.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Louisa Montagu, née Lowry-Corry, was the daughter of the Irish politician and peer, Armar, 1st Earl Belmore and his wife Lady Harriet Hobart, daughter of 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire. The dissolution of her parents’ marriage by an Act of Parliament in 1793 and their subsequent remarriages, meant that Louisa was sent to finish her education with relatives. In July 1804, she married George John Montagu, Viscount Hinchingbrooke, MP (1773-1818), who succeeded his father as the 6th Earl of Sandwich in 1814.
This impressive portrait dates to the year of their marriage. Positioned against an anchor and set against a turbulent sea, Louisa is the personification of Hope. It is one of only a small number of full-length portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence, which present the sitter in allegorical guise, and may have been intended to convey the bride and her new husband’s hopes for a successful union. Similar images proliferated in print culture during Lawrence’s lifetime, for example in Gally’s 1798 mezzotint after Burnet Reading, which also shows Hope as a female figure in classicizing dress and resting against an anchor. Of the handful of other allegorical portraits by Lawrence, another, depicting Georgiana, Lady Leicester, later Lady de Tabley, also shows the sitter as Hope (fig. 1; 1814, Tabley House, Cheshire, inv. no. 204.2). Lady Leicester’s portrait was inspired by the character of Speranza in Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590-1596) and Lawrence depicted her holding the character’s ‘dew-branch’ and stepping lightly through a mass of billowing clouds. The Spenserian association was made explicit to contemporary audiences by the inclusion of a number of verses from the poem, published under the painting’s entry in the catalogue at the time of the 1814 Royal Academy exhibition. Spencer’s poem may also have partially informed Lawrence’s depiction of Louisa, following the lines: ‘But wise Speranza gave him comfort sweet, / And taught him how to take assured hold / Upon her silver anchor, as was meet’ (E. Spencer, The Faeries Queene, I, Canto X, XXII).
Allegorical portraits were not uncommon in British portraiture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One of the most important proponents of this genre was Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose work had a definitive influence on Lawrence’s career. Between 1761 and 1764, Reynolds painted three full-length female portraits in which he fused conventional female portraiture with imagery of allegorical significance and narratives of classical mythology. One of the most famous examples of new portrait-type was his 1784 Portrait of Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (San Marino, Huntington Art Gallery, acc. no. 21.20) a portrait Lawrence greatly admired, writing in 1823 that it was ‘indisputably the finest female portrait in the world’ (G. Perry, ‘Musing on muses: Representing the actress as ‘artist’ in British art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c. 1790-1900, A. Laurence, J. Bellamy and G. Perry (eds.), Manchester and New York, 2000, p. 25). His praise and knowledge of Reynolds’ intellectualizing, academic full-length portraits evidently informed the present portrait of Louisa, Viscountess Hinchingbrooke. The sitter’s soft, classical drapery, her removal from a contemporary context and the elevated status thus afforded to her, clearly show Lawrence working within the traditions Reynolds had established some years earlier.
This impressive portrait dates to the year of their marriage. Positioned against an anchor and set against a turbulent sea, Louisa is the personification of Hope. It is one of only a small number of full-length portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence, which present the sitter in allegorical guise, and may have been intended to convey the bride and her new husband’s hopes for a successful union. Similar images proliferated in print culture during Lawrence’s lifetime, for example in Gally’s 1798 mezzotint after Burnet Reading, which also shows Hope as a female figure in classicizing dress and resting against an anchor. Of the handful of other allegorical portraits by Lawrence, another, depicting Georgiana, Lady Leicester, later Lady de Tabley, also shows the sitter as Hope (fig. 1; 1814, Tabley House, Cheshire, inv. no. 204.2). Lady Leicester’s portrait was inspired by the character of Speranza in Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590-1596) and Lawrence depicted her holding the character’s ‘dew-branch’ and stepping lightly through a mass of billowing clouds. The Spenserian association was made explicit to contemporary audiences by the inclusion of a number of verses from the poem, published under the painting’s entry in the catalogue at the time of the 1814 Royal Academy exhibition. Spencer’s poem may also have partially informed Lawrence’s depiction of Louisa, following the lines: ‘But wise Speranza gave him comfort sweet, / And taught him how to take assured hold / Upon her silver anchor, as was meet’ (E. Spencer, The Faeries Queene, I, Canto X, XXII).
Allegorical portraits were not uncommon in British portraiture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One of the most important proponents of this genre was Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose work had a definitive influence on Lawrence’s career. Between 1761 and 1764, Reynolds painted three full-length female portraits in which he fused conventional female portraiture with imagery of allegorical significance and narratives of classical mythology. One of the most famous examples of new portrait-type was his 1784 Portrait of Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (San Marino, Huntington Art Gallery, acc. no. 21.20) a portrait Lawrence greatly admired, writing in 1823 that it was ‘indisputably the finest female portrait in the world’ (G. Perry, ‘Musing on muses: Representing the actress as ‘artist’ in British art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c. 1790-1900, A. Laurence, J. Bellamy and G. Perry (eds.), Manchester and New York, 2000, p. 25). His praise and knowledge of Reynolds’ intellectualizing, academic full-length portraits evidently informed the present portrait of Louisa, Viscountess Hinchingbrooke. The sitter’s soft, classical drapery, her removal from a contemporary context and the elevated status thus afforded to her, clearly show Lawrence working within the traditions Reynolds had established some years earlier.