Of Emma’s Tambourine

Plate VIII of the celebrated Attitudes of Emma Lady Hamilton shows her in a dancing pose holding aloft a large tambourine which she seems to be keeping away from an importuning child. Based on a drawing taken at Naples by the German artist Frederick Rehberg it was engraved in Rome by the Italian printmaker Tomasso Piroli and published in 1794. The image was subsequently reproduced in a number of formats during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Italy, London and in Germany and these images were widely distributed during the 1790s but were they simply following a trend or taking a leading role in the changes seen in dancing on the stage? In addressing the confusing history of this image I hope to address both Hamilton’s place in the iconography of dance and the tambourine as an iconographical attribute of the dancer.

Keith Cavers is an independent curator, scholar and consulting iconographer. He studied Stage Management at RADA and History of Drawing and Printmaking at Camberwell. His thesis on James Harvey D’Egville (Surrey) led to a visiting research fellowship at Harvard in 1996 where he returned in both 2015 and 2016. He was Slide Librarian and a Visiting Lecturer at Camberwell for twenty years and Information Officer at the National Gallery London for twelve. During lockdown he assembled a chronological sourcebook of late Georgian published sources (now well over 570,000 words), with a matching Iconography (460+). In 2021 he contributed a chapter on D’Egville to ‘With a Grace Not to Be Captured: Representing the Georgian Theatrical Dancer, 1760-1830’, and on Clarissa Wybrow for the Queen’s University Belfast ‘Dance Biographies’ blog. He is currently working on an historical study: “Ballet in Late Georgian London 1776 – 1836.”