by Paula Byrne
Reynolds was acutely aware of the commercial potential that followed from the huge expansion of the market for engraved prints in the late eighteenth century. He sometimes painted famous beauties and actresses specifically with a view to the reproductions that would be made from them. It may not be by chance that his painting of Perdita employs a high proportion of black and white: this meant that it would translate well to the monochrome medium of engraving. A stipple engraving by William Dickinson, published in the summer of 1782, duly circulated in very large numbers. The very pose in which Mary sat became influential: Edward Burney copied it, in mirror image, for his portrait of his cousin, the novelist Fanny Burney.
Familiarity with Reynolds’s portraits did not depend only on fine mezzotints; cheaper copies could be had for sixpence plain or one shilling coloured. A print seller’s catalogue of 1784 noted that a variety of choice examples were always kept ready framed and glazed, available at the lowest prices. Reductions of Reynolds’s images were also made for biographies and frontispiece portraits of authors. Prints after Reynolds were even available as household objects: his portrait of Tarleton appeared on a transfer-printed milk jug and some of his portraits of female figures were copied onto fans. His Kitty Fisher was miniaturized in a print to decorate a watchcase. There was, then, a fluid interchange between high art and low. Reynolds’s originals were crowd pullers, both in his studio and at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions at Somerset House in the Strand. At the same time, shoppers could sift through a vast stock of engraved images in the print shops – and laugh at the caricatures displayed in the windows.
Portrait prints and caricatures catered in different ways for the public’s avid interest in political faction, sexual scandal, and literary controversy. The reputation of a public man or woman might be enhanced by the idealization of a Reynolds portrait, but could equally fall victim to detraction and ridicule. In Robinson’s second novel, The Widow, one of the dissipated fine ladies of fashion, Mrs Vernon, remarks to her friend, on the subject of her husband: ‘leave him in the country, if you have any desire not to be caricatured in all the print-shops’.8
Caricatures frequently alluded knowingly to the postures of popular portraits. The images of Mary that began to appear in print-shop windows gave satirical illustrators every opportunity to capitalize on a ready market for images lampooning the current politicians, royals, and actresses. As will be seen, she received more than her fair share as she continued to scandalize with her colourful love life and mingled with controversial figures such as the politician Charles James Fox.
Perhaps the loveliest of the many portraits of Mary is by John Hoppner (who painted her several times). Hoppner was a figure to whom Mary would have felt very sympathetic. Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney were older men; Sir Joshua in particular became a father figure for Mary, just as Garrick had been. Hoppner, by contrast, was about the same age as her and, like her, he used his talents to gain access to a world far above his lowly status. A boy of German origins, he became a chorister in the royal chapel and showed such promise as an artist that the King paid for his training. Rather as Mary never denied the rumours that she was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Chancellor Northington, Hoppner encouraged the rumour that he was the illegitimate son of the King himself. He became known as the Prince of Wales’s painter and his house off St James’s Square, where he entertained with his American wife (who was also an artist), became a centre of fashionable society. He developed a well-deserved reputation for flattering his female sitters. The catalogue of his works reads like a register of the late Georgian beau monde, from the royal family downward.
The Hoppner portrait now at Chawton House in Hampshire was in the early twentieth century a trophy of William Randolph Hearst, the original for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. It is not known when it was painted or by whom it was commissioned. It is half-length with Mary looking at the spectator. She wears a greyish low-cut dress (could it be the silk in a hitherto unknown shade which she brought back from Paris, initially ‘kept a profound secret’ and then made ‘the rage’?). It is trimmed with white satin that highlights her creamy half-exposed breasts. She has white cuffs and a large white feather on her spectacular felt hat, which has a gorgeous diamond buckle in front. Her powdered hair falls over her neck; her luminous skin tones are set against a red curtain, a backdrop that may be influenced by the Reynolds portrait. Eighteenth-century art theory proposed that harmonious proportion was best achieved by imagining a triangle inside the rectangle of a portrait frame. At the apex of Hoppner’s triangle, mesmerizing the spectator, are ‘Mrs Robinson’s eyes’.
