Art in Tights: Tableaux Vivants as Commercial Entertainment in Sweden and Finland, 1840–1860

Summary In the 1840s, Sweden and Finland were hit by a minor craze for living pictures or tableaux vivants as commercial entertainment. For the price of a ticket, the public could experience the staging, by live actors, of work of arts from antiquity and contemporary sculptors such as Canova and Thorvaldsen. Making strong claims of artistic value, based on the aesthetic theory of Winckelmann and the artistic practice of artists such as Canova, the performances raise interesting questions of how aesthetics worked when set in a commercial framework. The article discusses the problem of beauty faced by entertainers and spectators when art was reenacted for money. The experience of beauty was central to aesthetic theory and to living pictures. However, it remains unclear whether commercial living pictures was about beauty in art or about good-looking women. A possible conclusion is that it was about both, and that the aesthetic theory behind the tableaux was a theory created for a male visual culture, in which the male gaze’s consumption of female bodies was self-evident while dressed in arguments of truth and beauty, confirming a social order in which a certain right look was ascribed to men.

Quirin Müller and his company performed "living pictures" or tableaux vivants consisting of persons assuming the attitudes and positions of famous sculptures.A later advertisement gave details of the Academy's program: the  works to be recreated included The three Graces as sculpted by Thorvaldsen and by Canova as well as recreations of the sculptures Mars and Venus, Oedipus and Antigone, and The death of Abel. In late September , after giving a number of performances, the Academy left Stockholm for Copenhagen.By , Müller was back in the Swedish capital, after which he toured south and mid-Sweden for some time.
Müller's shows were given favorable press reviews.One review gives an idea of the nature of the show.The company consisted of around ten people, mostly young women.These stood stock-still in various formations, using their bodies and facial expressions to recreate classical and neoclassical works of art. The three-dimensionality of the representation was enhanced by a rotating stage: Especially well-found is Mr M[üller]'s idea to let the groups stand on a moving platform, which slowly rotates, through which movement the spectator gets the opportunity to observe the groups under all possible variations of light and shadow. Müller's visit to Stockholm created a minor craze for "living pictures" as commercialized entertainment in both Sweden and Finland.While tableaux vivants were an established form of amusement within educated urban culture, they were new as a commercial product.This article will examine the performances sold by Müller and other exhibitors of living pictures, according to reports appearing in (recently digitized) Swedish and Finnish newspapers.I will focus on two main points.First, I discuss the artistic and educational claims made by directors such as Müller in order to be accepted by an urban, middle-class public.Second, I look at the problematic nature of the Academy's artistic claims, given thataccording to some commentatorsthe central feature of the performances was the rotating exhibition of scantily-clad young women.I argue that it remains unclear whether these living pictures were about beauty in art or beauty in young women.A possible conclusion is that it was about both, and that the aesthetics behind the tableaux were created for a male visual culture in which the male gaze's consumption of female bodies was self-evident, even if veiled by artistic claims to truth and beauty.
The digitization of the press has made it possible to detect and trace otherwise obscure popular phenomena in peripheral European countries such as Sweden and Finland. If it were not for the artists' newspaper advertisements, reviews and commentaries, information on an ephemeral and itinerant entertainer such as Müller and his Swedish performances would be almost impossible to find, much less to examine.The performers have left very few archival traces and the audiences few if any firstperson documents describing the events.Apart from published reviews, there are no known descriptions of Müller's shows.For this article, I have systematically tracked Müller's and other directors' tours through Sweden and in some cases through Finland, analyzing advertisements, editorial comments and reviews.Note that the articles, reviews and comments referred to below were unsigned, anonymity being the norm in Swedish  th-century press.
While there is little research on Swedish and Finnish performances of living pictures, international scholarship can be divided in two groups.One has focused on early  th century performances as an artform and as literary motifs. The second has examined the second wave of living-picture performances in the British music-hall traditions of the late  th and early th century.  This article seeks to add to the substantial and impressive research on early  th century tableaux vivants by shedding light on their early commercial stagings in countries on the European periphery. Heidi Schlipphacke has described the tableaux as "a deeply uncanny art form"; an encounter between the imagined and the real, stillness and movement, a copy or a double of art while being art itself.The commercial staging added yet another layer of the uncanny, as (mostly) middleclass men bought tickets to see actors and actresses stage tableaux of an often erotic nature.My analysis indicates that the directors who staged the tableaux and advertised them mainly to educated, middle-class male audiences, made their artistic claims so as to evoke two different emotions.First, they advertised an aesthetic experience cultivating and confirming romantic ideals of art and beauty.Second, they offered an erotic experience, consisting of a chance to gaze at lightly clad, attractive young women.In doing so, they reaffirmed an image of an ideal society based on well-defined power relations between sexes.They nourished the male gaze by draping the unequal relation between the sexes in claims to beauty and aesthetics, while emphasizing the obligation of women to be beautiful and accessible.
