Frances Molesworth, later Marchioness Camden

Maker Joshua Reynolds (British, 1723-1792)

SitterSitter: Frances Molesworth, later Marchioness Camden (British, 1760 - 1829)

Collections

ClassificationsPAINTINGS

Date1777

Mediumoil on canvas

Dimensionscanvas: 55 3/4 × 45 in. (141.6 × 114.3 cm.) frame: 72 × 60 1/2 × 5 1/2 in. (182.9 × 153.7 × 14 cm.)

DescriptionCrouched on the ground, center, full-length, the body turned slightly right, the head full-face. Her left arm on a plinth covered with a gold drapery, her right in her lap, the hand holding her dress. Her mouse-brown hair is dressed high, with rose-colored ribbon, which also swathes the curl on her right shoulder. Dark-gray eyes, full lips, bright complexion. Her low white dress epaulettes. In the background, left and right, silver birches in autumn foliage; center, blue cloudy sky; right a pillar or red masonry

Credit LineThe Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

Label TextFrances Molesworth was born around 1760, the only child of Anne (Smyth) and William Molesworth, of Wembury, Devonshire. Following the early deaths of her father (1762) and mother (1767), she was raised by her mother's only surviving sibling, Lady Margaret Bingham (d.1814), and her husband, Sir Charles Bingham (1735-1799), created first Baron Lucan in 1776. Her beauty, wealth, and accomplishments outshone that of the Lucans' three daughters--the eldest of whom, Lavinia, was two years younger than she (see cat.nos. 81, 148). Eager to see their niece settled, the Lucans announced on January 8, 1778 that she would wed William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne (1737-1805), a prominent politician who became prime minister in 1782. Mary Delany believed the seventeen-year-old heiress could do better if only she would assert herself, for she had "a fortune of £40,000, and a right to twice as much, but she is pretty, quiet, and young, and I believe will be obedient to his nod." By January 24, however, Frances had broken off the engagement. One newspaper claimed that Lord Shelburne's subscription of £100 toward the support of American prisoners convinced her that he would squander her fortune. It was more widely reported, however, that Lord and Lady Lucan had imposed on their unwilling niece, who at the eleventh hour tearfully begged her aunt to "break off the detested match." Encountering Frances Molesworth in Florence in October 1778, Sir Horace Mann observed, "I cannot blame [her] for refusing the Lord who wished to marry her. With her figure and fortune she won't want younger admirers to choose from." Indeed, she soon refused a second proposal from a widower who "made a horrid husband to his first wife," and a third in December 1779 from George Augustus North (later 3rd Earl of Guilford), who "had not sixpence in the world, from his own extravagance." Finally, at the age of twenty-five, she met John Jeffreys Pratt, Viscount Bayham (1759-1840), eldest son of the first Earl Camden and a recent graduate of Cambridge who was just a year older than she. Within three weeks of their meeting, they were engaged, and despite the bride's reputation as a jilt, the marriage took place on December 31, 1785 at Lord Lucan's house in Charles Street, Berkeley Square. Gossips charged Lucan with cheating Frances of much of her inheritance, but according to Horace Walpole, it was actually her cousin Sir William Molesworth who deprived her of all but £30,000, which Lucan "nursed...up to £45,000." John Jeffreys Pratt had already embarked on a distinguished political career, serving as Member of Parliament for Bath from 1780-94 and Lord of the Admiralty from 1782-89. After succeeding his father as 2nd Earl Camden in 1794, he served as Lieutenant of Ireland from 1795-98 and was created Marquess Camden in 1812. While raising three daughters and a son, Lady Camden sustained a prominent role in court circles. When her uncle was created Earl of Lucan in 1795, Walpole credited her influence, observing dryly, "No wonder. Lady Camden, the Vice-Queen, is, as you know, Lady Lucan's niece." Renowned in youth for her beauty, Lady Camden deteriorated rapidly in middle age; one stunned acquaintance remarked in 1805: "How altered she is, from a very pretty, round-faced girl, which I remember her, with an elegant little figure, and beautiful teeth, she is now a little hump-back wizened woman, with black teeth, and yet she is not much above forty." Lady Camden died on July 7, 1829.