In the public eye, Mary was still associated with the Prince of Wales. It was reported that she had obtained a corner box at the opera ‘from whence she angularly darts the artillery of her eyes against a certain Royal breast-work, and that with so much skill, that it is generally conceived she will be able to make another breach in it before the close of the season, and march in with all the honors of love!’9 She was making herself highly visible in London society once again: on one occasion, she was spotted simply sitting in her stationary carriage in fashionable St James’s, watching and being watched.
When Mary Robinson and Banastre Tarleton coincided in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s studio on 28 January 1782, it may not have been their first meeting. The previous Thursday night there had been a brilliant midwinter masquerade at the King’s Theatre. The auditorium was festooned with parti-coloured lamps and the upper tier of boxes was elaborately draped with garlands and bows. By half past midnight the place was crowded, though only a few were in fancy dress. The ‘beautiful Perdita’ was one of them. Dressed in a black domino, ‘she did not unmask the whole evening; but there was just enough of her face seen, to make the rest wished for’. One of the few other people in fancy dress was Colonel Tarleton. He was also in a domino, but wore no visor. At one point in the evening, he was addressed by an unknown domino and replied: ‘Sir, let me see your face. I fight in open day, and you attack me from a masked battery!’10 Mary does not appear to have been cross-dressed that night, so this was probably not her, but since she and Tarleton were the most famous recently returned travellers in the theatre that night, it is highly likely that someone pointed them out to each other.
It is testimony to Mary’s energy that, having danced through the night, she sat for Sir Joshua the next day. That was a Friday; it was on the following Monday that she and Tarleton were in the studio together for the first time. They were in the same place again in the evening, when there was another winter ball, this time at the Pantheon. Eight hundred members of the beau monde attended. Entertainment was provided by Signor Delphini the Italian dancer and John Bannister the comic actor. Supper was served at one in the morning: roast fowl, cold beef, and jellied tongue, with port, sherry, madeira, and Rhenish wine. The company danced until six. Colonel Tarleton was present, as were the Prince of Wales and his entourage, but as usual the press paid particular attention to Mary: ‘The chief constellation of the pleasurable sphere, was the lovely Perdita, in a domino and mask that did not quite conceal her dimples.’11 There was, however, a tense moment when ‘a gentleman, a foreigner, as it is supposed, of some distinction, seeing the Perdita on a bench with Lord M—n, sat by her’. His exchange with Mary caused Malden to unmask and invite the gentleman to do likewise. This was the sort of incident that could provoke a duel, but on this occasion Mary succeeded in calming the situation.
It was a couple of months before she and the Colonel became lovers. Through the spring Mary continued to draw attention to her Parisian clothes. She created a new fashion in elaborate muffs:
The Cataract Muff was no sooner exhibited on the arm of Perdita than a rivalship in that article of dress was planned. Numberless were the projects that miscarried. At length a genius of the superior order produced the tablature muff, whereon some little story of an amorous nature, is generally pencilled, and, like the muff itself, the painting is calculated to produce a glow! Some have impr
oved on the above muff, by having several valves contrived, one under another, in the manner of Chinese looking-glasses, that, when one scene tires, by touching a spring another appears of a more heightened nature, by which means the imagination is gradually led on to explore every recess which the muff can contain!12
The sexual connotations of the muff were well known. Even the genteel Lady’s Magazine carried a story about the mythical origins of the garment. It was a gift from Venus to keep Adonis warm, but he soon found ‘a better application of it’: ‘In short, he cuddled, and moulded, and tossed and flirted, and branded the new instrument of amour, with so much regularity, and so just meaning, that it was not a month before, as the chronicles of those times relate, the language of the muff became as intelligible as that of the eyes.’13
An account of what Mrs Robinson wore became a fixed point in the newspaper reports of social gatherings. At the opera, her hair was ‘ornamented with braided wheat ears fastened on with diamond pins’. On another occasion one of Mademoiselle Bertin’s hats, imported especially from Paris, caused a sensation: ‘The cap in which the beautiful Perdita has lately appeared is a chef d’oeuvre of elegance; it is ornamented with plumes of feathers and a wave of artificial roses, interspersed with various flowers, on a ground of sea green, and is fastened on with brilliant pins.’ At another masquerade at the Pantheon (when she did not unmask) she wore a dress of white crape, decorated with festoons of white flowers, and ‘was much admired for the elegant simplicity of her dress’.14 Her carriages were equally prominent: ‘The Perdita yesterday launched yet another new elegant coach, that far eclipses all the various equipages of the bon ton; it is a puce-coloured ground, lined with white satin, and curtains of the same, trimmed with broad silver fringe: the most invidious of her sex must allow, that she has displayed a supreme taste in the tout ensemble of this elegant vehicle.’15 Sometimes the dress would be designed to match the carriage and sometimes vice versa.