Tableaux Vivants: from the aristocracy of Naples to small-town society The tableaux vivant, unlike many other forms of  th-century entertainment, was aristocratic in origin.Rooted in early-modern drama and festivities, their post- breakthrough was initiated by the "attitudes" presented during the s and  s by Emma Hart (later Emma Hamilton) in her Naples salon. Hamilton, mistress and then wife of William Hamilton, the British ambassador in the Kingdom of Naples, performed dramatic configurations of women based on classical myths such as Medea and Ariadne, with lightning-fast changes of scenery and dress between acts.These staged representations of antiquity's heroines created a sensation within the international elite.A remarkable number of European intellectuals visited the salon to see Hamilton perform; several of her tableaux were reproduced by distinguished artists such as George Romney and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Hamilton's stagings created strong aesthetic experiences, impressing some of the great theorists on the field such as Herder.  Goethe's works probably also contributed to the popularity of living pictures.His novel Die Wahlverwandschaften ( ) features a small circle of friends who stage living pictures, while what he termed "attitudes" played a central role in his innovative tragedy Proserpina (). By the s, staging tableaux had become highly fashionable in urban social life all over Europe.Tableaux were a feature of soirées and balls, and provided diversion during theater intermissions.They portrayed well-known motifs taken both from antiquity and from contemporary novels such as those by Walter Scott. Tableaux also became fashionable among the Swedish gentry.In , Esaias Tegnér, bishop of Växjö and author of the national-romantic poem Frithjof's Saga, mentioned in a letter to his son that he had been shown tableaux vivants at one of Baroness Wrede's soirées; and others wrote of tableaux staged at Malla Silfverstolpe's Uppsala salon during the s and s. Contemporary novels also featured women who performed tableaux; see for instance Sophie von Knorring's Skizzer (Sketches, ) and Fredrika Bremer's Grannarne (The Neighbors, ).  In the s, tableaux were also mentioned in press reports on theater performances and social events attended by the Swedish bourgeoisie and other middling sorts.  The Swedish public was, thus, not unfamiliar with living pictures when Müller arrived in Stockholm in .Nor was Müller the first to offer the Swedes tableaux independently of both theater companies and amateur social events.In , the equestrian showman Didier Gautier and his company included living pictures when touring Stockholm, Karlskrona and Norrköping with a show of art horse-riding, acrobatics and pantomime.In December , entertainment entrepreneur C.A. Nyman's show featured living pictures, including six tableaux based on William Hogarth's Midnight Modern Conversationthat is, a wild drinking party. Thus, tableaux had entered the Swedish repertoire of commercial entertainment shortly before the advent of Müller's Academy.

The aesthetic, artistic and social claims of commercial Tableaux Vivants
Professor Müller made a great impression on the Stockholm audience.The repertoire, scope and claims of his shows were new.As seen in the opening quote, Müller sought an educated audience.This (it seems) justified stretching the truth a bit.Müller, a German newspaper revealed, was in fact a "homebaked Professor", and his "Academy of living pictures" was no traditional academy but, rather, a troupe of athletic, agile persons working for wages.The use of the word "Academy" was a marketing gimmick, used to create artistic and scientific legitimacy.It might also have been a way to frame the presentation of semi-nude figures as decent and acceptable, along the lines of artistic academies. By conferring an academic title on himself and referring to his troupe as an "Academy" and the "Academic Art Society", Müller attempted to convince the public that his shows rested on firm artistic and scientific grounds.This seemed to work.A first review, published in Aftonbladet the day after the first performance, was full of praise.Although the reviewer put the term "professor" in quotation marks, he made it clear that Müller distinguished himself artistically.  Müller's "plastics", wrote the reviewer, were comparable to "the higher ballet".They had a double value as an aesthetic experience and as an "aesthetic means of education": the Academy made it possible for audiences to become familiar with statues which were spread over the continent and which they would otherwise have no chance to see.However, the review makes it clear that Müller interpreted these works of art in his own way, probably in order to enhance the visual effect: Mr Müller looks for a middle-way between the pure plastics and painting, by using colored drapes on his figures; we cannot fault this, because a too severe imitation of the plastic originals may have met too great obstacles in practice.We do however ask Mr M., if it would not make a more poetic impression, if he chose, in all that concerns the drapery, less gaudy and more light-color nuances.
