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| Object search: lawrence |
Result 5 of 25 |
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| | Emily Anderson: Little Red Riding Hood
ca.1821
| Sitter: Emily Anderson
British, born around 1805-1810
| Maker: Thomas Lawrence
British, 1769-1830
| 63 3/4 x 45 in. (161.9 x 114.3 cm.)
| oil on canvas
| The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
| | Nothing is known of Emily Anderson, the daughter of the Rev. William Anderson of Udale, Cromarty Bay, Firth, Scotland. She may have been a descendant of Hugh Anderson (1633-1704) of Udol, a covenanting minister and scholar. Judging from her apparent age in the painting, she was born around 1805-10.
Hooded cloaks and mantles made of thick, red wool and lined with silk were conventional elements of feminine outdoor dress when Thomas Lawrence painted this portrait. The "red riding hood" worn by Emily Anderson sets off a fairly stylish ensemble, featuring a high-waisted round dress of brown cotton, long white silk stockings, and black shoes with shoe-ties. However, Lawrence undoubtedly intended the costume to suggest the folktale of "Little Red Riding Hood," the naive country girl who set out to carry a basket of treats to her grandmother's house, but made the fatal error of informing a hungry wolf of her errand. By the time she reached the house, the wolf had eaten the invalid woman and donned her clothing, a disguise which enabled him to lure the trusting girl near enough to eat her, too. The story became well-known in Britain during the third quarter of the eighteenth century through English translations of a collection of moral fables by Charles Perrault (1628-1703). Maria Cosway was among the first artists to capitalize on the tale's popularity, exhibiting a Little Red Riding Hood at the Royal Academy in 1783. John Hoppner and John Opie each painted veiled portraits with this theme in succeeding decades.
According to family legend, Lawrence's picture was inspired by a private theatrical performance that he witnessed while staying with Emily Anderson's family at Udale. Unable to determine a dress or pose "which in his opinion did justice to the beautiful girl," he saw her perform a dance in the guise of Red Riding Hood and decided to depict her in that manner. Whether or not the story is true, Lawrence's dramatic presentation of Emily Anderson certainly reflects his longstanding theatrical predilections. She appears as she would on a stage, decked out with costume and props appropriate to her role, spotlit against a dark background and towering over the viewer. Lawrence was frequently criticized for relying on dramatic elements of lighting and brushwork to disguise his imperfect command of anatomy. In the present portrait, anatomical distortions are apparent in the overall massiveness of the girl's body in relation to her head, and in her proper right arm, which is too long and wide.
Lawrence undoubtedly meant to flatter his sitter by likening her to the unspoiled rustic paragon of the folktale, who was "as sweet a young creature as ever was seen;/With goodness, and beauty, and modesty crown'd,/Belov'd and esteem'd by the neighbours all round." But his literary allusion also imbued the painting with moral significance, for in Lawrence's day "Little Red Riding Hood" was a cautionary tale explicitly warning pubescent females ("young, growing misses fair,/Whose orient rosy blooms begin t'appear) against succumbing to male sexual predators (the "Most dangerous of all Wolves", who "Ogle and leer, languish, cajole and glance;/With luring tongues, and language wond'rous sweet,/Follow young ladies as they walk the street)." Like his painting Pinkie, painted three decades earlier, Lawrence's Little Red Riding Hood mythologizes the bittersweet epoch of a girl's transition to sexual maturity. But the more heavy-handed manner adopted here reflects the greater sentimentality of the early nineteenth-century cult of childhood relative to that which arose in the late eighteenth century on the tide of Romanticism.
Lawrence bolstered the idealization of innocence implicit in his literary theme by exaggerating the sweetness of the girl's expression and modeling the position of her arms on the classical gesture of female modesty employed in sculptures of the Venus Pudicitia type. At the same time, he dressed her in a conspicuously abbreviated mantle and dress whose function is to reveal, rather than conceal, the physical attractions of her bare arms, chest, neck, and face. Lawrence couched this exposed and vulnerable figure in a foreboding atmosphere of deepening gloom and menacing clouds. His conception may have inspired John Wood's The Gathering Storm (1829), in which the ominous backdrop provides a non-literary embodiment of danger. Both paintings exemplify the vogue for depictions of imperiled innocents that was a side-effect of the cult of childhood. Earlier examples include Joshua Reynolds's Children in the Wood of 1770, which played upon the heightened sensibilities of the viewer.
The widely accessible literary theme of Emily Anderson's portrait expanded its potential audience beyond that of the sitter and her family. It was reproduced as a line engraving by Richard James Lane in 1824, and as a mezzotint by John Richard Jackson in 1845. The painting was also copied in oil on at least one occasion. By the mid nineteenth century, the tale of Little Red Riding Hood had lost its overt sexual connotations, having been reinterpreted with a sanitized, happy ending by the Brothers Grimm. As a genre subject as well as a portraiture conceit, it enjoyed sustained popularity among Victorian artists, who further developed the sentimental quality anticipated in Lawrence's portrait.
|  | | | Accession No. 18.18
| Provenance:
Painted for the sitter's father, the Rev. William Anderson of Udale, Cromarty, Firth, Scotland; by descent to the Rev. A. Anderson; to Mrs. Augusta Gordon Watson, presumably a relation; to her son Lieutenant Frank A. Anderson; sold to Duveen; acquired by Henry E. Huntington, 1918
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