‘Chaste as a picture by Wilkie’: The Relationship Between Comic Performance and Genre Painting in Early Nineteenth-Century British Theatre

Abstract:

The dramatist George Colman the Younger describes a private impersonation of a fellow-passenger on a coach by the actor Charles Mathews as ‘humorous as a sketch by Hogarth, chaste as a picture by Wilkie.’1 Even in his coarsest characters, says Ann Mathews of her husband,‘it was like looking at one of Wilkie’s pictures, delineating a scene from low life, while no idea is conveyed that the painter is himself a low man’. 2 Blackwood’s Magazine (1820), defending Mathews against the charge of mimicry, asked,‘Who thinks of calling Wilkie’s pictures caricatures? And what are they but just representations of individual character and habit, under peculiar circumstances?’3 This invocation of the artist, David Wilkie, as sharing a technique analogous with a comic actor, may seem surprising, although the Drama had also described the celebrated comic actor, John Emery, who specialized in rustic characters, as ‘this …

Año de publicación:

2008

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