The "pure plastics" mentioned in the review referred to the presumed whiteness of antique marble statues, the imitation of which was a challenge when using live actors.Instead, the individuals seem to have been clad in flesh-colored tricotsto which I return belowand in colorful draperies.
During his stay, Müller varied his repertoire by replacing some tableaux with others.In one of his last advertisements, finally, Müller claimed that he was leaving Stockholm for Saint Petersburg. This was one of those little white lies entertainers used: to travel to and (presumably) perform in Saint Petersburg was a sign of prestige for Swedes, the Russian capital being by far the largest city in the Baltic region.Instead, Müller gave his next performance in Malmö, in the opposite direction, in November, after which his troupe performed in Denmark for a period. I will soon go into some details regarding Müller's repertoire.First, I will discuss the small craze for living pictures that followed Müller's success in Stockholm, in Sweden and in Finland (where the language of the press and the educated elite was still predominantly Swedish).In the Åbo newspaper Åbo Tidningar, an advertisement was published in November  by the well-known entrepreneur in the entertainment business, the acrobat Carl Rappo.He offered the following: Great Arabic, Herculean, Athletic Art-and Strength-Representation, as well as the Academy for Living Pictures (here never before seen), by CARL RAPPO, recognized [as the] last European Hercules, together with the Academic Art-Society, consisting of ladies Guidora, Pfarfartto, Josephine Rappo, Nicoline Nielsson and J. Frisch, and Mr. Jean Jentzé.   The advertisement was a clear steal, Rappo using both "the Academy for living pictures" and the "academic Art-Society" to describe a troupe consisting of five women and two men (including Rappo himself).Rappo was an experienced artist who knew how to exploit fashionable trends.His repertoire was similar to Müller's, and there was a connection between the two companies: the J. (Johanna) Frisch mentioned in the advertisement had been part of Müller's troupe in Stockholm.The tableaux were well received, although one reviewer could sense a dividing line between those in the audience who preferred the "herculean efforts", and those appreciating living pictures as "a pleasure of a far nobler kind".As in Stockholm, the educational aspect was mentioned: a visit to Rappo made a trip to Rome unnecessary.  Thus Rappo, too, succeeded in his artistic claims.A few months later, when Rappo performed in Helsinki, the newspaper Morgonbladet wrote that the show made an indescribable impression on the audience, creating "a strong craze for studying antiquity and sculpture".  Rappo had probably visited one of Müller's Stockholm performances.We know that he did observe other entertainers, because he once caused a social scandal in Gothenburg by interrupting a competitor's show. Müller and Rappo were in Stockholm at the same time; Rappo was then attached to Joseph Liphard's Hamburg circus company, an outfit which gave large-scale shows involving more than  people.Müller's influence can be further traced in an advertisement published by Liphard in October, promising the following (among other things): Mr. Baptist Liphard performs the plastic Academy, on horseback, or: Les Poses des Hercules [sic], according to Thorvaldsen's famous Academic Model. Thorvaldsen's quite conventional statue of Hercules was not made for horseback, but entertainers were open to innovations.The Liphard family had evidently adopted both the idea of human reenactments of artworks, and the nonsense academic prose in which Müller wrapped his performances.
Liphard neither stayed in Stockholm nor followed Rappo to Finland.Instead, he went to Norrköping to perform art horse-riding.However, in November , an advertisement appeared in the Linköping newspaper Östgöta Correspondenten, in which Liphard promised a four-part show of which the first was presented as follows: The first Part: ACADEMY of LIVING PICTURES or Gallery for Antique and Modern works of art by the most famous masters, from older and newer eras. Müller's shows had, thus, produced two imitators, both well-established entrepreneurs in Baltic entertainment.A review in Östgöta Correspondenten stated that Liphard gave "living pictures of antique and modern style according to the Qvirin-Müller method", a phrasing which revealed Müller's reputation: he had never appeared in Linköping, yet readers were supposed to be familiar with his work.Liphard's pictures were said to be very well executed; every new formation "met with loud cheers". When he returned to nearby Norrköping soon after, the reviewer in Norrköpings Tidningar repeated that every picture was met by lively cheers.The reviewer further dismissed the rumorto which I return belowthat the living pictures could somehow be indecent.This rumor had resulted in a virtually all-male audience.Women, wrote the reviewer, should rise above that type of small-town mentality and appreciate the living pictures, enjoying, as a bonus, a good laugh at the Pajazzo. Later, Liphard toured the country southwards before leaving for the continent.
