Benjamin West, P.R.A.

Probably by descent from the sitter to her great-grandson, Henry Frederick Compton Cavendish (1854-1928), until at least 1905;

Anonymous sale ("Different Properties"), London, Christie's, 26 May 1933, lot 18;

Where acquired by "Edwards," for £9.9;

Anonymous sale ("Property of a London Gentleman"), New York, American Art Association, 18 May 1934, lot 137;

Chester Dale (1883-1962), New York;

By whom bequeathed to the Minneapolis Institute of Art;

By whom sold to Julius Weitzner, New York and London, 1958;

From whom acquired by John and Johanna Bass, New York;

By whom bequeathed to the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, in 1963 (inv. no. 63.32).

New York, Union League Club, American Paintings from the Chester Dale Collection, 13 - 28 January 1937, no. 2;

Baltimore Museum of Art, Benjamin West: American Painter at the English Court, 4 June - 20 August 1989, no. 4 (lent by the Bass Museum of Art);

Miami, Center for the Fine Arts, British Portraits from the Collection of the Bass Museum of Art, 11 December 1993 - 6 February 1994.

Catalogue of Portraits, Miniatures etc. in the Possession of Cecil George Savile, 4th Earl of Liverpool, London 1905, p. 33, under cat. no. 2 (erroneously describing the work as a self-portrait of Lady Northampton and her daughter);

"A West Portrait of the Italian Period," in Bulletin of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts 34, no. 27 (3 November 1945), pp. 96-101;

The John and Johanna Bass Collection at Miami Beach, Florida, Miami 1973, p. 14, cat. no. 33;

R.C. Alberts, Benjamin West: A Biography, Boston 1978, p. 50;

A. Staley, in Benjamin West: American Painter at the English Court, exhibition catalogue, Baltimore 1989, p. 17, cat. no. 4, reproduced;

H. von Erffa and A. Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West, New Haven and London 1986, pp. 14, 17, 19, 23, 487, 537-541, cat. no. 676, reproduced p. 18;

K. Garlick and M. Russell, in Paintings and Textiles of the Bass Museum of Art: Selections from the Collection, M. Russell (ed.), Miami 1990, p. 94, reproduced.

Painted in Venice in 1769, as indicated by the inscription at lower left, this intimate portrait dates to Benjamin West’s formative Italian sojourn. Few works from this period survive—only four portraits from his time in Italy are known today—making the present painting an especially rare testament to his engagement with the Renaissance artists he had recently encountered. Here, West consciously adopts the visual language of devotional painting, drawing inspiration from Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia and Madonna del Granduca (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, inv. 1912, nos. 151, 178), as well as Correggio’s Madonna and Child with Saint Jerome (Parma, Galleria Nazionale). The intimate pose, gentle inclination of their heads, and harmonious color palette reflect West’s ambition to translate Renaissance ideals of grace and tenderness into a contemporary portrait “in the character of a Madonna,” a mode that, according to a contemporary report, earned him considerable acclaim in Venice.¹

The sitters are Lady Anne Somerset, daughter of the fourth Duke of Beaufort, and her young daughter, Lady Elizabeth Compton. Lady Anne had married Charles, 7th Earl of Northampton, in 1759; he was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Venice in August 1762, with the family arriving later that year, shortly before West himself. Elizabeth, shown here at approximately two years of age, would be orphaned within a year—her mother died in Italy in May 1763, and her father in France in 1764—lending the painting a poignant retrospective resonance.²

¹ Robert Rutherford to Joseph Shippen, 22 April 1873, quoted in Effra and Staley 1986, p. 541.

² Lady Elizabeth later married Lord George Augustus Henry Cavendish, later 1st Earl of Burlington, in 1782, the year in which she was famously painted by Joshua Reynolds.