In March 1782 it was announced that the forthcoming annual Royal Academy exhibition would include no fewer than four portraits of Perdita: full-lengths by Reynolds and Gainsborough, and two miniatures by Richard Cosway. Mary was painted several times by Cosway and his wife Maria, who had recently moved into the house next door to Gainsborough’s studio on Pall Mall after its previous occupant, Dr James Graham (he of the celestial bed), had been forced to leave due to debt. The Cosways filled the house with paintings, held numerous society parties, and established a garden and greenhouse on the roof of the building.
The Morning Herald gushed that ‘The ensuing exhibition at Somerset-house is likely to prove very Splendid, it will at least captivate the admirers of beauty and elegance, for the most distinguished pencils will exhibit the lovely Perdita!’16 Gainsborough was to have six large canvases in the show, among them the Prince of Wales leaning against his horse and full-lengths of both Mrs Robinson and Colonel Tarleton. The Public Advertiser soon remarked upon Robinson’s high public visibility: ‘The Perdita has been particularly successful in the commerce of this Year. How immense must have been her Imports and Exports is cognisable from this one Circumstance: she has sate for her Picture four times, viz. twice to Romney, once to Gainsborough, and once to Sir Joshua Reynolds!’17 Terms such as ‘commerce’ and ‘exports and imports’ are examples of what feminist critics call the commodification of women in the eighteenth century, but Mary Robinson was no passive victim in this regard: few women of the age had as great an understanding as she did of her own selling power. She knew how to manipulate her personal image and harness the insatiable public interest in her private life to her own advantage.
The Public Advertiser article went on to compare the different portraits of Mary. It regarded the Reynolds as the best, the Romney as ‘second in Point of Merit’ and the Gainsborough as ‘one of his Few Failures’ because it was not a good likeness. Stung by criticism of this kind, Gainsborough withdrew his Perdita from the Royal Academy show. When the annual exhibition opened on 29 April, it was Reynolds’s portraits of Mary and Tarleton that were the talking point. The Robinson was widely praised, but the Tarleton drew a mixed response. The satirist John Wolcot, whose pseudonym was Peter Pindar and who later became a very close friend of Mary’s, wrote in the first of his Lyric Odes to Royal Academicians of 1782 that he was not impressed with ‘Tarleton dragging on his boot so tight!’ and the distinctly Trojan – which is to say wooden – aspect of the horse.
