MISS WOOLGAR,
1
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
1
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
MISS WOOLGAR, is a 1 by Thomas Harrington Wilson, a Romanticism work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
This print shows a girl playing a male role in 1840s burlesque theater. The artist copied her real signature, Sarah Jane Woolgar, right on the print. Burlesque comedies like The Phantom Dancers mocked serious ballets such as Giselle. Men’s parts were often played by women then, a trend that grew in later 19th-century Paris and London. Look up the artist Wilson, Thomas Harrington next.
Sarah Jane Woolgar is depicted in male attire as Duke Albert in *The Phantom Dancers*, a burlesque of the ballet *Giselle*, standing beneath a vine with a lake and mountains in the background. She poses with her body angled to the right, her left hand resting on her hip and her right arm bent upward, index finger raised, while wearing a crowned hat with a rosette and tassel, a white shirt, a long blue jacket with red bows, knee-length breeches adorned with ribbons, white stockings wrapped in blue and white ribbons, and heelless black slippers with buckles. The lithograph, produced in London…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Wilson wasn’t a painter—he was London’s go-to guy for cheeky prints that made fun of real people, usually in costumes.
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