At this point and for a short while afterwards, tableaux vivants were an established product in the entertainment market.In October , the Danish acrobat family Price embarked on a year-long tour, offering Swedes pantomimes, dancing and living pictures. This company also received good reviews.The Göteborg newspaper reviewer wrote that the tableaux deserved the highest praise for both composition and execution. One Karlskrona newspaper published a panegyric poem to the three young "sylphs" Juliette, Amalia and Sophie Price. The Price family certainly had talent.The same could probably not be said of D.C. Alexander, a jack-of-all-trades within Swedish entertainment.His company offered acrobatics, the spectacle of a giant snake and the like; in , Alexander also began advertising "plastic antiquerepresentations".  He did not receive any newspaper reviews, but his adoption of tableaux showed that they had become the flavor of the month.
In August , Quirin Müller returned to Stockholm, again receiving a warm welcome.Although many of the works of art shown were familiar from the last visit, a reviewer wrote, they were still well worth the visit.   The reviewer noted that Müller had expanded his use of drapessoon after, Müller himself started to use the phrase "shawl-groups" in his advertisements. His claim that there was artistic merit in these peculiar, draped interpretations of popular art motifs was generally accepted.Stockholms Dagblad claimed that Müller was the best in his genre, while Aftonbladet praised the "shawl-groupings" for their artistic value. The Uppsala newspaper Upsala celebrated Müller's shows as a great opportunity to experience major artworks impossible to see in the Nordic countries.  In December , Müller started a tour in Southern Sweden.His reputation, enhanced by puffs in local newspapers, preceded him.In Jönköping: Mr. Quirin Müller, famous for his tableaux vivants and groups taken from antiquity etc, and who has shown his 'living pictures' with extraordinary approval in Stockholm and other towns of the Realmnot to mention abroadhas arrived in town. In Göteborg, Müller again received much praise, although his artistic claims were presented in a somewhat different way.The reviewer wrote that the first show was excellent with the exception of the ill-tuned orchestral music.This had led Müller to fire the orchestra and hire a better one.Obviously the stagings were also musical.The aura of classical antiquity seems to have been fading away; the display of figures, exaggeratedly draped and slowly rotating, was now accompanied by the ever-present mid- thcentury brass ensemble.  Müller left Sweden in spring , never to return.The glory days of commercial tableaux vivants were over, although the genre did survive.Joseph Liphard returned to Sweden in , but now as an exhibitor of a wax cabinet and artistic rider in Alexander Guerra's so-called Roman circus. Carl Rappo, however, continued to give tableaux vivants when touring Sweden -.A Norrköping advertisement for his show, appearing in , contained the near-nonsense prose typical of  th-century entertainment.Rappo led an "Indian, Syrian, Japanese and Bioplastic Academy" which performed living pictures, acrobatics, and also a pantomime. He received one positive review, which emphasized the tableaux in particular, complete with the props and drapery: The so-called Bioplastic Museum of Living Pictures performs pictures, illuminated in lovely and successful ways, mostly taken from Greek mythology, but also from Biblical history, and partly taken from antiquity.
[…] The rich costumes, the shining weapons and helmets, the fluttering draperies, contribute to raise the total effect of these tableaux vivants. Living pictures had also been adopted by the Italian director of a company of acrobats, Giovanni Viti, arriving in Malmö from Copenhagen.His repertoire was similar to Rappo's: acrobatics and tableaux vivants, which Viti like his predecessors claimed to be of artistic value, describing them portentiously as "the Atelier of Living Pictures taken from Greek and Roman Mythology". It seems to have been a short visit before returning to Copenhagen. In , Viti was again in Sweden, arriving in Uddevalla from Norway with "the Mimic-Plastic-Ballet-Dance-Society".He gave "aesthetic performances" consisting of dancing and tableaux vivants. A longer tour to Sweden and Finland followed.Reviews were mixed.Carlskrona Weckoblad held that the living pictures gave proof of "a deep study of antique masterpieces, and of an aesthetic conception of the myths on which they are founded", while a Stockholm newspaper dismissed them as cheap and tasteless. At this point, Viti was one of very few commercial artists still giving living pictures. This genre of spectacle returned, instead, to the sphere of private bourgeois sociability. Aesthetics at work: a noble pleasure or girls in tights?
