The One With Emma Hamilton

Lady Emma Hamilton, the great love of Horatio Nelson’s life, was born OTD in 1765. She began life a peasant, then married into high society, had an affair – and a lovechild – with the most famous sailor in the world, and somehow died a pauper. It’s a long and hair-raising story, which I intend to go into in more detail in my longer reads section in the coming days. Today, though, I will quickly tell you how she ended up in an episode of Friends…

Below is one of the many portraits of Emma as a teenager by the celebrated artist, George Romney. At this point, she was known as Emma Hart, not Hamilton:

Romney’s obsession with painting young Emma reached such a frenzy that it’s a wonder he had time to do much else. His surviving diaries are nearly all blocked out with appointments to paint ‘Mrs H’. His pictures of her captured a decidedly narrow range of expressions. In every image, Mrs H was either a chaste damsel, a coy nymph, or something in between. The pieces had quite stupendously mundane names, such as ‘Emma Hart Wears A Straw Hat’ and ‘Emma Hart Reads The Newspaper’, but they were all sufficiently risqué to ensure they reached their desired audience.

The images sold so well and became so ubiquitous in Georgian London that Emma soon saw her face grinning suggestively back at her from shop windows, gallery walls, and side-street posters for soap. She had become a nameless celebrity.

To this day, the eyes of the teenage Emma watch on. When we go into antique shops and see dusty-framed portraits of Georgian damsels hanging on the walls, unloved, chances are a good number of them will be Romney’s depictions of Emma Hart/Hamilton. Hers remains an omnipresent, yet unremarked, face of 18th century Britain, a go-to maiden.

Once you know Emma’s face, you’ll see it everywhere. In a 1998 episode of Friends, the characters Phoebe and Rachel share a copy of Wuthering Heights. On the cover of the book is a young Emma Hamilton, as depicted by Romney. I almost did a double-take when I first saw it.