Joshua Reynolds and Sarah Siddons have been subjects of an immense amount of scholarship, a testament of their lasting fame. In recent years, as scholars move to crumble barriers between disciplines, attention has focused on Reynolds and Siddons together, intertwining analyses of portraiture, theater, the gaze, spectatorship, and celebrity. This then is a tricky field to negotiate. Yet Heather McPherson does it well in her Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons. McPherson's focus is on the role that the visual image played in the emerging concept of celebrity in the second half of the eighteenth century. Appropriate attention is devoted to the great portraits of David Garrick, Siddons, Elizabeth Farren, and other celebrated personalities of the age. Yet these are not unduly privileged as she also stresses the potent relevance of the explosive rise of print media, particularly caricature, and parallels between the stage and nascent exhibition culture. At the beginning of each section, the relevant scholarship is carefully summarized and used as a touchstone for further inquiry. Key to the study is the articulation of the multivalent nature of public image and display in art and the theater.

In the first chapter McPherson explores nascent celebrity culture at mid-century by concentrating on the constructed self-images of David Garrick and Joshua Reynolds. Virtuoso display, theatrical tragedy (as opposed to comedy) and Grand Manner portraiture are interwoven to show how both men strove to overcome the stigmatization associated with their respective professions in order to present themselves as intellects and connoisseurs within a new era of spectatorship. By the 1780s, display and the politics of representation—the subject of chapter 2—had become more engrained in English society and here McPherson offers a penetrating analysis of the prints of the Royal Academy exhibitions vis-à-vis the mise en scène of the stage and a comparative study of the queenly portraits of the Duchess of Devonshire, Siddons, Queen Charlotte, and Farren by Thomas Gainsborough, Reynolds, Maria Cosway, and Thomas Lawrence. The conflicted relationship between the Royal Academy and the royal family is a strong subtheme, iterating the English fear that the academy might falter and become a tool of the king. In chapter McPherson 3 returns to the stage with a cohesive study of the image of Siddons and the physiological and cultural connotations of tragic pallor, pointing to the social precariousness of actresses. Siddons's insistence on the naturalness of her pale skin, as opposed to the artificial whiteness of makeup, anchors her as a consummate tragedienne who was capable of great sensibility and emotional authenticity, both defining features of the cultural elite.

McPherson navigates the richly studied genre of late eighteenth-century caricature by focusing on celebrity status and the crucial role that print media played in the construction and dissemination of celebrity. She divides theatrical caricature into three types: moralizing prints; prints about specific plays or characters that offer broader sociopolitical commentary; and political subjects restaged as theatrical tableaux. She deftly handles the intertwined nature of the stage and politics, especially when one elides into the other as both actor and politician engage in performance. The Hastings trial, with Richard Sheridan's and Edmund Burke's histrionics, is an especially limpid example. Coupled with this is a discussion of cultural politics, particularly John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and the fear of debasing the Bard in a tawdry commercial venture, and an account of the Venetian Hoax whereby a father-daughter con team proffered the secret of Titian's coloring to numerous gullible Royal Academicians in what was yet another assault on the Royal Academy's hegemony. In the final chapter McPherson traces the afterlives of Siddons and Reynolds in order to elucidate upon the idea of fame. While the relevance of the crisis of the Royal Academy in the 1790s and its eventual move to Burlington House and the afterlife of Reynolds's home and studio in Leicester Square seems underdeveloped, the chapter ends with lucid analyses of several latter portrayals of Reynolds and Siddons.

McPherson works backward by claiming that the roots of modern celebrity culture lay in the late eighteenth century. Just as relevant would be an analysis of post-1688 circumstances that paved the way for the rise of celebrity. For example, the historical idea of fame as immortal and historically validated in contrast to the distasteful evanescence of celebrity, is only briefly referenced as a prelude to the later transmogrification of fame, a result of the increasing weight of the role of the public and diversification of imagery into print media. More pointedly, William Hogarth, whose career and artistic production were entangled with the theater, is discussed only in terms of his portrait of David Garrick as Richard III (1745). His waxing and waning reputation, chronicled by Douglas Fordham in British Art and the Seven Years' War (2010), offers an instructive comparison to Reynolds's and Garrick's carefully crafted self-images.

This lack of a fuller analysis of what had come before unfortunately diminishes the complexity of McPherson's consideration of the rise of celebrity culture that is the focus of her book. Similarly, comparative studies of the reputations of contemporary artists such as Gainsborough and Lawrence—that is, extending the discussion beyond their artistic production—would have also enriched the analysis of Reynolds's, Garrick's, and Siddons's struggles to secure fame. In terms of imagery, McPherson confines herself primarily to paintings and prints; sculpture is less fulsomely discussed although its implied property of permanence complicates the historiography of fame. Similarly, McPherson omits the frequent characterizations of actors in print in terms of paint or sculpture, such as Siddons described as “a cartoon of Raphael” or “a model from Praxiteles” as Shearer West has noted in Robyn Asleson, ed., A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and her Portraitists ([1999], p. 27), despite insight on the complex relationship inherent in print between ephemerality and permanence as well as the evanescence of spectacle and lasting fame they offer. However, by skillfully crossing disciplines and emphasizing the correlation between celebrity and fame in late eighteenth-century English society, McPherson provides an admirable scholarly contribution that places the late eighteenth century at the core of a palimpsest that resonates into our own time.