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TABLEAUX
With roots in medieval and Renaissance pageants,
the modern tableau emerged in the eighteenth century.
In his writings on the theater of the 1750s and 1760s,
Denis Diderot argued that stage productions should
create emotional and moral effect like the best painting
of the day by presenting deliberate tableaux at critical
moments in the drama. In Naples in the late eighteenth
century, Lady Emma Hamilton famously assumed fro-
zen “attitudes” after fi gures on Greek vases and ancient
statues. This activity would soon be echoed in a music
hall entertainment, the pose plastique, where partially
dressed fi gures assumed positions suggesting classical
statuary (Stevenson, 57). In 1809, Goethe prominently
featured the practice of staging tableaux vivants in
his novel Elective Affi nities. Tableaux vivants became
especially popular in Great Britain when the Scottish
painter Sir David Wilkie, having witnessed in a Ger-
man theater a tableau after a painting by David Teniers,
began arranging fi gures after famous paintings and
literary works. In his most well known examples, based
on the stories of Sir Walter Scott, Wilkie constructed
elaborate scenes requiring weeks’ preparation, all for
brief performance (Stevenson, 46). The amusement of
staging tableaux was enjoyed among the highest classes
of British society, including the royal family.
In 1845 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson
photographed a number of tableaux after Scott featur-
ing medieval costumes, using as models friends who
were practiced in the art of assuming characters and
holding poses from having enacted tableaux. These
works related both to literary painting of the day and
to the contemporary craze for tableaux vivants. They
also helped to initiate a trend of fi ctional photographs
in which groups of two or more fi gures enact a scene for
the photographer. As with tableaux, such images might
refer to historical or allegorical themes, or to recogniz-
able moments from everyday life.
William Lake Price, who created elaborate costume
photographs after literary sources such as Don Quixote
and Robinson Crusoe in the mid-1850s, noted the diffi -
culty of photographing fi gure groups, attempts at which
marked much ambitious art photography in the Victorian
era. When O.G. Rejlander produced his intricate com-
position photograph The Two Ways of Life in 1857, he
was trying to exceed the limitations of photography in
rendering complex fi gural arrangements, by combining
a number of discrete tableaux into a larger scene that
itself resembled an elaborate tableau vivant. It has often
been noted that Rejlander employed professional models
from a troupe of pose plastique actors, accustomed to
partial nudity and long poses, for The Two Ways of Life,
and it has been suggested that some of the negative criti-
cism directed toward the work may have derived from
the picture’s associations with the “debased art form”
of commercial tableaux vivants and poses plastiques
(Daniel, 15).
Rejlander more directly copied specifi c paintings in a
number of studies, made after the old masters, in which,
wrote the critic A.H. Wall in The Photographic News of
31 December 1886, “he selected models, illuminated,Carroll, Lewis. Tableau with
Xie Kitchin as the Damsel in
distress with St. George and
the Dragon.
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles © The J. Paul
Getty Museum.