During the Georgian period there was a remarkable proliferation of seductive visual imagery and written accounts of female performers. Focusing on the close relationship between the dramatic and visual arts at this time, this beautiful and stimulating book explores popular ideas of the actress as coquette, 'whore', celebrity, muse and creative agent, charting her important symbolic role in contemporary attempts to professionalise both the theatre and the practice of fine art.Gill Perry analyses the complex ways in which these identities were both constructed and challenged through portraits and exhibition and theatre reviews. Using a concept of 'flirtation' as an analytical tool that can illuminate eighteenth-century perceptions of female sexuality, theatricality and social mobility, Perry argues that a fashionable culture of 'dressing up' and flirtatious masquerade, performed through public drama, concerts, amateur theatricals and painted portraits, provided late eighteenth-century actresses with many possibilities for unconventional role playing, both on and off stage.Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, Mary Robinson, Frances Abington and Elizabeth Farren are among her cast of leading