Details of Sculptor

Surname

Damer

Alternative Surname

First Name

Anne Seymour

Initial of Surname

D

Year of Birth/Baptism

1748

Flourished

Year of Death

1828

Biographical Details

The only child of Field-Marshal Henry Conway, a distinguished soldier and Whig politician, and Lady Caroline, née Campbell, daughter of the 4th Duke of Argyll, Damer was born at Coomb Bank, Sundridge, Kent. Her father’s cousin, Horace Walpole, acted as Damer’s guardian when her parents were abroad, and took a close interest in the child from an early age: ‘you know how courteous a Knight I am to distressed virgins of five years old’ he wrote in a letter to Henry Conway (quoted in Noble 1908, 5). Accounts of ‘Missy’s’ intellectual development recurred in Walpole’s correspondence from her early childhood. He later recalled that she first displayed her talent for sculpture at 10 years old, when she modelled a Spenserian subject in period costume from pieces of candle wax. She later modelled dogs in bas-relief and heads ‘in the manner of Isaac Gosset’ (HWC, vol 12, 273). Walpole was quick to hail the arrival of an important artist: ‘Goodnight… to the Infanta, whose progress in waxen statuary advances so fast that by next winter she may rival Rackstrow’s olde man [presumably Benjamin Rackstrow]’ (Noble 1908, 5). An anecdote, related much later by Allan Cunningham, reveals that it was her father’s secretary, the philosopher and historian, David Hume, who first sparked Damer’s talent. Apparently the child mocked the work of an itinerant plaster-modeller and Hume challenged her to produce something better.
On 14 June 1767 she married John Damer, the eldest son of Lord Milton (afterwards Earl of Dorchester) at Park Place. Her husband, who was heir to a great fortune, was a hopeless spend-thrift, and Damer too appears to have indulged in the trappings of high rank and fortune: her ear-rings alone were reputedly worth £4,000. The marriage was not a happy one and the couple separated. On 15 August 1776 he committed suicide in a tavern, the Bedford Arms in Covent Garden. Something of the scale of his spending is reflected in the extent of his wardrobe, which was sold after his death for £15,000.
Cunningham suggests that sculpture provided a consolation for Damer after the breakdown of her marriage. Another, anonymous account, in French and possibly autobiographical, says that the event led to a decision to engage less with the fashionable world and to pursue her desire to be an artist rather than a dilettante (quoted in Yarrington 1997, 33). Damer took ‘two or three lessons’ in modelling from Giuseppe Ceracchi, who was probably introduced to her by Walpole (Anecdotes 1937, 142). The Italian arrived in England in 1773 and subsequently immortalised Damer in a marble statue as The Muse of Sculpture. She received 6 lessons in carving from John Bacon RA and lessons in anatomy were provided by the surgeon William Cumberland Cruickshank in 1790. According to Walpole her ‘first effort in marble’ dated from 1780 and was the head of a Niobed (18, HWC, vol 12, 272); this conflicts with the account of John Gould who claims that a self-portrait in marble executed in 1778 was her first work (17). In 1784 she exhibited at the Royal Academy as an amateur or ‘Honorary Exhibitor’ (Graves II, 1905-6, 235), showing a bust of Lady Melbourne, a group of dogs and an ideal subject (20, 5, 64). In 1786 she received an important commission for two colossal keystones for the new bridge at Henley (52). These, like the Niobed, are carved in a broad manner, imitative of Greek sculpture. In the 1780s she was responsible for several works in which Society figures were glorified as antique characters, including Peniston Lamb as Mercury (25) and Prince Henry Lubomirski as Bacchus (28), both of which carry inscriptions in Greek. In addition to her other talents, Damer was apparently a classical scholar.
Her efforts were eulogised by her friends. Horace Walpole compared her favourably to Bernini and the sculptors of antiquity. He had the words ‘Non me Praxiteles finxit at Anna Damer’ cut on the terra-cotta model of a fishing-eagle which she presented to him in 1787 (7). On two of her early portaits Erasmus Darwin penned the lines: ‘long with soft touch shall Damer’s chisel charm/ with grace delight us and with beauty warm/ Forster’s (31) fine form shall hearts unborn engage/ and Melbourne’s smile enchant another age (20).’ Sir William Hamilton, who was visited by Damer in Naples in 1782, felt that her Ceres excelled the work of any living Italian (19). She was in Italy again between October 1785 and July 1786 when she executed a profile portrait of a British visitor, Lady Elizabeth Foster (57).
In November 1790 Damer left England for Portugal for her health’s sake. She proceeded to Spain, where she visited the Alhambra, and then to France. After her return to London in May 1791 she completed the statue of George III for the Register House at Edinburgh (11). This commission came in 1787 through the good offices of her uncle, Lord Frederick Campbell, the Lord Clerk Register of Scotland. It was her most ambitious work, and its production was monitored in some detail by The World, who recorded all the stages of the work. The marble, cut from a nine-ton block of Carrara, seems to have been carved entirely by Damer, and was exhibited at the Rotunda, Blackfriars Road, London (The Leverian Museum), in 1793-5. Its finishing touches were a bronze crown and sceptre, cast by the clockmaker Benjamin Vulliamy. A portrait of her close friend Mary Berry, also in bronze, dates from around this time and may have been cast by the same firm (33).
