Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd

  • White marble
  • 21 × inches · 535 × mm
  • 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

Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri