SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS (1723-1792)

Anne, 2nd Countess Albemarle (c. 1759)

Oil on canvas (126 x 101 cm)

The National Gallery, London

Although some colour has fled from the face in this portrait as is usual with Reynold’s work of this period, the shadows there retain their transparency; the lights painted in the patterned black mantle are perfectly preserved, and the paint employed for the pattern of the skirt and for the lace retains its original relief, so that this is one of the most exciting of Reynold’s paintings to examine close-up.

The sitter, Lady Anne Lennox (1703-1789), was the second daughter of the 1st Duke of Richmond. She married in 1723 William-Anne van Keppel, the second Earl of Albemarle, who died in 1754 after a distinguished and extravagant diplomatic career. She was the mother of Reynold’s friend and patron Augustus Keppel, and several of her other children were painted by Reynolds.

There were appointments for Lady Albemarle in the artist’s pocket-books on September 1757 and on April, May and June 1759. Payment by the executors of Lady Albemarle’s son, the 3rd Earl, is recorded for 13 December 1773 (they took their time…)

Reynolds in this period often painted women at their “work” (Lady Albemarle’s niece Lady Caroline Fox is a good example). Lady Albemarle is “knotting” at a light table of the slightly gothic type made by Chippendale in the mid-1750’s. Aileen Ribeiro points out that “knotting, that is making, with the aid of a small shuttle, a decorative linen braid which could be sewn on to a fabric, was a pastime acceptable at Court and on many social occasions, providing with the excuse of work, a chance to show off the graceful attitudes of the hands”

We know from family letters that Lady Albemarle spent much of 1759 in “a furious passion” because one of his daughters, Lady Caroline, had eloped with Robert Adair, a surgeon that acted as the family doctor. She did not become less formidable as she grew older, but she was loved and even revered. In 1780 Lady Albemarle surprised her family when after a stroke she made a full recovery. In the winter of 1782, she was alarming her friends by consuming champagne and cold partridge pie after midnight. She died in 1789 at the age of 86.