Enfilade

Press release from the NPG:

Daniel Gardner, "The Three Witches from Macbeth (Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne; Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire; Anne Seymour Damer)," pastel on paper, 1775 (London: NPG)

As it launches a major exhibition of actress portraits, the National Portrait Gallery has announced the acquisition of a large and rarely seen picture of three of eighteenth-century society’s most glamorous and notorious women – as the three witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne – the most famous political hostesses and society beauties of their day – are shown gathered around the witches’ cauldron alongside their friend, the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer.

The portrait will be seen by museum visitors for the first time at the National Portrait Gallery’s autumn exhibition The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons, where it’s included in a section devoted to amateur dramatics. It was acquired through the Government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme having been allocated to the Gallery from a private collection in lieu of inheritance tax.

This unusual group portrait of 1775 in pastel by artist Daniel Gardner (1750-1805) shows three intimate friends who enjoyed attending private theatricals and shared a common passion for Whig politics and the arts. Gardner’s choice of the Cauldron scene from Macbeth can be related to their shared and shadowy political machinations as leading members of the Devonshire House circle. The daughter of the First Earl Spencer, Georgiana’s marriage to the fifth Duke of Devonshire placed her at the apex of Whig Society. She held famously libertine parties at Devonshire house in London, and recently was the subject of Amanda Foreman’s hugely successful book and the subsequent film The Duchess with Keira Knightley.

Viscountess Melbourne was married to Sir Penniston Lamb MP and was an ‘enthusiastic manager of her husband’s political interests’. While she had been friends with Damer, the foremost female sculptor of her day, since the early 1770s, her friendship with Georgiana was fairly recent. This pastel portrait may in part be related to Melbourne’s desire to publicise this new friendship. Melbourne is thought to have commissioned the work that has descended in her family.

The newly-acquired work is a significant addition to the National Portrait Gallery’s eighteenth-century collections. While each of the three sitters was influential, due to her lasting interest to biographers, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire remains one of the greatest celebrities of her day and this is the first portrait the Gallery has acquired of her as an adult. It is also the first portrait it has acquired of Lady Melbourne.

While there is no evidence of its being exhibited at the time, contemporaries clearly knew of its existence. It is mentioned in Lady Mary Coke’s journal, where she wrote in 1775 of a drawing of “the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Melburn, and Mrs Damer all being drawn in one picture in the Characters of the three Witches in Macbeth … They have chosen that Scene where they compose their Cauldron, but instead of ‘finger of Birth-strangled babe, etc’ their Cauldron is composed of roses and carnations and I daresay they think their charmes more irresistible than all the magick of the Witches.”

Dr Lucy Peltz, Curator of 18^th-Century Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: “This unusual group portrait depicts three of the most politically influential and socially notorious women of the period. I am delighted that the Acceptance in Lieu panel has allocated it to the National Portrait Gallery where it helps to present a more representative view of female achievement in the eighteenth century.”