Juliana Westray Wood

Born in England, Juliana Westray made her dramatic debut in Boston in 1797. In 1803, she joined the Philadelphia company of actor, director, and theater manager William Burke Wood, whom she married in 1804. At that time, stage performers—and particularly women—were viewed as morally suspect and fair game for insult. While playing Shakespeare’s Juliet in Philadelphia in the summer of 1811, Wood was struck by a musket ball thrown from an upper box. In 1816, while attending church services in Baltimore, she was denounced from the pulpit for portraying the heroine in what the minister considered a “shameful production.”

This glamorous painting belies those sordid realities. Moreover, when an engraving of the portrait appeared in The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor in March 1811, Wood was praised as “a lady whose public talents and private virtues have raised her to a very high rank in public estimation.”