Clouds whirl across the night sky, only a sliver of moon visible. In these woods, three witches are gathered around a cauldron. An orange cat and a ram cavort beside them, and a ghoulish face emerges from the darkness. But the witches themselves are anything but frightening. No crones with warts and knobby fingers, these ladies are the epitome of elegance, wearing diaphanous gowns and stupendous hats that cascade with long veils. Youthful, with porcelain skin and rosy cheeks, they strike refined poses. One witch on the right, wearing a pointy black hat, looks out from the artwork toward the viewer, aware she is being watched.
The Three Witches from Macbeth (1775), by the British portraitist Daniel Gardner, is now in the collection of London’s National Portrait Gallery. Every year, as Halloween approaches, the museum tends to highlight the spooky but spectacular gouache-and-chalk painting.
Gardner was a well-known society portraitist and a student of the fashionable painter George Romney, from whom, he famously claimed, he learned little. His witches aren’t fantastical: His models were three of the most influential women in Georgian England. This triple portrait captures Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne (left); Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (center); and the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer (right) decked out as the three witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the play, the trio prophesy Macbeth’s rise to the kingship and ultimately lead him to his demise. Society women were sometimes portrayed as classical or pastoral figures, but depicting three of them as characters in a theatrical scene was unusual. The painting is a quizzical outlier in Gardner’s oeuvre—the only time he depicted his sitters in costume—yet it reflects a larger fascination with gothic and supernatural themes that took place in Georgian England.
The late 1700s saw a widespread fascination with Macbeth
In the mid-to-late 1700s, a Macbeth mania swept through English public culture. For well over a century, the play had been out of style. English theaters had been shuttered from 1642 to 1660 by order of the Puritan government. For close to 100 years after they reopened, Macbeth was performed only rarely. That changed in 1744, when the actor and writer David Garrick debuted a new production of Macbeth that returned more faithfully to Shakespeare’s text, bringing the play back into the limelight. The three witches became a popular motif in art and poetry, with artists including Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Romney all painting or drawing their own versions of Macbeth’s three witches.
The public fascination with Macbeth and its famous king-killing may have been stirred, in part, by the discord in nearby France, which crescendoed from the protests and riots of the 1760s and ’70s to the bloody tumult of the revolution itself in the final years of the decade. At the same time England was under the rule of King George III, the so-called “mad king,” who was known for mental health episodes that might have seemed not dissimilar to Macbeth’s outbursts. Amid heavy censorship of the era, Shakespeare’s play offered an outlet for contemporary anxieties.
The portrait celebrates three patrons of the arts
Lady Melbourne, the Duchess of Devonshire, and Anne Seymour Damer were high-powered friends and well-known supporters of the theater. All three women took part in amateur productions at the private theater at Althorp, the Duchess of Devonshire’s family estate. Lady Melbourne is thought to have commissioned the portrait from Gardner, and it descended through her family. Scholars believe either she or Damer may have suggested the composition.
A plaster portrait bust of Lord Nelson after Anne Seymour Damer, ca. 1802
A plaster portrait bust of Lord Nelson after Anne Seymour Damer
Wick Antiques Ltd
Damer was also a well-known sculptor of the era. Encouraged by her guardian Horace Walpole, she studied different types of art with a number of prominent teachers of the era, including modeling with Giuseppe Ceracchi, marble carving with John Bacon, and anatomy with William Cumberland Cruikshank. She worked chiefly in the Neoclassical style, making busts that moved from early wax pieces to technically complex work in terra-cotta, bronze, and marble. Her subjects were largely her society friends, like politician Charles James Fox and, later, British naval admiral Horatio Nelson. She also portrayed the actresses Sarah Siddons (who earned fame for her turn as Lady Macbeth in the 1780s) and Elizabeth Farren (a popular comic performer) as Muses. Her art often referenced the world of theater. For instance, she made a statue of Apollo for the façade of Drury Lane Theatre and a bas-relief for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery.
Gardner’s portrait was also one of political power
By the time of this portrait, all three women held prominent positions in British society and shared a passion for Whig politics. Lady Melbourne had been friends with Damer since the early 1770s, while her friendship with the Duchess of Devonshire was newer. The portrait may in part reflect Lady Melbourne’s wish to publicize that new intimacy with the Duchess, who would go on to host England’s most influential political salon from 1776. The National Portrait Gallery describes Gardner’s choice of the cauldron scene to represent their “shadowy political machinations” as leading members of the Devonshire House circle. The witches in the play, after all, famously urge Macbeth toward power.
The painting is not known to have been exhibited in its time, but contemporaries clearly knew of it. Lady Mary Coke wrote in her 1775 journal of “the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Melburn, and Mrs Damer all being drawn in one picture in the Characters of the three Witches in Macbeth…They have chosen that Scene where they compose their Cauldron, but instead of ‘finger of Birth-strangled babe, etc’ their Cauldron is composed of roses and carnations and I daresay they think their charmes more irresistible than all the magick of the Witches.”
The label of “witch” has historically been used to discredit women whose power made others uneasy. By casting themselves in the role, with roses in place of grisly ingredients, these three society women seem to claim power for themselves, treating the idea of dangerous female influence as a compliment rather than an insult.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/cW2uomM
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