The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist by Jonathan David Gross

Abstract

Jonathan David Gross. The Life of Darner: Portrait of Regency Artist. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Pp. 410. $85. Seymour Darner was England's groundbreaking first female sculptor. Her studio drew public audience, and she was cultural ambassador throughout the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars as well as satirized bluestocking, inheritor of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill estate, novelist, and an actress. Giuseppe Ceracchi's statue of Darner as the muse of sculpture stood in the entrance to the British Museum for many years (39), and her colorful life and penchant for cross-dressing (xv) made her model for literary characters in works by Hannah Cowley, Susan Ferrier, James Plumptre, and the Duchess of Devonshire. Despite her prominent role in Regency society, politics, and aesthetics, however, Darner has remained largely ignored since Percy Noble's 1908 biography, Seymour Darner: A Woman of Art and Fashion, 1748-1828. Jonathan David Gross's The Life of Darner: Portrait of Regency Artist ends this long absence of attention. Drawing upon previously unpublished letters and photographs of her works, Gross investigates Darner's remarkable life and career as vital to comprehensive understanding of Regency culture. Referring to her as Anne throughout the biography, Gross catalogues monumental moments in Damer's life--her husband's death; theatricals at Richmond House; her completion of bust of Nelson; her personal presentation of bust of Charles James Fox to Napoleon Bonaparte; the writing of her novel, Belmour; and her intimacy with Mary Berry--along with details of her everyday life. Her habit of reading outdoors during gnat infestation in her home (270), for example, and her care and grief as she nursed her dying mother, Lady Ailesbury (306-9) are made coherent with her career milestones. Gross's attention to detail makes Darner and her world present and accessible. The biography is aptly framed by David Gardner's 1775 painting, Witches 'Round the Cauldron, depicting Darner, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Lady Melbourne as Macbeth's weird sisters. The inclusion of that image on the book's cover foregrounds Gross's richly detailed close readings of Damer's own works and various artistic representations of her. Gross's attention to the portrait in particular and his closing remarks on her having carved out an identity for herself that transcended social norms, gesture anticipated by her pose as witch in coven, brewing up mischief (343), are telling of his holistic approach to Damer's life and career. The biography is warm, intimate, and dense with correspondence and artifacts of Damer's life, exposing her social values, aesthetic sensibilities, and caring nature. As Gross outlines, Damer's life was cosmopolitan from the start. Born in 1748 and raised in London by Whig parents, she grew up surrounded by poets, philosophers, artists. was particularly close with Joshua Reynolds, Angelica Kauffmann, Elizabeth Farren, and Sarah Siddons (9). In the first of twenty eight short, thematically organized chapters, Gross notes that Damer's intimate relationship with Walpole, who treated her like daughter and actively promoted her sculpting career (1), her tutelage under David Hume, who dared her to become sculptor (11-12), and her mother's moral and artistic [guidance] (21) fostered Damer's artistic sensibilities and ambitions from young age. Darner's social life revolved in many ways around her friendships with other women, notably the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Melbourne, Mary Berry, and Princess Caroline. Her 1767 marriage, arranged and tepid from the start, to the Hon. John Darner, a felon and rake but heir to large income (16), lacked the intimacy she found with other women. Gross finds an illustration of her ambivalence toward her marriage in Reynolds's 1773 portrait in which she is pale and fragile: She strains to disappear, sharp contrast to the rebellious pose she struck for Daniel Gardner (18). …