Portrait of Emma Hamilton as a Sibyl

Emma Hamilton (1765–1815), the celebrated beauty who became Nelson's companion, was a subject for numerous painters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most famously Romney and Vigée Le Brun. Gavin Hamilton's 1789 portrait depicts her as a sibyl — one of the prophetic figures of antiquity — a format that Emma herself cultivated through her celebrated 'attitudes', performances in which she draped herself in classical poses for the entertainment of Neapolitan society and its foreign visitors. The portrait as sibyl gave the painter an opportunity to present a contemporary figure in the classical guise that Emma herself actively promoted, blurring the line between portraiture and mythology. The work belongs to Hamilton's late Roman phase — he died in Rome in 1798 — and is among his final contributions to a body of work that had shaped European Neoclassicism.

The sibyl portrait requires the painter to balance recognisable likeness with the classical costume and pose that the genre demands. Hamilton gives Emma the freely flowing drapery and turbaned headdress conventional to sibyl iconography while preserving her specific features — the large dark eyes, the striking complexion — that made her famous.