As mentioned above, the Liphard company's shows had been troubled by a rumor of indecency.There were reasons for that.Müller and his epigones made artistic claims.In the s, art theory centered on the idea of beauty as a subjective experience.This was the consequence of late th-century theories of aesthetics, in which German art philosopher Johann Joachim Winckelmann played a prominent role.Winckelmann represents a crucial shift in the conception of good art.He rejected the older view of art as a craft, to be judged in accordance with the artist's technical competence and skill.Instead, art was to be understood as an individual experience, with emphasis on the viewer's capacity to see and comprehend true beauty.Winckelmann believed that beauty could not be understood by reason, nor calculated; it could only be felt.This did not mean that absolute beauty did not exist.On the contrary, antique Greek art (it was maintained) was superior to all other in depicting beauty; heroic grandeur and other baroque ideas of beauty were to be rejected. For (Winckelmann maintained) true beauty is mild, harmonic and calm, showing, as he famously summarized it, "noble simplicity and tranquil greatness" ("Edle Einfalt und stille Gröβe").  The philosophers associated with the emergence of aesthetic theory, such as Herder, Goethe, Kant and Hegel, all referred to Winkelmann's writings. Both the individual experience of beauty and the implied dogma of the superiority of Greek antiquity became central components in aesthetic philosophy.Of course, artists were deeply inspired by these ideas; their works were anchored in intensive studies of Greek art.The sculptor Canova was one of the main proponents in this trend. The exhibitors of living pictures in the s and s claimed to be working within this aesthetic tradition.Intellectually, they were the offspring of Winkelmann; artistically, they depended on Canova and Thorvaldsen.For Canova, the interplay between idealized body and their clothesantique costumewas a central means of creating tranquil but moving beauty; draperies were also one of Winckelmann's four characteristics defining ideal Greek art. Drapes or shawls were also essential to the early tableaux and attitudes performers such as Emma Hamilton and her turn-of-thecentury successors such as Henriette Hendel-Schütz and Ida Brun. Thus, Müller's extensive use of drapes, although exaggerated, was based on artistic practice and aesthetic theory; a popularized aesthetics.
The reviews mentioned above accepted the claims made by Müller and his epigones, praising the living pictures as art.Although art was not supposed to rotate with the help of mechanical cranks nor contain fleshcolored tights, in the eyes of reviewers, at least, living pictures represented something of the noble simplicity and tranquil greatness described by Winckelmann.The positive comments centered on how the living pictures' composition and execution gave the audience an experience of beauty.
Accordingly, an exaggerated use of colorful draperies was perceived as heightening the experience of art, not debasing it.
It was this perceived ability to convey an experience that made the living pictures "a pleasure of a far nobler kind".Winckelmann had defined true beauty as expressed through the idealized human bodyboth male and female. In  th century Sweden, however, there was also massive emphasis on beauty as a specifically female faculty.The general conception of beauty derived more from Rousseau than Winkelmann, in defining beauty as a natural trait of womankind.Beauty was not something ascribed to women, it was the essence of womanhood.A real woman was beautiful.Men could be beautiful, but they did not have to be; for a woman, on the other hand, beauty and grace were essential to her nature, virtue and duty.  From their inception in Emma Hamilton's salon, tableaux vivants had been strongly tied to women and femininity.In subsequent bourgeois environments, women were usually responsible for organizing and executing tableaux vivants.As a social amusement, living pictures united aesthetic ideals with female pastimes and the objectification of young women, who were to render themselves tranquil, idealized objects for the gaze of others.This fits with the classical texts on the male gaze, such as those of the  s feminist scholars of film and literature Laura Mulvey and Griselda Pollock.They describe a double conception of beautybeauty as truth and beauty as the essence of womanthat established a male heterosexual gaze and a male right to look. Contemporaries' dismissive evaluations of Emma Hamilton when not performing illustrate this point.Goethe had found her unhappy and others described her as vulgar and common; but when she struck a pose, she was turned into an ideal.Her audiencewhich, it must be added, was both male and femaleseemed to have liked her best when she managed to present herself as beautiful and idealized.She went from being an object of dissatisfied male gaze to an object which satisfied, from a real woman to an ideal, as her appearance changed so as to coincide with aesthetic ideals.  After Müller's arrival in Stockholm in , a review in Aftonbladet noted that while his audience of  persons gave his second show a full house, only ten of those present were women.The review betrays ambivalence when it comes to the shows' combination of artistic and female beauty.On the one hand, the reviewer assured "sculpture-loving women" that the shows were perfectly appropriate to both sexes.On the other, he complained about "inconsiderate da Capo-criers" shouting at the female models. Clearly, he felt that some men were a little too noisy in their praise of female beauty, for reasons not found in aesthetic theory.This probably did make the event less suitable for decent bourgeois or middle-class women.
