The changing histories of three historic dancing women of the early eighteenth century: Hester Santlow, Marie Sallé, and Marie-Anne Cupis de Camargo

Women’s History Month in Dance 60, 61, 62. History needs always to be reconsidered and rewritten. Which women were most original, most renowned, most influential? How public were their private lives? Why do some celebrities stay famous and others pass into obscurity?

Most histories of ballet tend to compare and contrast the ballerina Marie Sallé (1707-1756) with the ballerina Marie-Anne Cupis de Camargo (1710-1770) - which is what their French contemporaries did, including the Enlightenment intellectual Voltaire and, in retrospect, the Enlightenment choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre. According to this either/or account, Camargo (60) was the technician, specialising in entrechat-quatre and therefore shortening the baroque dance dress, so that her ankles and lower calves could always be seen. Somehow technical skill and innovation are seldom seen as the equal of expressive grace and dramatic effect, which became the legend of Marie Sallé (see illustration 61). Actually, the only paintings we have of Sallé show her wearing corsets and revealing as much ankle as Camargo. Nonetheless her legend is that of Sallé the reformer: she performed her own ballet Pygmalion (1734) in Greek attire, with loosened hair and without corsets or hoops in her dress. Legend is not inaccurate, but it distorts.

In Paris, Sallé and Camargo had both been students of the senior ballerina Françoise Prévost (1680-1741). Like her before them, they both appeared in the vehicle Les Caractères de la Danse, a classic of early Enlightenment dance drama in which the same performer played a series of sixteen different characters. Sallé emphasised its acting side, introducing a male partner; Camargo its dance brilliance. But it’s wrong to see - as some have done - Sallé as a proto-Isadora versus Camargo as an showily empty dynamo. As Clement Crisp once shrewdly remarked, Sallé and Camargo may have been no more unalike than Svetlana Beriosova and Nadia Nerina (great ballerinas of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden who shared many leading roles and created others for Frederick Ashton in the 1950s and 1960s).

You see Sallé differently when you notice that she made her debut not in France but in England, in 1717, around age ten. When you compare her not to Camargo but to the British ballerina Hester Santlow (illustration 62), dance history changes:  Sallé now looks far less original. Between 1717 and 1733,  when Sallé reached her twenty-sixth birthday, Sallé (star dancer of Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre here) was in direct competition with Santlow (1690-1773, longterm luminary of Drury Lane Theatre). 

Santlow was muse to the reforming choreographer John Weaver (1673-1760), but she was also an inspiration and example to most of London’s dancing masters, and partner to a series of eminent, visiting French male dancers. I began researching her in 1985 because she is the first ballerina to have been muse to a known choreographer, Weaver; it took time before I understood that Weaver (who is now acclaimed as a pioneer of Enlightenment dramatic choreography) was far less celebrated than Santlow, and his London career considerably shorter. For well over twenty years,  the social highlight of the Drury Lane year was Santlow’s annual benefit performance, often attended by the royal family: she danced for Queen Anne, for George I, and for George II - and performed at court as well as in the theatre. She was known to the writers and artists of the English Enlightenment: Joseph Addison, John Gay, Alexander Pope, Richard Steele, James Thomson, both celebrated dancer and actress (in plays from Shakespeare to new comedies). Very often, the dances given at Lincoln Inn’s Fields by Marie Sallé and her brother François (who married an Englishwoman and remained here) were parodies of Santlow’s presentations at Drury Lane. Long before Sallé followed suit, it was Santlow who dared to appear in Grecian attire, to dispense with hoops and corsets, to let her hair flow over her shoulders, and sometimes (thus showing her legs and figure in a new way) to dress as a boy.

Only when Santlow retired in 1733 (in her forties, immediately after the death of her husband, the actor-manager Barton Booth), did Marie Sallé reach the climax of her own career - by appropriating Santlow’s reforms. In her own Pygmalion (1734), she wore Grecian attire, dispensed with hoops, let her hair flow loose. And, cleverly, she invited a French critic to report on her show in the Mercure galant - a visiting critic to whom Santlow and Santlow’s innovations meant nothing and who judged Sallé only by Paris Opéra standards. Now it was she who was London’s dance sensation - the Drury Lane team briefly collapsed after the death of Booth and retirement of Santlow - and the master composer Handel promptly invited her to appear in three of his operas in the 1734-1735 season.

For her, Handel added a new prologue, Terpsicore (November 1734), to his 1712 opera Il Pastor Fido, and composed ballet suites for her in his new masterpieces Ariodante (January 1735) and Alcina (April 1735). (Her Terpsicore was a new musical production of a vehicle originally devised for Prévost.) This London season made her a fortune - but exhausted her welcome. (Appearing as a boy had worked well for Santlow. Not so, it seems, for Sallé.) She returned to Paris. 

But Sallé was the kind of luminary who earned good luck: she returned to Paris just in time for a new opera by Handel’s contemporary Jean-Philippe Rameau, Les Indes galantes (August 1735). (In 1733, Camargo had made a great impression in his breakthrough opera Hippolyte et Aricie: an observer remarked that where the bass singing the tragic Thésée had caused tears to stain his cheeks, the thrill of Camargo’s dancing dried them.)

