The Reynolds exhibition at Tate Britain has a section devoted to women of a certain reputation. But there's a significant gap between what the labels on the wall tell us, and what we read in the catalogue. Of "Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra" the label tells us: "In this sexually-charged image Kitty Fisher, a high-class prostitute, is shown as Cleopatra suspending a large pearl over a goblet of wine ..." But the catalogue, by Martin Postle, tells us Fisher was a "courtesan" rather than "a mere prostitute".
Postle quotes a contemporary source as observing that there was "a gradation of whores in the metropolis: women of fashion who intrigue, demi-reps, good- natured girls, kept mistresses, ladies of pleasure, whores, park-walkers, street-walkers, bunters, bulk-mongers". Clearly there are discriminations to be made. It's an interesting subject.
Did Kitty Fisher really eat a £100 banknote on a slice of buttered toast, or was this just a good story? Was she really established in her lodgings by a subscription from "Arthur's, an exclusive gentleman's club on St James's Street", as a contemporary source quoted by Postle avers, or is this just gossip?
"Mrs Abington as 'Miss Prue'", one of the loveliest pictures in the show (it comes from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale), shows a young woman with black silk bracelets leaning on the back of a chair, gazing attentively and, to my eye, seriously at the viewer. The thumb of her left hand is so placed as to obscure part of her lower lip. Her mouth is slightly open, which is one way a portraitist can create the illusion of the sitter being about to speak.
The label tells us that Mrs Abington had worked in a brothel before making her name on the stage. The catalogue says that she began working selling flowers and singing ballads in Covent Garden (the market, that is, not the opera house), and that she was known as "nosegay Fan". It goes on: "Subsequently, she lodged in the household of a certain Mrs Parker, evidently a courtesan. There, as well as being schooled in the arts of seduction, she received lessons in etiquette and possibly also in French and Italian, before Mrs Parker's jealousy apparently forced her back onto the street." And that "shortly afterwards" she went on stage.
So what are we talking about here - a talented and beautiful young girl who is taken off the streets into some kind of geisha household and there trained to entertain, before getting out of that line of business and onto the stage? Or someone who has "worked in a brothel" as per the label on the wall (implying for all that we know that she would be obliged to submit to any punter)?
The answer affects the way you are going to read the painting. Do you agree that "Her thumb is poised suggestively before her slightly parted lips, a gesture which is at once vulgar and sexually charged"? That is to say, is she "coquettishly" hinting at fellatio? It seems to me wildly improbable that Reynolds would consciously have painted the sitter in such a way. If, as the label tells us, Mrs Abington was at the time the mistress of a wealthy Irish MP, it seems even less likely.
Postle tells us that, although the portrait is traditionally supposed to show the actress in her role as Prue in William Congreve's Love for Love, "Reynolds did not attempt to illustrate a particular moment in the play." I wonder why he says this. There is indeed a moment in the play when the silly country girl, Miss Prue, is left alone with an unattractive suitor, Ben - a rough sea-dog. Ben offers her a chair: "Come, mistress, will you please to sit down? For an you stand astern a that'n, we shall never grapple together. Come, I'll haul a chair; there, an you please to sit I'll sit by you." Prue replies: "You need not sit so near one; if you have anything to say I can hear you farther off, I an't deaf."
In other words, there was some kind of comic business with a chair. The awkward country girl, shown leaning on the back of a Chippendale chair in a way that is unique in female portraiture of the period, knows that she is about to have to fend off a proposal (which indeed she does). She has been taught earlier in the play that a woman should always tell lies, but in this scene she decides to tell the absolute truth: "I'm too big to be whipped so I'll tell you plainly I don't like you, nor love you at all, nor never will, that's more; so, there's your answer for you; and don't trouble me no more, you ugly thing!"
These are the thoughts that are welling up inside Miss Prue, as she sits awkwardly on her chair. Her suitor ends up calling her a sea-calf and a cheesecurd, and vowing he'd as soon marry a Lapland witch. She replies: "I won't be called names, nor I won't be abused thus, so I won't. If I were a man [Cries], you durst not talk at this rate; no, you durst not, you stinking tar-barrel."
Evidently this was Mrs Abington's big moment.
