Audio by Kate Hanks
Maker: Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792)
Culture: English
Title: Mrs. Nesbitt as Circe
Date Made: 1781
Type: Painting
Materials: Oil on canvas
Place Made: United Kingdom; England
Measurements: 49 x 39.5 in.
Transcript:
So the first thing I always notice about this painting is the two cats because their facial expressions are so expressive for cats. And then I usually notice the woman’s face and how she is looking at the viewer like she has a secret. I was always really drawn to this piece, but I didn’t know much about it until I started working at the Smith museum. And I was gonna give a tour using this artwork, so I started doing some research and the story behind it is super wild. The woman who it’s is a portrait of, Mrs. Nesbitt, lived in England is the late 1700s and she was a mistress to this Earl, who was really close with King George III. And when the Earl died, Mrs. Nesbitt inherited his estate and stayed close with the government. And, apparently, she would act as a British spy and seduce foreign agents and get their government secrets and pass them along to the King. So, in this portrait of her, the painter was drawing on this legend of Circe, who was a Greek siren witch kind of person. And she would seduce sailors and turn them into, like, docile animals. So, the painter is using the animals in the portrait as symbols to represent Mrs. Nesbitt’s past. And when I teach it, especially with little kids, I ask them to imagine what objects they would use to represent their personality in a portrait. And there’s always really funny results. My favorite was a 2nd grader who just drew a piece of pizza and said that that represented his entire personality.