Sallé deserves renown as ballet’s first female choreographer of note. Possibly other women, Santlow included, shaped their own dances before Sallé, but Sallé took authorship of the whole dance drama. She retired in 1741, though making occasionally return appearances at court. 

Camargo, by contrast, danced with the Paris Opéra until 1751. She passed into legend in her own day. She was the epitome of fashion; everyone copied her couture. Legend has it that it was she who removed heels from dancing shoes. She as much as Santlow and Sallé needs a revisionist history: where legend used to insist she never performed gargouillades, I now discover - thanks to Edmund Fairfax in Facebook - that she did. She was also the protagonist of a famous ballet by Marius Petipa. Whereas the dance achievements of Santlow and Sallé were given little attention in the nineteenth century, Camargo’s name stayed famous. After Diaghilev’s death, when British artists convened to re-create the Diaghilev enterprise in British terms in 1930, they formed the Camargo Society. (In 1935, having helped to ignite other ballet enterprises here, it handed over its productions to the young Sadler’s Wells Ballet.)

For all eminent dance women of the eighteenth century, sex and sexuality were major issues - and often binds. In the first ten or more years of her life, Santlow had lovers: later accounts claimed that she was notorious for her “incontinency”, a word that then meant promiscuity. By contrast, Sallé’s chastity was reckoned one of the wonders of the Paris Opéra, although some posthumous historians have now determined (on what strikes me as quite inadequate evidence) that she was lesbian. Camargo’s most celebrated lover was of immense prestige, Louis de Bourbon, comte de Clermont and member of the French royal family: for him she retired from the Paris Opéra for five of her prime years (1736-1741), though dancing for him in a private theatre. (She subsequently returned to the Opéra for ten further years.)

Exquisite portraits of Camargo dancing by Nicolas Lancret hang in London’s Wallace Collection (illustration 60), the National Gallery, Washington D.C., Berlin, St Petersburg, and Nantes - cities in which she never danced. Lancret portrayed Sallé too: the most often reproduced (61) is one now in Rheinsberg, Germany. (Some online information shows another, quite different one (62), in the collection of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts., but this for some reason is less well known.) Santlow’s popular Harlequin dance was caught in a contemporary portrait - her loose hair is glimpsed - that was acquired by London’s Theatre Museum; today it belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and has often been converted into Christmas cards and magazine covers.

Sallé has been rediscovered in the art historian Émile Dacier’s 1909 biography and successive recent publications by Sarah McCleave. Santlow was largely overlooked until the late Selma-Jeanne Cohen (her most remarkable research) resurrected her career in a 1960s publication, Santlow, Fam’d for Dance. The baroque dance historian Moira Goff and I became friends in 1992 when we realised we had both been researching and writing about her; her 2007 biography, The Incomparable Hester Santlow, and blog, Dance in History https://danceinhistory.com/author/moiragoff/ , are important. It’s good that Jennifer Homans makes room for Santlow’s importance in her history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels (2010).

Curiously, of the three ballerinas, it’s Santlow who has left legacies in terms of dances and descendants. Six of her great solos were notated and have been reconstructed in recent decades. (You can see, for example, Moira Goff dance Santlow’s Passacaglia from Venus and Adonis on YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LCytknjaNEM .)

And the descendants of Hester Santlow have been one of the areas I myself have most enjoyed researching. She was good friends with her daughter Harriot, and after her retirement from the stage, went to live with Harriot and her husband Richard Eliot at Port Eliot in Cornwall. Harriot had nine children by Eliot. The young Joshua Reynolds made an informal group portrait of the couple and their children. Reynolds did not include Santlow, but did include a friend and neighbour, Captain John Hamilton: interesting, since after Eliot’s death, Harriot and Hamilton married and had a son. Santlow outlived her sons-in-law, her daughter, and three of her grandchildren. In her old age, she visited Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where a new memorial had been placed to her husband, Barton Booth. (I have often wondered whether she also paid her respects to the nearby memorial to James Craggs, her earlier lover and Harriot’s father.)  When she died, her left her possessions to her grandchildren. Their progeny have proliferated; many of them were ennobled in the nineteenth centuries. 

And thus Hester Santlow and her illegitimate daughter have left descendants who include Diana (princess of Wales) and Fergie (duchess of York); William (duke of Cambridge) and Harry (duke of Sussex); George, Charlotte, Louis, and Archie; Beatrix and Eugenie,; the duke of Gloucester; five of today’s non-royal dukes (Abercorn, Buccleuch, Devonshire, Marlborough, Northumberland); sundry marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons; the prime minister Alec Douglas-Home and his playwright brother William; Dorothy MacmIllan, wife to the prime minister Harold MacmIllan; the actress Jane Asher; the writer Nicholas Haslam; the Lady Mary Lygon who was friend and perhaps muse to Edward Elgar and the Lygon family who were Evelyn Waugh’s models for the Flytes of “Brideshead Revisited”.) 

Saturday 20 March

60: Marie-Anne Cupis de Camargo, by Nicolas Lancret. Wallace Collection, London.

61: Marie Sallé, by Nicolas Lancret. Rheinsberg, Schloss.

62: Hester Santlow in her Harlequin Dance. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.