Young, rich, and beautiful, Frances Molesworth sat for this portrait in increasing misery, waiting to marry a man she did not love. Her aunt and uncle had selected a singularly uninspiring bridegroom for a teenage girl: their friend and contemporary Lord Shelburne was a forty-year-old widower with children from his first marriage and a reputation for treacly insincerity (see Biographical Notes above). Initially viewing him "in the light of a guardian," Frances docilely went along with preparations for the wedding, which included nineteen sessions in Reynolds's studio beginning in June 1777. Weddings were customary occasions for portraiture in eighteenth-century Britain, and although Reynolds's painting does not explicitly represent Frances Molesworth as a bride, it was certainly commissioned to commemorate her transition from girlhood to womanhood, through marriage. Both the portrait sittings and the marriage negotiations proved unusually protracted, but the former were completed a few weeks prior to the official announcement of Frances Molesworth's engagement on January 8, 1778. By then, she had developed "an antipathy" for her fiancé and the marriage was called off within three weeks. Perhaps it was not only Lord Shelburne she was rejecting, but marriage itself, for at least two more rejected suitors and eight years intervened before she ultimately wed.
These circumstances may account for some of the unusual features of the portrait. It has been observed that Reynolds rarely represented adult women seated directly on the bare ground, but quite frequently adopted the pose for children who were not subject to the same rules of decorum as adults. Indeed, Frances Molesworth's painting coincides with an efflorescence of portraits and fancy pictures in which Reynolds emphasized the artless innocence of little girls by representing them in close proximity to nature, seated on the ground before a landscape backdrop. Possibly Reynolds was struck by Molesworth's youth, emphasized by her timidity, and adopted the pose in order to dramatize those qualities. The fact that several months earlier he had used the same pose in his portrait of Mary, Lady Kent (1751-1817), a woman in her mid-twenties who began sitting to him shortly after her marriage, indicates that the posture could also be adapted to fully mature women, presumably with the intention of associating them with notions of childlike purity and unaffected "naturalness."
The Molesworth and Kent portraits derive from a slightly earlier Reynolds painting, representing Mary Horneck (c.1752-1840) and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1775, when the sitter was about twenty-three. Horneck and her family were old Devonshire friends of Reynolds and he occasionally painted them for his own pleasure. In 1769 his friend Oliver Goldsmith dubbed Horneck "the Jessamy Bride" --a nickname whose precise meaning is obscure, but which evidently contained a note of irony, as the girl was only fifteen years old at the time and would not marry for another decade. Jessamy, a corruption of the word jasmine, was used to describe perfumes and cosmetics, as well as the sort of people who wore them. Perhaps to convey his young friend's "jessamy" quality, Reynolds couched her portrait in luxurious Eastern exoticism. She wears the sort of fanciful pseudo-Turkish costume that women frequently donned for masquerades, and which painters translated into contemporary portraits. The Magazine à la Mode reported in 1777, "The dresses of our ladies have inclined very much to the Persian and Turkish, since the taste for masquerades as a fashion amusement has prevailed."
Reynolds accentuated the exoticism of Horneck's appearance by seating her directly on the ground in a pose that mimics the low, cross-legged position that European travelers found remarkable in Turkish women. A critic described the painting in 1775 as "Mary Horneck sitting as if in a Turkish mosque," but in truth most British viewers would probably have thought of a seraglio, owing to the fascination with harem life that dominated eighteenth-century western literature on "the Orient." Indeed, the great popularity and wide usage of mock-Turkish dress in England may stem from the "pleasurable frisson of the slightly improper" which clung to it. Citing a number of "indiscreet encounters involving characters in Turkish dress at masquerades," Aileen Ribeiro speculates that "there was very much a feeling of indecorum associated with it." Horneck's exotic dress and pose were probably intended to convey the same mild suggestion of the enticing and taboo.
The positive response to Reynolds's portrait of Mary Horneck emboldened him to repeat the provocative Eastern pose and costume in his portraits of Frances Molesworth and Mary Kent. These were commissioned works, however, and Reynolds evidently felt obliged to domesticate Turkish exoticism by replacing the turban with the high-dressed hairstyle of late 1770s Britain, and eradicating any suggestion of the seraglio by placing the women outdoors, in recognizably English landscapes. Though understated, Turkish elements are nonetheless evident in Molesworth's white cross-over gown, edged with gold braid and fringe, which she wears with a looped sash of gold silk and a long-sleeved overgown. These sartorial clues assist in Reynolds's subtle evocation of Orientalist fantasy, adding mystique to the nascent sensuality of the beautiful child-bride.
In adapting Mary Horneck's pose to Frances Molesworth's portrait, Reynolds softened the unattractive angle of the bent left arm and positioned the right arm more gracefully, borrowing the gesture from his portrait of Mary Kent. He failed, however, to improve on the formless drapery below the sitter's waist, which terminates the torso in a stumpy, mushroom shape. Reynolds was often vague about the lower limbs of his female sitters--perhaps out of a prudish sense of tact--but critics complained of the ugliness of this device, which made the figure appear "to be deprived of the lower part of her limbs." The impression may have been exaggerated by a later intervention. The nonstandard size of the canvas (less than a full-length, but more than a half-length) and the lack of cusping around the edges indicate that the canvas has been cut down from a larger format. The original appearance of the painting is suggested by a roughly contemporaneous stipple engraving by Luigi Schiavonetii (1765-1810), which shows a few more inches of landscape at the top and bottom of the canvas. These elements are already missing in John Samuel Agar's engraving of 1823, which represents the painting as we see it today, with the voluminous drapery of the skirt wedged uncomfortably within a condensed format. Reynolds evidently adopted an experimental method in carrying out the drapery. In his ledger, he noted "Miss Molesworth drapery painted with oil colour first after cera [wax] alone." Reynolds liked the rich, buttery texture that wax imparted to his paintings and he experimented freely with it. Here, as in many other cases, his experimental methods and materials have not aged well, and the drapery no longer retains its original appearance.
Reynolds completed a second portrait of the present sitter in 1787, by which date she had become Viscountess Bayham. That painting represents her as a sophisticated woman of twenty-seven, dressed for outdoors. Her conspicuously chic attire features an oversized hat, cocked at a jaunty angle and trimmed with ostrich plumes, from beneath which she gazes with cool confidence. Reynolds's very different conceptions of the same sitter at different stages of her life is suggestive. In both paintings, he exploits stereotypes of feminine mystique in a manner appropriate and flattering to her personal situation at the time. In the later painting, we see the self-assured glamour of the fashionable society woman. In the earlier, the graceful modesty of the young virgin, whose charms are both advertised and made to seem tantalizingly unattainable through coded references to the oriental harem. Conceived as a marriage portrait, the Huntington painting effectively underscores the purity that men desired in their brides, offering a further enticement to the splendid fortune that made Frances Molesworth such a desirable catch.

Status

On view

Object number24.32