Kitty Fisher | |
---|---|
Born | Catherine Maria Fischer [1] 1 June 1741 Soho, Westminster, London, England |
Died | 10 March 1767 (aged 25) |
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Courtesan |
Spouse | John Norris (m. 1766) |
Catherine Maria Fischer (1 June 1741 Soho, Westminster, London – 10 March 1767 Hemstead, near Tunbridge Wells, Kent), known as Kitty Fisher, was a prominent British courtesan. [2] From her teenage years onward, Fisher developed a carefully molded public image, which was enhanced by acknowledgement from Sir Joshua Reynolds and other artists. By emphasizing Fisher's beauty, audacity, and charm, portraits of her, along with newspaper and magazine articles promoted her reputation, prompting spectators to view her with awe. [3] She was one of the world's first celebrities who was not famous for being an actress, musician, or member of the royalty, but simply for being famous. Her life exemplifies the emergence of mass media publishing and fame in an era when capitalism, commercialism, global markets, and rising emphasis on public opinion were transforming England.
Born in London, [note 1] [1] Kitty Fischer was the daughter of John Henry Fischer and Ann Fischer. [2] According to some sources, she was originally a milliner, whom either Commodore Augustus Keppel, second son of the Earl of Albemarle (as reported by Town and Country in 1771) [4] or perhaps Lieutenant-General (then Ensign) Anthony George Martin (d. 1800) reportedly introduced to London high society. [5] With a flair for publicity, she became known for her affairs with men of wealth. Her appearance and dress were scrutinized and copied. Scurrilous broadsheets and satires upon her were printed and circulated, and several portraits of her by Joshua Reynolds, including one in which she posed as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl, were engraved. Prints from these engravings were sold to thousands of her fans, making Kitty Fisher one of the first "pin-up" glamour girls.
In one famous incident, on 12 March 1759, [6] Kitty Fisher fell off her horse while riding in St James's Park and exposed herself (as split-leg undergarments did not exist in the time period). [7] [8] Scores of broadsheets, ballads, and prints mocked her, playing on the pun of her being a fallen woman. But Fisher was not one to be outdone, and she immediately seized public attention for her own ends by having her portrait painted by Joshua Reynolds, the most prominent painter in England. [9]
Her fame spread throughout Europe. When he visited London in 1763, the famous Italian lover Giacomo Casanova met Fisher and wrote:
It is unclear to what extent Casanova's account is to be trusted, as similar stories of a currency or banknote sandwich were told about several other women who were Fisher's contemporaries. [4] His insistence that Fisher spoke only English is contradicted by other sources. It is possible Casanova sought to link his name to Fisher's due to her celebrity status.
Fisher maintained a famous rivalry with Maria Gunning, who had become Lady Coventry after a calculated insertion into the marriage market orchestrated by Gunning's mother. Fisher's rumored affair with Lord Coventry several years later sparked the rivalry. Giustiniana Wynne, visiting London at the time, wrote:
Fisher's retort to Lady Coventry shows her intentions to marry a Lord and, thus, ascend social class by means of marriage, in much the same way as Gunning herself. Fisher's cynical assessment of the gender politics of the day shows an awareness of the constraints on single women with a mind towards greater social mobility, but also serves as a condemnation of the Gunning girls for positioning themselves to marry wealthy, powerful men, merely for their own means and preservation. Wynne also wrote that "She lives in the greatest possible splendor, [note 3] spends 12,000 pounds a year, and she is the first of her social class to employ liveried servants—she even has liveried chaise porters." [note 4]
The first artist known to have painted Fisher was Joshua Reynolds. In addition to the portraits made famous through engraved prints that were marketed directly to the public, [13] [14] [15] he did several other paintings of Fisher, some of which appear to be unfinished studies.
Nathaniel Hone painted her at least once in 1765, at the height of her popularity, and possibly a second time. His famous painting, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. [16] Besides sitting multiple times for Hone and Reynolds, [17] she may have been painted by Philip Mercier, James Northcote, and Richard Purcell, among others. [18]
Apart from the letters of Giustiniana Wynne, she is also mentioned in the diaries and letters of Madame D'Arblay and Horace Walpole among others.
In 1766, she married John Norris, son of the M.P. for Rye and grandson of Admiral Sir John Norris. She came to live at her husband's family house, Hemsted (now the premises of the prestigious English public school Benenden School). Some sources say she settled into the proper role of mistress of Hemsted, building up Norris's fortune and enjoying the company of the locals, who appreciated her generosity to the poor. However, she died only four months after her marriage, some sources say from the effects of lead-based cosmetics (although this may be a confusion with the fate of her rival Lady Coventry), or possibly from smallpox or consumption (now known as tuberculosis), in 1767. She was buried in Benenden churchyard dressed in her best ball gown.
Fisher is mentioned in the nursery rhyme Lucy Locket :
Music publisher Peter Thompson also published a country dance bearing her name in Volume II of Thompson's Complete Collection of 200 Country Dances published in 1764. [19] During her lifetime, numerous books and articles claiming to tell her life story were published, although these were often spurious and make it difficult to separate biographical facts from the myth of Kitty Fisher. She was also included as a character in several eighteenth-century novels, including Chrysal by Charles Jonstone. Paulette Goddard played her in the 1945 blockbuster film Kitty , released by Paramount Pictures. A fictionalized version of Fisher, played by Kirsty MacColl, appeared in the 1991 Channel Four historic musical fantasy Ghosts of Oxford Street.
