Lola Montez

Lola Montez (1818–1861) was the most famous of the international performers who toured Australia during the boom years of the 1850s. Born Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert in Ireland, Montez spent her early years in British military outposts in India and was in her teens when, in order to avoid being married off to a ‘gouty old rascal’ of her mother’s choosing, she eloped with a British soldier. The marriage ended five years later and Montez was publicly named as an adulteress. She then fled to Spain where, having decided to earn a living on the stage, she received some form of tuition in dance and adopted the Spanish-sounding name. She made her London debut at Her Majesty’s Theatre in June 1843, but soon fled again, performing in Berlin, Warsaw and Paris and attracting praise and scandal in equal measure. By 1846 she was in Munich, where she added King Ludwig I of Bavaria to an already impressive inventory of lovers. The relationship with Ludwig ended in 1848, when he was forced to abdicate amidst growing unrest at Lola’s political influence. After five scandal- packed years in California, she came to Australia in 1855 and performed in Sydney and Melbourne. Metropolitan audiences were scandalised by Lola’s routines, particularly her ‘Spider Dance’, in which she enacted having a spider caught in ‘an extremely short gauze skirt’. Despite being denounced as immoral and ‘utterly subversive’, Montez went on to play to packed houses in Adelaide and was loved by the less discerning audiences in Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine. Montez left Australia in 1856. When her stage career stalled the following year, she toured America and Britain delivering a series of lectures on beauty and morality. She died in New York from syphilis- related symptoms in January 1861. Purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in 2010, this portrait of Montez was initially thought to have been painted by the German artist, Friedrich Dürck (1809–1884). However, research by one of Montez’s biographers, Bruce Seymour, now indicates that it is one of two commissioned by King Ludwig I from Joseph Stieler (1781–1858), who painted thirty-six portraits for Ludwig’s ‘Gallery of Beauties’ at Nymphenburg Palace, Munich, between 1827 and 1850. Stieler’s second painting of Montez, completed in 1847, is displayed at Nymphenburg and is the most famous portrait of her. Montez sat for this portrait around the same time, but the end result was not to the King’s satisfaction. Ludwig is believed to have given this painting to Montez who took it to England where it was sold in March 1849.