Damer was a high-profile public figure, and was praised and noticed for a variety of personal attributes and pursuits. A Sapphick Epistle, portraying her as a lesbian, appeared in 1771. As an ‘inveterate Whig’ she sympathised with the American Revolution and canvassed for Charles James Fox in the Westminster Election of 1784, with other notable aristocratic women, particularly Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Cunningham 1829-33, 3, 255). Her sculptural pretensions, and perhaps the impropriety of a woman nurturing them, were satirised in a print entitled The Damerian Apollo, 1789, which portrayed Damer in a billowing dress, her hammer and chisel poised to emasculate a statue of the god.
She had an equivocal reputation with professional artists. Farington, for instance, balanced his interest in her as a celebrity (focussing particularly on her physical attributes) with a mistrust of her qualifications as a sculptor. After he accompanied Damer and Miss Berry to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1796 he commented ‘the observations of Mrs Damer did not seem to me to prove that she has any exact knowledge of painting, whatever she may have of sculpture; and she did not make intelligent remarks on the latter. I think her manner and particularly her voice very affected and unpleasing’ (Farington 2, 571). Although it was never doubted that Damer carried out her own modelling and it was common sculptural practice to employ assistants to carry out most of the heavy cutting work, Damer was criticised for using other hands in the course of her work. James Smith II was one of those assisting her and he helped undermine her reputation by claiming that ‘she could carve little or none: I carved most of her busts for her’ (Cunningham 1829-33, 3, 272).
Horace Walpole died early in 1797 . He left Damer £4,000 and his beloved Gothic home, Strawberry Hill, with £2,000 per annum for its upkeep. Farington writes that Mrs Damer’s behaviour became increasingly erratic and she took to wearing ‘a man's hat, and shoes, and a jacket also like a man’s - thus she walks abt the fields with a hooking stick’. He also ridiculed the ostentatious fondness she demonstrated for her friends, the Miss Berrys, from whom she took leave with such ecstasy that the servants compared the ritual to a parting before death (Farington 3, 1048). She remained at Strawberry Hill until 1811 and there organised a number of theatrical events, written and performed by herself and her circle. William Lamb’s play The Fashionable Friends... spoken by Hon Anne S Damer was published in 1801. Around the same time she penned a novel, Belmour, which was republished in 1827. Damer’s theatricality was central to Cunningham’s critique of her character, for he presented her as impersonating the role of a deluded artist in a melodrama.
In November 1799, shortly after the Battle of the Nile, Damer modelled a portrait of Lord Nelson ad vivum. In the following years she presented busts of the Admiral to Napoleon Bonaparte (35) and the Corporation of London (37). The former was given to the First Consul in 1802 when Damer, his admirer and a friend of his wife, visited France during the Peace of Amiens. She also gave him her bust of Charles James Fox (36). The bust of Nelson for the Corporation was praised in a piece by Thomas Hope in the Morning Post on 5 May 1804, in which he admired the ‘breadth of style… discarding every incidental minutiae’ and the ‘simplicity of attitude inseparable from real dignity’ (Yarrington 1997, 37). Damer personally distributed 50 copies of the article. Here, as on numerous other occasions, the eulogies of her literary friends and admirers were at odds with the opinions of professional artists and art historians. Cunningham considered the bust crude and Farington regarded Hope’s article as ‘most extravagant & false & ridiculous’ (Farington 9, 3223-4). Lawrence Gahagan cast a slur on Damer’s status when he advertised his own bust of Nelson in The Times of 16 December 1805 as ‘the only professional sculpted bust of the hero’ (Yarrington 1997, 41). Damer’s own confidence as a sculptor can be seen in her decision to compete against her professional counterparts for the commission to provide Nelson's monument after his death in 1805. The decision indicates that Damer had the workshop facilities, either at home or through subcontractors, to carry out such a large commission. In the event the job went to James Smith II, who narrowly defeated J C F Rossi in the final ballot.
Later that decade Damer executed two monuments for members of her family, both with busts. Her mother’s is frontal, all’antica, and is now badly damaged (2). That to her grandmother is slightly turned, has arms and a naturalistic double chin. Some busts of the 1810s are innovative: the head of Caroline, Princess of Wales, has a slip of carved drapery round the head, which crosses over the breastbone (43). The bust of Sir Humphrey Davy is signed in Greek but is more naturalistic than classicising, conveying a good deal of character through the upturned corners of the scientist’s mouth and the wisp of hair across his forehead (41). When she was advanced in years she had casts of her bust of Nelson made for the Duke of Clarence and the Rajah of Tanjore (45). Cunningham’s satirical account suggests that the latter was presented in the belief that her art could civilise the Rajah’s country. The Rajah thanked Alexander Johnston, Damer’s relative who presented the bust, for ‘a very beautiful specimen of an elegant art’ (Lit Gaz, 1829, 427).
