Belmour: A Modern Edition

Biographical Note

✦ ix ✦ Biographical Note Anne Seymour Conway was born on November 8, 1749, at Coombe Bank in Kent, and spent her youth at Park Place, Remenham, near Henley-on-Thames.1 She was the daughter of well-known parents: Henry Seymour Conway served as an army officer and politician, and his wife, Caroline Bruce, née Campbell, Lady Ailesbury, was the daughter of John, fourth Duke of Argyll. Anne retained the aristocratic Whiggish outlook of her parents. Her father’s secretary, David Hume, allegedly encouraged her interest in sculpture.2 When her parents traveled abroad, her guardian was Horace Walpole, who bequeathed his Strawberry Hill home to her as his executor and legatee. On June 14, 1767, Anne married John Damer. After seven years they separated, and he committed suicide on August 15, 1776, leaving her in debt. Damer’s career as a sculptress began after this tragic incident, which, as shown in her many letters to friends such as Mary Berry, tinged the rest of her life with melancholy. Before the death of her husband, Damer commissioned Daniel Gardner to paint her and her friends as the witches from Macbeth. He wrote the following poem to accompany the portrait: Tales of Old Witches are no longer heard, Fictitious legends once receiv’d for truth. And wisely here the Artist has transferr’d The pow’rs of sorcery from age to youth. Beware, ye Mortals, who those comforts prize, Which flow from peace from liberty, and ease, Th’ Enchanter’s wand, and magick spells despise, But shun the witchcraft of such eyes as these.3 ✦ x ✦ Of the three women in the painting, Damer is the only one who looks out at the viewer, defiantly. Anne Damer gave copies to Lady Melbourne and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as gifts. Each version differed slightly, with details painted into the hem of a garment in the painting, to commemorate the recipient.4 After her husband’s suicide, the group portrait became her farewell gesture to the bon ton, for Damer’s father-in-law, the notorious Lord Milton, insisted that she sell her own jewelry to pay the considerable debts her husband had accumulated as a fashionable rake. When her fatherin -law also proved unreliable in paying her pension, she lived with her parents for a while and later (in 1778) rented an apartment behind Lady Melbourne’s home in Piccadilly, on Sackville Street.5 Though she seemed anxious to avoid public attention, she attracted onlookers who gawked at this aristocratic woman with a smock and mob cap, working in the damp yards behind her own apartment—a far cry from the fashionable residence she had once kept in London. In the 1770s and for two decades afterward, several caricaturists lampooned her as a lesbian who shunned the company of men, insinuating that she was responsible for her husband’s suicide. One particularly cutting sketch of July 1, 1789, shows her gelding the Apollo Belvedere, a reference to a statue she intended for the new Drury Lane (c. 1802), which burned to the ground on January 24, 1809.6 By the 1790s, the playwright Hannah Cowley could depict Anne Damer as a respected artist whose romantic attachment to her own sex symbolized the excesses of the age of sensibility. Despite her jealous detractors, however, Damer was no dabbler. She influenced the perception of Lord Nelson, Charles James Fox, George III, and other figures through her neoclassical busts. As a sculptress Anne Damer recorded the historical actions of others, but she also became a historical curiosity herself. A pen portrait of Damer appears in Susan Ferrier’s Marriage, showing her as a cross-dressing woman, complete with riding ✦ xi ✦ crop and “worsted stockings and black leather shoes, something resembling buckets.”7 The painter Joseph Farington noted Damer’s histrionic farewells to Mary Berry and disagreed with her outspoken opinions on painting.8 As an actress , she sometimes embarrassed audience members, such as the future Lord Palmerston, who, with the prince regent and the king and queen, attended numerous plays in which she performed at the house of her half sister, the Duchess of Richmond . Nevertheless, the House of Commons ended sessions early so Charles James Fox and William Pitt could attend a production of The Way to Keep Him on April 20, 1787, at Richmond House. “So moving were Mrs. Damer and Lord Henry Fitzgerald” in Nathaniel Lee’s Theodosius, or the...