The reviewer's description of an almost completely male audience was founded in reality, and the consequent rumor of possible indecency posed a challenge to the shows' profitability.On August , Müller published an advertisement with an addendum addressed to the "Honorable Ladies of Stockholm".He defended his tableaux against ill-natured reports: I have noted, with true grief, that the Ladies here [in the town] have honored my plastic performances with their presence to only a small extent.I assume that the cause of this absence lies in an understandable prejudice towards Tableaux vivants, which ill tongues have propagated.However, today, a large and educated public has been able, through experience, to persuade itself that my representations in no way offend the sense of decency, but may be viewed by even the most discrete of women. Müller proposed to combat the troublesome perceptions of indecency by demonstrating the suitability of living pictures for female audiences by giving a special show for a woman-only audience: In order to give the Ladies the pleasure of such a show, I have decided to give an extra show just for the Ladies, for which the Tableaux and the groups have been chosen with particular regard to them.
In hindsight, it may seem as if Müller was simply confirming the rumor when arranging shows specially adapted to an all-female audience. The issue can be illuminated by examining his repertoire.To what extent were the tableaux about female beauty?Luckily, the advertisements sometimes detailed the shows' content.Although some of the motifs were male, heroic and biblical, there was an obvious dominance of tableaux showing women.The Three Graces was a popular subject both for neoclassical artists and for Müller, Liphard and Rappo.The mythological Graces' main task had been to attend the Olympians at feasts; thus they were clearly cast in the role of subordinate, eroticized objects.Tableau number , The Graces taken from Canova, referred to Canova's Three Graces, an influential work often used as a point of reference in early  th century discussions of aesthetic ideals.Canova's piece is notably erotic, showing the Graces as intimately involved with and caressing each other.Of course, we cannot know exactly how Müller staged the spectacle, but it is hard to ignore the objectification that would have been inherent in three young women in tight, flesh-colored tricots, displayed in an erotic pose, slowly rotating under the gaze of a paying male audience.It almost certainly challenged norms of decency held by the female middle-class public.
Müller shared the neoclassical artists' emphasis on the aesthetic significance of the Graces.His show opened with Thorvaldsen's version of the same motif, and there was still another tableau showing the Graces carrying a flower basket.Müller did not specify the sculpture which formed the basis of this tableau, but the motif had been commonplace since the renaissance.Aside from the Graces, Müller also provided some openly semi-erotic scenes, such as Diana and her nymphs in the bath.This theme, taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, had likewise been popular since the renaissance, it gave Müller good opportunities to utilize his female staff.The important part played by Canova is obvious."Bacchus and Hebe after [the manner of] Canova" may have been a double set showing one of Canova's and neoclassicism's most important works, Hebe, in conjunction with a representation of a Bacchus sculpture.It is probable that scene , "Mars and Venus", was a Canova work with equally erotic potential."Ajax and Cassandra", finally, was a mythological motif featuring the rape of Cassandra by Ajax the Lesser in the temple of Athena.
The tableaux did give some instruction in art history.The Graces as a motif had attracted artists such as Botticelli, Rafael and Rubens long before it was reinterpreted by Canova."Colos di Monte Cavallo" refers to the colossal statues of Castor and Pollux on the Quirinal Hill in Rome.Other tableaux, such as "The girl with pigeon", taken from a nd century Roman statue of a girl protecting a bird from a snake, reproduced classical statues important to the development of aesthetic theory,  Again, we do not know how faithful to the original the living pictures were.Most likely, neither the public nor reviewers had seen the original art works.