Damer died at her home in Upper Brook Street on 28 May 1828, and was buried at Sundridge. Her grave is marked with a plain slab carved with coats of arms and an epitaph requested in her will: ‘HIC PROPE JACET, UNO CHARACUM MATRE IN LOCO, ANN SEYMOUR DAMER SCULPTRIX ET STATUARIA, ILLUSTRIS FEMINA’. She desired that her mallet, chisel, apron and the ashes of a favourite dog (‘Fidèle’) should be placed in her coffin. Damer also requested that when she was assumed to be dead her body should be ‘thrown into quick lime… so as to prevent the possibility of my being buried alive, an idea which has always presented itself to my imagination with peculiar dread and horror’. She left her properties, York House, and Upper Brook Street, to relatives and large sums of money to servants and family. A snuff-box given to her by Napoleon was bequeathed to the British Museum. A sale of her extensive library was held in 1828, part of which is now at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.
Damer’s biographers have been ambivalent about the importance of sculpture in her life’s achievements. The obituarist writing for the Gentleman’s Magazine accorded her the status of ‘celebrated… amateur sculptor’ and presented her art as one remarkable part of a generally notable and active aristocratic life. He referred to her works as 'gifts', indicators of friendship divorced from economic pressures (Noble 1908, 224). A similar approach can be seen in Percy Noble’s biography, Mrs Damer A Woman of Art and Fashion, 1908, which, as its title suggests, deals as much with Damer’s thespian and other social activities as with her sculptural work. For the professional artistic community, however, Damer presented a number of challenges. She could not be dismissed as a bumbling amateur since her commitment to her craft was tangible and her abilities were admitted to be of a very high standard. Cunningham’s influential and nuanced Life presents her as a woman of deluded faith in her own genius who hoped to discard her aristocratic lineage and replace it with an immortal reputation as an artist. Cunningham expressed admiration for this ambition. The tragedy, however, as he presented it, was that Damer had no genius, her works were uneven in quality, and she would have received little or no notice had it not been for her rank and her rejection of the mental and physical expectations of a lady of quality. Of her works he was scathing, writing : ‘She exhibits few symptoms of poetic feeling…she aspires only to the gentle and the agreeable; there is little of dignity in her Thalia (29) – of heroism in her Nelson – or of intellectual capacity in her Fox’ (Cunningham 1829-33, 3, 273).
Latter-day accounts have addressed Damer’s work largely within the same evaluative frameworks. Gunnis based his entry on Cunningham and on the very similar biography by John Gould. Noble offered little defence of his subject’s artistic efforts, which he felt were ‘rather rough and unfinished’ (Noble 1908, viii). Whinney praised Damer’s naturalistic treatment of animals, but presented her merely as an agreeable eccentric, and remarked that her Henley keystones were only ‘an unusual achievement for a young lady of quality’ (Whinney 1988, 319). Damer’s practice and reputation have recently been reassessed in a thesis by Benforado and an article by Yarrington. The latter focusses closely on all aspects of the making of Damer’s reputation and on the ways in which her gender, privileged background and semi-professional sculptural practice were negotiated in contemporary and near-contemporary biographies.
MGS
Literary References: HWC, vol 12, passim; Farington, vols 1-9, passim; Cunningham 1829-33, 3, 247-273; Gould 1834, 132; Noble 1908; Anecdotes 1937, 46, 49, 142, 172, 236-38; Gunnis 1968, 120-121; Neoclassicism 1972, 229-230; Pyke 1973, 36; Benforado 1986; Yarrington 1988, 92-4; Whinney 1988, 319; Yarrington 1997, 32-44; Dawson 1999, 30-2; Pettit and Spedding 2002, 2, 5; McLintock 2010, 18-28; Yarrington 2013, 81-99; Snodin 2014
Archival References: GPC
Additional Archival References: Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington; Brynmor Jones Library, Hull University; BL MS 37727 ff143-275; Nat Library of Scotland, MS Coll, MS 629 ff1-52; Correspondence with Mary Berry, BL Add MS 37727, ff143-275
Will: PROB 11/1741
Auction Catalogues: Damer 1828
Representations of the Sculptor: Angelica Kauffman, 1766, private coll (frontispiece to Noble 1908); Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1773, canvas, NPG (594) and YCBA (repr Yarrington 1997, 36); Giuseppe Ceracchi, Anne Seymour Damer as the Muse of Sculpture, c1777, marble, BM; Richard Cosway, 1785, watercolour on ivory, NPG (5236), engraved by W C Edwards for Cunningham 1829-33, 3, 247; H. Carr watercolour, 1788 SNPG; William Holland, The Damerian Apollo (satirical print), 1789, BM; anon, Came House (repr Noble 1908, opp 48); Richard Cosway, canvas, nd (repr Noble 1908, opp 98)