AMONG MUNICH’S lesser-known tourist attractions is the Schloss Nymphenburg’s “Gallery of Beauties”: a collection of winsome female portraits commissioned by a 19th-century king of Bavaria, Ludwig I. The gallery thereby combines two of that king’s main obsessions, women and the arts. And naturally it includes a picture of his greatest obsession: the Irish-born femme fatale, Eliza Gilbert, better known to the world as Lola Montez.
You might wonder, looking at it, why Ludwig was so overthrown (metaphorically at first, and later literally) by her, with her pleasant if somewhat austere features, and a dress-sense that would not be out of place on a plainclothes nun. But that may have been exactly the artist’s intention.
Lola was notorious throughout Europe by the time Ludwig met her. She had been run out of Baden-Baden not long before for licentious behaviour, reportedly demonstrating her dancer’s agility by raising her leg over a man’s shoulder. So the court painter’s brief may have been to make her look like she wasn’t that kind of girl. Or that if she had been once, she had since reformed.
The PR campaign didn’t work for long, competing as it had to with the feisty reality. Born in Sligo in 1821, Eliza was the product of high expectations – her mother was the illegitimate daughter an Irish MP, Sir Charles Oliver – and low income. Her own father was a penniless army officer who died soon after they moved to India. She claimed her widowed mother then let her run wild. And wild, at any rate, is what she became.
By the age of 20, with both a broken marriage and a doomed extramarital affair behind her, she was already running out of respectable options. So she went to Spain and reinvented herself. Henceforth she would be Lola Montez the Andalusian dancer, as which she toured Europe, winning male admirers and moral censure wherever she went with such spectacles as the “Spider Dance”, in which she pretended her body was being invaded by insects.
Franz Liszt and Alexandre Dumas Snr were among her many high-placed conquests. So was a famous Parisian newspaper editor, before he was killed in a duel. But she really hit the jackpot with Ludwig, an ageing Lothario who fell at her feet (a part of her that he was particular fond of, apparently).
Her short but glorious reign as his mistress saw Lola awarded Bavarian citizenship and then a title – Countess of Lansfeld – as well as considerable influence on his policies. The social climbing was facilitated by a Protestant-led, liberal government, after the conservatives resigned in protest. But Lola’s involvement with the already unpopular king brought the new government down in its turn. So it was that in 1848, Europe’s “year of revolutions”, Bavaria unusually ousted a left-leaning government and returned a more conservative one: largely thanks to the role of the woman from Sligo.
For her part in events, she was forcibly escorted to the Swiss border and told not to come back; while Ludwig, unable to satisfy the demands for reform, abdicated in favour of his son. Not even this ended his intoxication with his Spanish dancer.
It was only his discovery of her infidelity – a surprise to him if no one else – that finally sobered him up.
The show had to go on, meanwhile, and Lola duly packaged the Bavarian chapter of her life-story into a stage play. She toured Europe and Australia and the US, a country she found more amenable to her large personality and in which she eventually settled.
Her life remained turbulent, however. When men were not being struck by her beauty, they were being struck by her in other ways. She was a serial assaulter: slapping, punching, kicking and sometimes resorting to other weapons as the mood took her.
When an Australian newspaper wrote about her critically on her tour there, she horsewhipped the editor.
Of her three marriages, the last two were bigamous and none was long-lasting. But then finally she did reform, spending the later part of her career as a living morality tale, raising money for prostitutes’ charities, and going on lecture tours. Among her speaking engagements was one in Dublin’s Rotunda. But soon afterwards she suffered a stroke and her highly eventful life ended in 1861, when she was not yet 39.
Reporting her demise, the New York Evening Post was – as Lola had become – charitable: suggesting that her controversial career had to be seen in the context of her early life: “She had talents and decided to make use of them to get on in the world. She was a Becky Sharp on a grand scale, only not quite as heartless as that imaginary character. Her most eccentric actions were speedily reported, but her many acts of generosity, especially to poor literary people – and there are several of this class in New York who can bear testimony to this – were known only to the recipients of her careless bounty.” So even if the painting in Munich was not quite an accurate representation at the time, its subject seems to have caught up with it – or it with her – in the end. But the full story of her life continues to inspire other treatments, including a recent novel – An Invitation to Dance, by Irish writer Marion Urch. This year also saw the release of a DVD version of the Max Ophuls famous film, Lola Montès (1955), in which the heroine is cast as a tragic circus performer, befriended by Peter Ustinov’s ringmaster.