The use of tight clothes was emphasized from time to time; a Karlskrona newspaper mentioned that the actors wore "fleshcolored … tricots". The word "tricot" (Swedish: trikå) entered the Swedish language in the s.In the classic Swedish novel Rosen på Tistelön (, translated into English in  as The Rose of Tistelön: A Tale of the Swedish Coast), by Emilie Flygare-Carlén, there is a scene in which a boy acts the part of Eros in a play.To make him look naked, he was dressed in "a pair of very tightly-worn nankeen trousers, which mamsell called tricots". In the same way, Müller's actors' tight, flesh-colored clothing represented the nudity of antique statues.This illusion of adult nudity probably per se verged on indecency in the s.When staged commercially in the form of Canova's Three Graces, it was obviously problematic.The rumor of the troupe's semi-nakedness spread fast.In August , a Gothenburg newspaper reported that "the living pictures of Müller horrify the ladies, so much [do] the tricots resemble natural nudity". Some of Müller's tableaux showed men in heroic positions.However, there is no doubt that the actresses were the main attraction.Apart from the helmets and swords cited above, no reviewer commented on the appearance of the male actors.Instead, reviews were more like, say, that appearing in August  in Aftonbladet: it praised the performances, for "one can but admire the skill with which the actresses comprehend the positioning and the mimicry of these works". This is telling.As Peta Tait has shown, nineteenth-century audiences could in fact express appreciation of beautiful male bodies.She points to how, in the s, commentators praised the muscular and well-proportioned body of trapeze pioneer Jules Léotard; he too imitated nudity by wearing flesh-colored tricots similar to costumes of Müller's performances. In the case of the Swedish commercial tableaux vivants of the s, by contrast, male bodies were left completely uncommented, although we may assume that the Hercules Rappo, at least, wore the same type of tights.We know that the Frenchman Venitian, who called himself "the first Hercules of Europe", wore fleshcolored tricots on the  tour of Sweden.During that tour, a reviewer praised Venitian's muscular and well-proportioned body in a language similar to that used to describe Léotard, going so far as to claim that every time Mr. Venitian left the stage, the reviewer longed for his return and to see his beautiful body yet again. Such language was rare, but it does point to the fact that male beauty could be appreciated by a male audience, which makes the complete silence concerning male tableaux actors interesting.Indeed, in , Karl af Kullberg (a contemporary Stockholm flaneur) claimed that no-one would ever buy a ticket for Müller's shows were it not for the women.  As mentioned, Liphard also had problems with rumors of indecency.His repertoire was similar, in part, to Müller's, but his employment of a "Hercules" tilted his show towards demonstrations of strength.On one evening in Karlskrona, he staged eight tableaux as part of a larger show: The Girl with pigeon and The girl capturing a butterfly; The indignant Hercules; Hercules and Hebe; Hercules with the boy; Ajax and Cassandra; the Gladiators, The Theban fratricide and the Three Graces with the flower basket. Rappo's repertoire was likewise similar to Müller's.His first advertisement for his "academy", in November , listed twelve living pictures: () The Three Graces, taken from Flaxman, performed by Dem.
[Messieurs] Fr.Rappe and Jentzé.() Ariadne, taken from Danneker, performed by Dem.Frisch.() The Girl with pigeon and The girl capturing a butterfly, taken from Drache and Wichman, performed by Dem.J. Rappo and Frisch.
Rappo seems to have neglected Canova in favor of another influential neoclassical artist, John Flaxman.Although four of the tableaux were performed by men and one was mixed-sex, there was an obvious female dominance, the Graces appearing in two different versions.Ajax and Cassandra and Girl with pigeon were staged by all three directors on most occasions.
Rappo's shows stirred some debate in the Finnish press.Åbo Tidningar published two fictitious letters headed "To my friend Alexander in Helsinki", both mentioning Rappo's Helsinki performances.The first letter stated that while the ladies of Helsinki had been spellbound by a visiting male musician, the men had responded with strong feeling to the beauty in Rappo's living pictures, an ironic comment on the Helsinki audiences' taste in art and beauty.In the second letter, "Alexander" was scolded for having attended Rappo's shows for the wrong reasons.He obviously cared for neither art nor beauty: "You say absolutely nothing about art, but this does not surprise me, your motive was never to experience art but to see three women in tricots".  Rappo was criticized more severely by the editor of the Kuopio newspaper Saima, Johan Vilhelm Snellman.He had long been unaware of "the great art expert Rappo", he wrote.But he had eventually visited a tableaux performance, and was appalled.
The ideal form, the deep expression, the tranquil posethose are not at stake here.One does not even imitate the color of marble.No, in flesh-colored tricots, with painted faces and natural hair, a few athletic men and a few voluptuous women, in positions somewhat reminiscent of the real works of artjust in case let's say ten people in the audience had any knowledge of them. Snellman points to the show's erotic undertones and to the fact that people generallyunlike the well-educated editorhad no clue to the actual appearance of Canova's or Flaxman's artworks.The show's ambivalence, balancing between displaying the beauty of art and the beauty of young women, was noted in an ironic poem published in the Helsinki newspaper Morgonbladet.Again, the focus was on the Three Graces.Both the first and the second strophe of the poem emphasized the beauty of the work, but in different ways: The last lines of the poem were easy to grasp: Canova, yes, great, but the audience found the beauty neither in his ideals nor Winckelmann's, but in tight tricots on female bodies, further enhanced by the very non-marbleesque use of rouge (carmine).

