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Jonathan David Gross. The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Pp. 410. $85.
Anne Seymour Darner was England's groundbreaking first female sculptor. Her studio drew a public audience, and she was a cultural ambassador throughout the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars as well as a satirized bluestocking, inheritor of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill estate, a novelist, and an actress. Giuseppe Ceracchi's statue of Damer as the muse of sculpture stood in the entrance to the British Museum for many years (39), and her "colorful life and penchant for cross-dressing" (xv) made her a model for literary characters in works by Hannah Cowley, Susan Ferrier, James Plumptre, and the Duchess of Devonshire. Despite her prominent role in Regency society, politics, and aesthetics, however, Damer has remained largely ignored since Percy Noble's 1908 biography, Anne Seymour Damer: A Woman of Art and Fashion, 1748-1828. Jonathan David Gross's The Lfe of Anne Darner: Portrait of a Regency Artist ends this long absence of attention. Drawing upon previously unpublished letters and photographs of her works, Gross investigates Damer's remarkable life and career as vital to a comprehensive understanding of Regency culture.
Referring to her as "Anne" throughout the biography, Gross catalogues monumental moments in Damer's life-her husband's death; theatricals at Richmond House; her completion of a bust of Nelson; her personal presentation of a bust of Charles James Fox to Napoleon Bonaparte; the writing of her novel, Belmour, and her intimacy with Mary Berry-along with details of her everyday life. Her habit of reading outdoors during a gnat infestation in her home (270), for example, and her care and grief as she nursed her dying mother, Lady Ailesbury (306-9) are made coherent with her career milestones. Gross's attention to detail makes Damer and her world present and accessible.
The biography is aptly framed by David Gardner's 1775 painting, "Witches 'