Richard Cosway, Portrait of Honora Margaretta Lambart, the Countess of Cavan, ca. 1789

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Richard Cosway, Portrait of Honora Margaretta Lambart, the Countess of Cavan, ca. 1789,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 2, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1325.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “Richard Cosway, Portrait of Honora Margaretta Lambart, the Countess of Cavan, ca. 1789,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 2, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1325.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Richard Cosway presents Honora Margaretta Lambart, the Countess of Cavan (1754–1813), as a beguiling beauty with piercing blue eyes.¹ Named after her paternal grandmother, Honora Hockmore of Buckland Baron, Devonshire, Lambart was the only surviving child of Sir Henry Gould the younger (1710–1794) and his wife, Elizabeth Walker (d. 1797).² She was the first wife of General Richard Ford William Lambart, 7th Earl of Cavan (1763–1837), styled Viscount Kilcoursie from 1772 to 1778; he was a British military commander throughout the Napoleonic era and beyond.³ They married on July 11, 1782, at St. Marylebone Church, London, when she was twenty eight and he was nineteen. They had four sons and three daughters who inherited their mother’s blue eyes.⁴ Upon Lambert’s death in 1813, her husband remarried, but the union resulted in no additional children.⁵

It is likely that Cosway painted Lambert by at least 1789 to serve as a keepsake when her husband went off to war.⁶ She would have been thirty-five years old. Cosway presents the countess in fancy dress with a high-necked gown that is reminiscent of the style of dress worn by many seventeenth-century women in portraits by Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640) and Sir Anthony Van Dyck (Flemish, 1599–1641), which Cosway collected.⁷ Cosway focused his effort on rendering details of her face and head, such as her loose pile of powdered curls, brilliant eyes, and the subtle blush in her cheek and lips. He quickly dashed in lines of her body in graphite, with some watercolor touches in the blue bow at her chest and in the shadows under the elevated collar of her white muslin dress. Cosway priced these drawings from the mid-1780s at thirty guineas, the same level as his miniatures on ivory.⁸ Set in a brilliant crystal surround, this portrait continues to sparkle today.

Notes

1. Lambert’s birth year was previously unknown. I am grateful to Maggie Keenan, Starr research assistant, for finding Lambert’s baptismal records and confirming a birth year of 1754. See London Church of England Parish Registers, ref. P82/Gis/A/02, London Metropolitan Archives.

2. For more on Henry Gould, see James Andrew Hamilton, “Gould, Henry (1710–1794),” Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, accessed November 20, 2022, https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Gould,Henry(1710-1794)&oldid=10735968.

3. General Lambart was head of the British Army in Egypt. It was on his suggestion that the lengthy process was started to bring the obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle, long embedded in the sand near Alexandria, to London. The arrival of the monument did not happen until fifty years after his death, but the obelisk now stands on the Victoria Embankment to commemorate the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. See Henry Manners Chichester, “Lambart, Richard Ford William,” Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, accessed November 22, 2022, https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Lambart,_Richard_Ford_William&oldid=10743978.

4. Their children were: Richard Henry Robert Gilbert Lambart, Viscount Kilcoursie (1783–1785); Honora Elizabeth Esther Lambart (1784–1856); Alicia Margaretta Hockmore Lambart (1785–1818); Sophia Augusta Lambart (1787–1798); Richard Henry Lambart, Viscount Kilcoursie, who died two days after birth (1788–1788); George Frederick Augustus Lambart, Viscount Kilcoursie (1789–1828); and Edward Henry Wentworth Villiers Lambart (b. 1791). The girls inherited their mother’s recessive gene for piercing blue eyes, as evidenced in a watercolor portrait by John Downman painted in 1788. See “John Downman (1750–1824), The Daughters of the 7th Earl of Cavan,” Philip Mould and Company website, accessed December 20, 2022, https://philipmould.com/exhibitions/22-downman-in-vogue-john-downman-1750-1824-selling-exhibition/works/artworks5520/.

5. See Chichester, “Lambart, Richard Ford.”

6. In a profile portrait of the Countess painted in 1783 by John Downman, she appears younger and with a thinner face. The watercolor was offered at Bonhams on April 8, 2010, Knightsbridge, London, lot 45. See “John Downman, ARA (British, 1750–1824), Honora Margaretta, Countess of Cavan (née Gould),” Bonhams website, accessed December 20, 2022, https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/17964/lot/45/.