Tarleton and Mary were observed together at several balls and masquerades in May, but she was officially still living with Lord Malden. They seem to have formed a fashionable threesome, who enjoyed playing pranks on less stylish characters who tried to enter their charmed circle. There is a story that a rake named Pugh, son of an alderman of the City of London, offered twenty guineas for ‘ten minutes’ conversation’ with Mrs Robinson. She consented to grant him the favour he asked, for the sum stipulated. Pugh hurried to her house, anticipating speedy sexual gratification. But instead of being closeted privately with her, as he had expected, he was shown into a room where Mrs Robinson was sitting with Tarleton and Malden. Mary took her watch from her side and put it on the table. She then turned away from her companions and addressed her conversation entirely to Pugh. For ten minutes. After which she picked up her watch, rang the bell, asked the servant to show out Mr Pugh, and relieved him of his twenty guineas, which on the following day was divided among her four favourite charitable institutions. Tarleton and Malden tittered throughout the ten-minute conversation.18
There is no surviving first-hand account of exactly how and when Mary transferred her affections from Malden to Tarleton. The former was her escort at the masquerade on 10 May but by the end of the month the Morning Herald was reporting that ‘The Perdita was lately made captive by Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton, – on one of that officer’s amorous reconnoitring parties: the consequence of which has proved very unfortunate to the fair one, her noble commander having refused to receive her back, at the hands of her new conqueror!’ Her rivals in the demi-monde were said to have received the warmest congratulations on her ‘impolitic lapse’.19
The scurrilous but well-sourced Memoirs of Perdita offered an account that drew upon the well-known fact that Tarleton, Malden, and their circle were all fanatical betting men. Malden had so strong a faith in Perdita’s attachment to him that he would not believe that any man could possibly seduce her from his arms. He was always warm in her praise and boastful of her loyalty to him alone. One evening at the St Alban’s tavern, in company with the Colonel and others, Malden ‘offered to confirm this opinion, by a bet of a thousand guineas’. Tarleton instantly accepted the bet: he would not only win her from Malden, but also jilt her. So it was, claimed the Memoirs of Perdita, that, Othello-like, he seduced her with tales of ‘the dangers he had undergone, the hair-breadth escapes he had ventured, the toilsome marches he had sustained, the wonders he had seen, and all the strange adventures which fill a soldier’s life’. He took her to his bed, only to find that their amorous pleasures were constantly interrupted by callers, so they left London for Barrow-hedges, a small village not far from Epsom, where ‘for a full fortnight they enjoyed themselves in an uninterrupted mutual possession, free from the impertinent cares and troubles of the world, strangers to its concerns, and totally occupied in the soft delights of communicating happiness: while every one of their acquaintance were totally ignorant whither they had flown’.20
Though there may be a grain of truth in all this, there are at least three problems with the story, quite apart from the way that it makes Mary into a passive agent, which she rarely was. For one thing, the man who wagers his lady’s chastity among his male friends in a tavern is as traditional a literary figure as Othello wooing Desdemona – indeed, the plot of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline turns on just such a bet. The author of the Memoirs of Perdita was as influenced by fictional convention as by historical fact. Secondly, the frequency with which the movements of Tarleton and Mrs Robinson were reported around this period
was such that a two-week period of ‘uninterrupted mutual possession’ on the Epsom Downs is most unlikely to have gone unremarked by the newspapers. And, thirdly, the Memoirs of Perdita ends the story by saying that Malden paid his bet ‘but totally renounced for ever his faithless mistress’. But he did not totally renounce her: he agreed to settle an annuity upon her, though he was very erratic in paying it.
There was fresh drama in early June. The Morning Herald reported news of a traffic accident in Hyde Park. A phaeton was driven into Mary’s chariot with such violence that it overturned. In the fall she was so dangerously wounded that she was conveyed ‘in a state of insensibility’ to her house in Berkeley Square. It was noted that ‘she was attended by Col. Tarleton when the above circumstance happened’.21
The house in Berkeley Square had been established for her by Malden. It was one of the most prestigious addresses in London: a generously laid out square with finely proportioned terraced houses fronted by elaborate wrought-iron railings. One of the properties had been fitted out in Oriental splendour by Clive of India, prior to his suicide in 1774; another was the family home of William Pitt the Younger; another, designed by William Kent, is regarded today as one of the finest Georgian terraced houses still standing anywhere in London.
A follow-up story published three days later claimed that when she was brought home unconscious Malden ensured that she was given the proper medical attention, but then left the house – presumably offended that she had been out driving with Tarleton. A different account was published the next day: far from having returned to her former lord, she was now ‘divorced from him’ and ‘cohabits with her military seducer Col T—at his house in Hill Street’. Then two days after this, an article appeared, possibly at Mary’s behest, denying rumours of ‘the Perdita’s having quitted her residence and attachment in Berkely Square’.22 By late July, however, the Morning Herald was announcing unequivocally that ‘The Perdita and her noble lover are now separated forever – it occasioned some convulsive pangs on either side, but at last les noeuds d’amour were torn asunder, never to be re-united!’23 It is not known at what date Malden entered into the arrangement to pay her an annuity.
