accessed 1 June 2018.
Millmore, Bridget. 2013. “To turn sideways”: An examination of the depiction of hair and head dresses in late eighteenth century women’s silhouettes. In Profiles of the past: Silhouettes, fashion and image, 1760–1960, ed. Lou Taylor, Annebella Pollen, and Charlotte Nicklas, 14–23. Profiles of the Past. http://www.profilesofthepast.org.uk/sites/profilesofthepast.org.uk/files/Profiles_of_the_Past_SFI_1760-1960_lo_res.pdf. Accessed 2 June 2018.
Nussbaum, Felicity. 2010. Rival queens: Actresses, performance, and the eighteenth-century British theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Panzanelli, Roberta. 2008. The body in wax, the body of wax. In Ephemeral bodies: Wax sculpture and the human figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli, 1–12. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.
Pilbeam, Pamela. 2003. Madame Tussaud and the history of waxworks. London: Hambledon and London.
Pollen, Annebella. 2013. Peering into the shadows: Researching silhouettes. In Profiles of the past: Silhouettes, fashion and image, 1760–1960, ed. Lou Taylor, Annebella Pollen, and Charlotte Nicklas, 4–13. Profiles of the Past. http://www.profilesofthepast.org.uk/sites/profilesofthepast.org.uk/files/Profiles_of_the_Past_SFI_1760-1960_lo_res.pdf. Accessed 1 June 2018.
Powell, Margaret K., and Roach, Joseph. 2004. Big hair. Eighteenth-Century Studies 38 (1) (Fall): 79–99.
Rutherford, Emma. 2009. Silhouette: The art of the shadow. New York: Rizzoli International Publications.
Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing remains: Art and war in times of theatrical reenactment. London: Routledge.
Sterckx, Marjan. 2007. Pride and prejudice: Eighteenth-century women sculptors and their material practices. In Women and material culture, 1660–1830, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, 86–102. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Teukolsky, Rachel. 2015. Cartomania: Sensation, celebrity, and the democratized portrait. Victorian Studies 57 (3) (Spring): 462–475.
TripAdvisor. 2017. Madame Tussauds London. https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g186338-d187535-Reviews-or10-Madame_Tussauds_London-London_England.html. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Verrill, Courtney. 2016. How the incredibly lifelike waxworks at Madame Tussauds are made. Business Insider, February 16. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-lifelike-wax-figures-are-made-2016-2. Accessed 2 June 2018.
Wallace, Beth Kowaleski. 2013. Representing corporeal “truth” in the work of Anna Morandi Manzolini and Madame Tussaud. In Women and the material culture of death, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, 283–309. Surrey: Ashgate.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Engel, L. (2019). Women Artists, Silhouettes, and Waxworks. In: Women, Performance and the Material of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58932-3_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58932-3_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58931-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58932-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)