The personal appearance of Mrs. Siddons has many times been described, but, curiously enough, none of her contemporaries allude to this unusual development of the lower lip. Mr. Fitzgerald says of her first appearance: “The audience saw a frail, delicate-looking, but pretty creature, tottering towards them rather than walking.... The criticism of the pit amounted to this, ‘that she was a pretty, awkward, and interesting creature—frightfully dressed.’” The London Morning Post, speaking of the event, said: “Her figure is a very fine one; her features are beautifully expressive; her action is graceful and easy, and her whole deportment that of a gentlewoman.” Thomas Davies wrote later: “Just rising above the middle stature, she looks, walks, and moves like a woman of superior rank. Her countenance is expressive, her eye so full of information that the passion is told from her look before she speaks.” Madame d’Arblay, in her Diary (December 15, 1782), wrote that “she behaved with great propriety; very calm, modest, quiet and unaffected. She has a very fine countenance, and her eyes look both intelligent and soft.” Leigh Hunt said, “I did not see her, I believe, in her best days; but she must always have been a somewhat masculine beauty.” Peter Irving wrote to his brother Washington in 1813: “I was surprised to find her face, even at the near approach of sitting by her side, absolutely handsome, and unmarked by any of those wrinkles which generally attend advanced life. Her form is at present becoming unwieldy, but not shapeless, and is full of dignity. Her gestures and movements are eminently graceful.” Two years later George Ticknor wrote: “She is now, I suppose, sixty years old, and has one of the finest and most spirited countenances and one of the most dignified and commanding persons I ever beheld. Her portraits are very faithful as to her general air and outline, but no art can express or imitate the dignity of her manner, or the intelligent illumination of her face.” And John Howard Payne said of her about the same period, 1817: “The grace of her person, the beauty of her arms, the mental beauty of her face, the tragic expression of her voice, and the perfect identification with the character [Mrs. Beverley] left nothing for me to wish for. In these she was so great that even her unwieldy figure, which at first somewhat annoyed me, was soon forgotten.”
In 1783 Mrs. Siddons called on Dr. Johnson at Bolt Court, and he gave to Mrs. Thrale an account of how she impressed him by her “modesty and propriety.” He says they “talked of plays,” but, unfortunately, he does not permit himself to say what he thought of her nose or her mouth or her jaw.
The beautiful Louise of Prussia, mother of the first Emperor William of Germany, lies in the family mausoleum at Charlottenburg, and the cast of her dead face, with that of Frederick the Great and of others of their distinguished countrymen and countrywomen, is preserved in the Museum of Berlin. Her last illness was severe and painful, but her attendants have left on record the fact that in her rare intervals of relief from suffering “she was very tranquil, and lay looking like an angel;” that “the countenance was beautiful in death, particularly the brow; and that the calm expression of the mouth told that the struggle was forever past.”
At the age of sixteen she was thus described: “She was like her sister Charlotte—had the same loving blue eyes, but the expression changed more quickly with the feeling or thought of the moment. Her soft brown hair still retained a gleam of the golden tints of childhood; her fair, transparent complexion was, in the bloom of its exquisite beauty, painted by nature as softly as were the roses she gathered and enjoyed. The princess was tall and slight, and graceful in her movements. This grace was not merely external; it arose from the inner depths of a pure and noble mind, and therefore was so full of soul.”
LOUISE OF PRUSSIA
Madame Malibran, the Queen of Song, died in Manchester, England, in 1836. The mask here reproduced came, perhaps, from the collection of George Combe, who visited America a few years later.