7. For more on Cosway’s collection, see Stephan Lloyd, “The Cosway Inventory of 1820: Listing Unpaid Commissions and the Contents of 20 Stratford Place, Oxford Street, London,” Volume of the Walpole Society 66 (2004): 163–217. For more on the aspect of adopting seventeenth-century Van Dyck dress into eighteenth-century portraiture, see Aileen Ribeiro, “Some Evidence of the Influence of the Dress of the Seventeenth-Century on Costume in Eighteenth-Century Female Portraiture,” Burlington Magazine 119, no. 897 (December 1977): 832–40.

8. As cited in Stephen Lloyd, “Richard Cosway,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, last updated January 3, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/6383.

With Knoedler and Co., New York;

Probably purchased from Knoedler and Co., at their exhibition, An Exhibition of Miniatures by Celebrated Masters of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 1906, lot 38, as Countess of Cavan, by Mortimer Loeb Schiff (1877–1931), New York, 1906–1931 [1];

By descent to his son, John Mortimer Schiff (1904–1987), New York, 1931–1938 [2];

Sold at his sale, Fine Decorative Furniture, Important Objects of Art, Tapestry, Sculpture and Rugs, Christie, Manson, and Woods, London, June 22, 1938, lot 42, as Countess of Cavan [3];

Mrs. Marjorie Rees, by 1954;

Purchased from her sale, Catalogue of Fine Portrait Miniatures, Faberge, Watches and Objects of Vertu, Sotheby’s, London, November 11, 1954, lot 63, as Countess of Cavan, by Leggatt Brothers, London, probably on behalf of Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, 1954–1958 [4];

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

Notes

[1] The exhibition catalogue, presumably a selling exhibition, is digitized as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library digital collections, and is inscribed in hand-written black ink with the figure “800,” presumably referencing $800. See http://library.metmuseum.org/record=b1693961. It is likely that Mortimer Schiff acquired the miniature from this sale since he was living in New York at the time.

Schiff was an American banker and early Boy Scouts of America leader.

[2] According to the sales catalogue, “Being a part of the collection formed by the late Mortimer L. Schiff, Esq. Now sold by order of John Mortimer Schiff, Esq. of New York, U.S.A.”

[3] “A Miniature Portrait of the Countess of Cavan—by Richard Cosway, R.A. (1742–1821)—3 in. by 2 1/2 in. The Countess is shown as a young woman with curly hair, facing to the left, and in muslin dress. The frame containing a braided lock of light brown hair is studded with pearls. Pencil and colour.” Marjorie Rees may have purchased the portrait since it was in her possession when she sold it sixteen years later. Additional information on Mrs. Rees remains unknown, but her life dates may be ca. 1899–1955.

[4] “An Attractive Miniature of the Countess of Cavan by Richard Cosway, head and shoulders three-quarters dexter, gaze directed at spectator, as a young woman with curly hair, blue eyes and wearing a muslin dress with high collar in pencil and colour, paste bordered frame, 2 3/4 in. From the Mortimer Schiff Collection, June 22nd, 1938, lot 42.” The sale is located at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Miller Nichols Library and was likely annotated by Mr. or Mrs. Starr. “Leggatt Bros.” bought lot 63 for £54. Archival research has shown that Leggatt Brothers served as purchasing agents for the Starrs. See correspondence between Betty Hogg and Martha Jane Starr, May 15 and June 3, 1950, Nelson-Atkins curatorial files.

An Exhibition of Miniatures by Celebrated Masters of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, M. Knoedler and Co., New York, 1906, no. 38, as Countess of Cavan.

An Exhibition of Miniatures by Celebrated Masters of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, exh. cat., (New York: Goerck Art, 1906), 15, as Countess of Cavan.

Fine Decorative Furniture, Important Objects of Art, Tapestry, Sculpture and Rugs, (London: Christie, Manson, and Woods, June 22, 1938), 15, as Countess of Cavan.

Catalogue of Fine Portrait Miniatures, Faberge, Watches and Objects of Vertu (London: Sotheby’s, November 11, 1954), 11, as Countess of Cavan.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 59, p. 24, (repro.), as Countess of Cavan.