Portrait of Viscountess Blundell, née Mary Chetwynd (1680-1756), three-quarter-length, seated in a blue dress, holding a sprig

Mary Chetwynd, daughter of John Chetwynd and his wife Lucy Roane, married Montague, 1st Viscount Blundell (see lot 127) in 1709, with whom she had three daughters and a son. Her brothers, Walter, John and William, each in turn Viscount Chetwynd, were all politicians. Interestingly, a group portrait or ‘conversation piece’ commissioned by Walter from the artist Charles Philips shows Mary and him taking tea at the Earl of Harrington’s London house near St. James’s Palace (Paul Mellon Centre, Yale, inv. no. B1981.25.503). The others in the group almost all belonged to the faction of ‘discontented Whigs’ who had expected to control the government after the accession of King George II, implying that Mary, who is pictured conversing as an equal with those around her, was also sympathetic to the Whig cause.