The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury by H. L. Meakin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury by H. L. Meakin Marcus Harmes Meakin, H. L., The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; hardback; pp. 410; 64 colour, 31 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £75.00; ISBN 9780754663973. Lady Anne Drury was an early seventeenth-century English gentlewoman who installed in her country house a decorated ‘closet’, or a small chamber decorated with painted panels. The images contained therein are, for the most part, allegorical and suggest a great deal about Lady Drury’s education, erudition, and also something of her inner emotional life, as they perhaps provided themes and ideas to stimulate her prayers and meditations. Although [End Page 300] these panels have received some scholarly attention from historians and art historians, H. L. Meakin’s monograph is the first comprehensive examination of the images, their sources, the possible date of their creation and installation, the role of Lady Drury in their design, their positioning in the architectural space, and the woman who commissioned them, as well as the social context from which she emerged. Lady Drury was granddaughter of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper of Elizabeth I, and was a friend of John Donne and Joseph Hall, a clergyman and writer on Protestant meditations. As Meakin points out, the Bacon family usually educated their daughters, as they did their sons, to a high level. This observation is the starting point for Meakin’s rich interpretation of the panels. The first section of the book surveys Lady Drury, her circles, and ways to interpret the closet, in particular the outlet it may have provided her, in terms of what she chose to put on the panels, for expressing her view of the world (p. 29) and her meditations on life experiences, such as her husband’s frustrated career and her daughters’ deaths. In the second section of the book, each panel is given individual attention and analysis. The analysis is impressive and multi-disciplinary. The very idea of sitting and contemplating in a closet brings the meditative writings of Joseph Hall more than once into consideration. Other sources for the often-enigmatic images are proverbs, classics such as Martial and Apuleius, Christian stoicism, bestiaries such as Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes, and continental emblem books. Meakin points to some panels that simply defy interpretation, but the cumulative impact of the panel-by-panel study is to reconstruct the meaning of the small but visually and intellectually rich space in which Lady Drury could immerse herself. Marcus Harmes The University of Southern Queensland Copyright © 2015 Marcus Harmes