Frances "Fanny" Abington was an English actress who was also known for her sense of fashion. Writer and politician Horace Walpole described her as one of the finest actors of their time, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan was said to have written the part of Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal for her to perform.
Sir Joshua Reynolds was an English painter who specialised in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting, which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and was knighted by George III in 1769.
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century. He painted quickly, and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes. Despite being a prolific portrait painter, Gainsborough gained greater satisfaction from his landscapes. He is credited as the originator of the 18th-century British landscape school. Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy.
Sir Thomas Lawrence was an English portrait painter and the fourth president of the Royal Academy. A child prodigy, he was born in Bristol and began drawing in Devizes, where his father was an innkeeper at the Bear Hotel in the Market Square. At age ten, having moved to Bath, he was supporting his family with his pastel portraits. At 18, he went to London and soon established his reputation as a portrait painter in oils, receiving his first royal commission, a portrait of Queen Charlotte, in 1790. He stayed at the top of his profession until his death, aged 60, in 1830.
Maria Coventry, Countess of Coventry was a famous Irish beauty and London society hostess during the reign of King George II. She died at a young age due to lead and mercury poisoning from toxins in her beauty regimen.
Sarah Siddons was a Welsh actress, the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century. Contemporaneous critic William Hazlitt dubbed Siddons as "tragedy personified".
"Lucy Locket" is an English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19536.
The Society of Dilettanti is a British society of noblemen and scholars that sponsored the study of ancient Greek and Roman art, and the creation of new work in the style.
Anne Seymour Damer was an English sculptor. Described as a 'female genius' by Horace Walpole, she was trained in sculpture by Giuseppe Ceracchi and John Bacon. Influenced by the Enlightenment movement, Damer was an author, traveller, theatrical producer and actress, as well as an acclaimed sculptor.
Penelope Boothby was a girl who has become one of the most famous child characters in British art. Her image inspired the paintings by Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli, John Everett Millais, a sculpture by Thomas Banks, photographs of Lewis Carroll, sonnet of Brooke Boothby.
Lady Cockburn and Her Three Eldest Sons (1775) is an oil on canvas portrait by Joshua Reynolds. Work began on the picture in 1773, and, in Grand Manner fashion, Reynolds exploited two classical paintings: the attitude of the child on the left was modelled on Cupid in Velázquez's Toilet of Venus whilst the general composition was inspired by Anthony van Dyck's Charity. The painting passed to Mister Cockburn's son George, and then to his daughter, Mrs Hamilton, the wife of Sir James Hamilton. It was bequeathed to London's National Gallery in 1906. The painting is one of the few signed by Reynolds: Lady Cockburn's dress bears his signature and the year 1775.
Giustiniana Wynne was an Anglo-Venetian author. She features in the memoirs of Casanova and had a long secret love affair with Andrea Memmo, one of the last statesmen of the Venetian Republic.
Elizabeth Hartley (1750?–1824) was one of the most celebrated actors on the London stage in the 1700s. She was also notorious for the role she played in society scandals including "The Vauxhall Affray".
Iden Green is a small village, near Benenden, in the county of Kent. It belongs to the civil parish of Benenden and the Tunbridge Wells Borough District of Kent, in the South East of England.
Fanny Murray, née Fanny Rudman and later Fanny Ross, was an 18th-century English courtesan, mistress to John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich and dedicatee of the fateful Essay on Woman (1763) that led to the downfall of John Wilkes. A contemporary of Kitty Fisher and Charlotte Hayes, the "celebrated Fanny Murray" was one of the most prominent courtesans of her day; a celebrity and fashion leader who rose from destitution to wealth and fame, before settling down into a life of "respectable prosperity". The Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny Murray are one of the first examples of the "whore's memoir" genre of writing, although they are unlikely to have been actually written by Murray.
Mary Palmer was a British author from Devon who wrote Devonshire Dialogue, once considered the "best piece of literature in the vernacular of Devon." She was the mother of painter Theophila Gwatkin and sister of the artists Sir Joshua Reynolds and Frances Reynolds and of the pamphleteer Elizabeth Johnson.
Jane Stanhope, Countess of Harrington, was a society hostess and heiress who served as a lady of the Bedchamber to the British queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
The "Streatham" portrait is an oil painting on panel from the 1590s believed to be a later copy of a woodcut of the English noblewoman Lady Jane Grey from 1580. It shows a three-quarter-length depiction of a young woman in Tudor-period dress holding a prayer book, with the faded inscription "Lady Jayne" or "Lady Iayne" in the upper-left corner. It is in poor condition and damaged, as if it has been attacked. As of January 2015 the portrait is in Room 3 of the National Portrait Gallery in London.
David Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy is a 1761 painting by the English painter Joshua Reynolds, depicting the actor and playwright David Garrick caught between the Muses of Tragedy and Comedy. It is regarded as one of Reynolds's most studied and well-known paintings, and is now in the collection of Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire.
Kathleen Eleonora "Kitty" Garman, later Kitty Epstein and Kitty Godley, was a British artist and muse. She was a model for her father Jacob Epstein, her first husband Lucian Freud, and Andrew Tift. In 2004 she had her own show at The New Art Gallery Walsall.