Tableaux vivants, beauty and gender power relations, or the authority to look
The critique of living pictures and its performers pointed to the fact that beautiful women were an essential prerequisite both for tableaux vivants as a genre and for the application of the theory of aesthetics in entertainment.The staging of marble forms with living bodies added an element of vulgarization.It was this that made possible the genre of commercial living pictures.The element of sexism was neither an accident nor incidental, but ratherat least according to criticsthe main reason that most of the audience bought a ticket.The performance could be legitimized by describing it as art, and this, in turn, was possible because contemporary artistic ideals contained the same elements of sexism and objectification of the female body.This was inherent in the aesthetic theory's idea of beauty as an individual experience and related, in turn, to the concurrent emphasis on beauty as a feminine trait.Staging live bodies as part of the neoclassicist worship of beauty, in front of a male, educated, middle-class audience, seems to be an early example of the hegemony of the male gaze as described in relation to th century film, press and advertising.Adult men's "pay-per-view" consumption of female bodies was both disguised as and legitimized by the artistic idealization of beauty.
Of course, beautiful women formed part of other forms of  th century entertainment, as a review of Alexander Guerra's circus performances, held in Stockholm in , makes clear.The horses and the artistic numbers were impressive, the reviewer wrote, adding that "the gentlemen connoisseurs and lorgnette amateurs equally assert that the women have features of an extraordinarily regular beauty". This reference to the male ocular inspection of female bodies captures the visual gender power relations in  th-century entertainment.However, the commercial stagings of tableaux vivants had an especially problematic relation towards the female audience.As mentioned, both reviewers and Müller himself noted that women refrained from attending his performances.Albeit we have no information of how individual women reacted to the tableaux, a comparison to other forms of entertainment built on the representation of bodies makes it clear that this was not a recurring problem in  th-century Swedish entertainment.
Representations of bodies were standard features on the entertainment market during the whole of the  th century, with acrobats, tightrope-dancers, circus riders, strongmen such as Venitian, and pantomimes.An inventory of these genres shows that genderspecific shows did not exist, nor was ever the problem of decency addressed in reviews or acted against in advertisements the way Müller did. Both women and men attended shows, watching male and female artists manifesting their bodies in different ways.This was not the case with all forms of entertainment at the period.A few other performers did have special shows "for ladies only" from the s onwards: waxwork exhibitions, peephole panoramas, anatomic museums.They had in common the erotic element; putting women, albeit not real ones, on display, such as Venuses, oriental Harems, naked women, and in the case of the museums, also their breasts and genitals in particular, challenging norms of decency. They could also experience the same problem as Müller: out of , people visiting Alexander Hartkopff's Anatomic Museum during its visit to Norrköping in , only  were women.  This indicates that the erotic element indeed was central to the commercial tableaux.Underneath a thin varnish of aesthetics, they offered the male urban audience two valuable things at a low price: self-affirmation and a position as a superior subject in a visual culture whose foremost object was attractive young women.Perhaps, finally, they provided order; they confirmed societal hierarchies.The authority to lookthe right to see and watch, freely and independently, and "to take pleasure in the act of looking"is not equally distributed in any society. The right to look, the knowledge of how to look, and the duty to be looked upon, are important parts of the construction of power relations in any society.Exhibitors of living pictures sold the right for urban men to claim both to be educated and to be served eye candy.They confirmed the gendered order of a society in which the main task of young women was to be pleasant objects for a male gaze.Obviously, it could be a rather indecent gaze at times, and as such maybe a liberating experience for the male audience in a culture which so strongly emphasized decency.The urban women, on the other hand, realizing that they had a less strong right to look, chose to stay at home.The product was not that interesting to them, since they could not, without great risk, assume the male position which was part of the price of entry.
That dated July ,  gives the earliest repertoire.Müller promised to stage  pictures: Mars and Venus.No .The Graces taken from Canova.No .The Graces with the Flowerbasket.No .Oedipus and Antigone.No .The Death of Abel.No .The Funeral of Abel.No .Ajax and Cassandra.No  .Diana and her nymphs in the bath.