Fashioning the Female Artist: Allegory and Celebrity in Lady Diana Beauclerk’s Watercolours of The Faerie Queene

Abstract

This chapter explores Lady Diana Beauclerk’s (1734-1808) rarely studied large-scale images of scenes from Edmund Spenser’s epic, The Faerie Queene, completed while she was in residence at Horace Walpole’s gothic mansion, Strawberry Hill. These remarkable watercolours depict key moments from the epic that focus on Spenser’s heroines in action. Borrowing from a variety of styles and techniques, the portraits are a blend of fantastical detail, global iconography, and au courant fashion trends. Lady Diana Beauclerk provides the spectator with a dazzling array of examples of the eclectic nature of eighteenth-century visual culture. In particular, her portrayal of Spenser’s Britomart as a powerful and striking Minerva figure capitalises on the associations between Minerva, the goddess of war and wisdom, and women’s intellectual and artistic accomplishments across visual and narrative materials. Although these watercolours have been largely unseen, I argue that we might be able to understand them as cleverly staged advertisements for Beauclerk’s work.