Thomas Gainsborough, 'Mrs Siddons', 1785

Mrs Siddons (1755–1831) was the greatest tragic actress of her time, remaining at the top of her profession for 30 years. The writer and critic William Hazlitt wrote that ‘She was Tragedy, personified...To have seen Mrs Siddons was an event in everybody’s life’. Gainsborough painted her in the winter of 1784–5, during her third London season.

As Sarah Kemble, she was born into a theatrical family. Four of her brothers became actors, the most famous of whom was John Philip Kemble. Aged 18, she married the actor William Siddons in 1773 and was thereafter known professionally as Mrs Siddons. Although she had acted in provincial theatres since childhood, Mrs Siddons’s first London appearance, at Drury Lane in 1775, was not a success. However, when she returned again in the winter season of 1782–3, she created a sensation, causing the theatre management to put up her salary from £5 to £20 for the next season and resulting in a ‘long and unbroken line of carriages’ rolling towards Drury Lane.

Most of Mrs Siddons’s earlier portraits depict her in character; one of the most celebrated is Reynolds’s portrait Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse signed and dated 1784 (now in the Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino) and exhibited that year at the Royal Academy.

Mrs Siddons was forever ‘on the wing’ between the theatre and her young family, for whom she was the only effective breadwinner, and she had less and less time to sit for all the painters wishing to portray her. Gainsborough probably began his portrait of her early in 1785, shortly before her thirtieth birthday. Like Reynolds’s Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, Gainsborough’s portrait was painted in the hope of finding a buyer or engraver, rather than commissioned. He made a particularly careful chalk drawing of Mrs Siddons (Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio), suggesting that he couldn‘t count on more than one sitting for the portrait. In April 1785 Gainsborough exhibited the finished portrait in his London studio.

Mrs Siddons is shown off-stage and in fashionable contemporary dress. She wears a black beaver hat trimmed with ribbon and ostrich feathers, like those worn by other ladies Gainsborough portrayed around 1785, such as Mrs William Hallett. Mrs Siddons’s blue striped gown, tied at the waist with a blue sash, is known as a ’wrapping-gown‘ and would have been comparatively easy for a busy actress to slip on and off. Her yellow mantle is edged with fox fur and she holds a fox fur muff. The sombre red curtain dramatically framing Mrs Siddons’s head, similar to those in portraits by Rubens and Van Dyck, is not often found in portraits by Gainsborough. He apparently found some difficulty in capturing Mrs Siddons’s distinctive features, and is said to have exclaimed: ’Confound the nose, there’s no end to it!'

Mrs Siddons was known for her grand manner – she was said to look, walk and move like a woman of superior rank. At the time Gainsborough painted her, she was playing her greatest role – Lady Macbeth. Something of the power and passion of that part can be felt in the portrait, considered by some as the artist’s masterpiece.