Descended From the Pages: Iconic Irish Women of the Female Activists Tableaux Vivants and the Visual Sources that Informed Them, 1890s–1920s

The paper focuses on the social and aesthetic phenomenon of tableaux vivant which experienced a popular revival amongst Irish women activists at the end of nineteenth and first quarter of twentieth century. As an art form and mode of public performance, the tableaux granted women, across all tiers of society, the prospect of greater visibility and opportunity for self-expression within the public sphere. The critical importance of this genre for the women’s movement in Ireland is clearly evident in an account published in ‘The Irish Citizen’ after a national “Daffodil Day” Fête organised by IWFL in April 1914: ‘…Our first show venture shows that most effective propaganda can be done in this picturesque fashion.’ Recognising this pageant as the highlight of the Fête, Irish feminist researchers have meticulously explored it with one significant omission – almost nothing has been said to date about the visual sources which inspired the IWFL activists; the names of the artist’s and the specific artworks recreated as tableaux, ranging from canonical paintings to cartoons in popular print, remain unattributed and therefore the political and creative decision making processes of the women participants remains unexplored. This paper aims to address this gap. It will analyse the imagery of the women’s tableaux performances that featured in suffragist to glamour fundraising events, and which were publicised in newspapers and magazines, at home and abroad, including the IWFL’s ‘The Irish Citizen’, ‘The London Graphic’, ‘The Tatler’, ‘Harper’s Bazaar’, etc. Through a thorough exploration of the tableaux iconography, we aim to reveal the intentions, motivations, and intellectual exchange among the women who orchestrated and staged these tableaux events. This paper inscribes the practice of tableaux vivants more fully into Irish art herstory and evaluates its impact on Irish visual culture.