Inscribe on the verso of the socle: ‘ANNE SEYMOUR DAMER FECIT’
and on the verso of the helmet: ‘ANNA ΔAMEP ΛONA ININA EΠOIEI’
Carved in 1785
Engraved:
By John Jones, ‘Mercury form the original bust of the Honble Penisten Lambe executed in Marble by the Honble Anne Damer’, stipple engraving, published by James Roberts, June 26, 1790.’
Collections
Elizabeth Lamb, Lady Melbourne (1751-1818);
By descent in the family;
Sotheby's, London, July 9, 2008, lot 166;
Private collection, UK to 2024
Exhibitions
London, Royal Academy, 1787, cat. no. 625 ‘Portrait of a boy in the character of Mercury, a head in marble’.
Literature
Percy Noble, Anne Seymour Damer: A Woman of Art and Fashion 1748-1828, London, 1908, p.82;
Ed. W. S. Lewis, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, New Haven and London, 1944, vol.XII, p.272 (‘Bust… Large as life – of Lady Melbourne’s son as infant Mercury…in marble 1785’);
Ingrid Roscoe, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851, New Haven and London, 2009, p.336;
Jonathan David Gross, The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist, Maryland, 2014, pp.174, 185 and 202