Although largely forgotten now, the artist Charles Collet (c.1725-1780) was in his time named ‘a second Hogarth’. Two prints made after paintings by Collet, ‘Grown Gentlemen Taught to Dance’ and ‘Grown Ladies &c. Taught to Dance’, lampoon members of the aspiring gentry as they attempt to learn ballroom dancing. The humour of a clumsy youth learning a country dance and an elderly woman being taught the minuet may be taken at face value, or further enhanced through examination of details in the prints. ‘Grown Gentleman Taught to Dance’ includes several textual details that appear to be thinly disguised references to the fashionable dancing master Giovanni Andrea Battista Gallini and his handbook A Treatise on the Art of Dancing (1762). Text is absent in the simpler print ‘Grown Ladies &c. Taught to Dance’, but the seemingly redundant inclusion of ‘&c.’ in the title may have a deeper significance, relating to the ‘grown lady’ who undergoes instruction. The paper demonstrates how contextual information enriches our understanding of an image, but at the same time inevitably raises more questions. Hilary Mantel, who provides the title for this conference, also wrote “History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past.”
The paper derives from a section of the author’s chapter ‘Visual Representations’ in Volume 4 (The Age of Enlightenment and Revolution, 1650-1789) of Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Dance, due to be published later this year.
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Jeremy Barlow has a special interest in historical imagery of dancers and musicians. His books include A Dance Through Time: Images of Western Social Dancing from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Bodleian Library) and The Enraged Musician: Hogarth’s Musical Imagery (Routledge). As a performer he has made many recordings with his group the Broadside Band of dance music from the early modern period. Albums include Il Ballarino: Italian Dances c. 1600 (Hyperion), Danses populaires françaises: Thoinot Arbeau, Orchésographie 1588 (Harmonia Mundi), English Country Dances from Playford’s Dancing Master 1651-1703 (Saydisc), Songs and Dances from Shakespeare (Saydisc), and Dances of Court and Country from the time of Elizabeth I and James I (DHDS and Classical Communications).