Anne Seymour Damer English, 1748-1828

Bequeathed by the artist to Sir Alexander Johnston;
By descent to his son Captain F. Johnston and thence by family descent to the present owner

The present marble portrait of the artist’s mother is one of the most sensitive portrait busts carved by Anne Seymour Damer. Behind the façade of severe Grecian style the serene beauty of the sitter is very moving.  The classical style of the marble belies the feeling of great intimacy in the delicacy of the handling and in the tender message engraved in the Greek inscription: ‘Friend and Mother’.

As a woman and an aristocrat, with strong whig sympathies, Damer's career as a sculptor has characteristics outside the normal concerns of her contemporaries.  She exhibited over thirty works at the Royal Academy from 1784 to 1818. These were almost exclusively portrait busts of friends in various classical guises, or genre groups of animals. Her position, however, remained that of an Honorary Exhibitor and her narrow range of subject matter was at times dismissed as indicative of her amateur status.  On the other hand few of her male counterparts could claim such an interesting range of influences and experiences, from her classical studies and her literary and theatrical work, to her extensive travels. In 1779 she was captured by a privateer and later released to her father in Guernsey.  In 1798 she met Nelson in Naples and Napoleon in 1802, to whom she presented examples of her busts of Nelson and Charles James Fox.

Damer’s mother was a fascinating character. Born in 1721, Caroline Campbell was the daughter of Colonel John Campbell of Mamore, later fourth Duke of Argyll.  Her godmother was Caroline, Princess of Wales, afterwards Queen-Consort to George II, for whom her mother, the beautiful Mary Bellenden had been maid-of-honour.  In 1739, at the time of her first marriage to Charles Bruce, third earl of Ailesbury, nearly 40 years her senior, Lady Ailesbury was described as ‘very pretty, well behaved, and just eighteen, has £2000 a year jointure and £400 pin money’. The most vivid accounts of Lady Ailesbury come from Horace Walpole, who was Damer's guardian and a great admirer of her mother: ‘Her face and person were charming, lively she was, almost to étourderie, and so agreeable she was that I never heard her mentioned afterwards by one of her contemporaries who did not prefer her as the most perfect creature they ever saw’.  The handsome Lady Ailesbury was well-read, being particularly interested in Rousseau, for whom she secured a pension of £100 a year.  Amongst her close circle were the historian, David Hume, the writers Gray, Thomson and Shenstone and the painters Reynolds and Angelica Kauffmann, whose portrait of her was sold in these rooms in 2004 (fig.1).  Lady Ailesbury’s own artistic talents were expressed through her embroidered and worked pictures after artists such as Cuyp, Van Dyck and Gainsborough. At the end of her life Mary Berry affectionately described her as ‘the picture of what an old woman ought to be and so seldom is’.

Lady Ailesbury's only child from her first marriage, Lady Mary Bruce (1740-1796), married Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond.  In 1747, Lady Ailesbury married the Hon. Henry Seymour Conway, a dashingly handsome Colonel and Percy describes their marriage as one of ‘unalloyed happiness’.  Damer was born a year later.  Throughout her life she had a very close relationship with her mother and after the death of her husband the Hon. John Damer in 1776 they lived together, latterly at Strawberry Hill, which was bequeathed to Damer on the death of Horace Walpole.  She also maintained a strong friendship with her half-sister and was a frequent visitor at Goodwood, the home of the Duke of Richmond.

Another version of this bust is on Lady Ailesbury's tomb in Sundridge Church, Kent, where Damer is also buried.

RELATED LITERATURE
Percy, pp.17-22, 190-192; Dawson, pp.85-90; Gunnis, pp.120-21; Bilbey & Trusted, pp.70-71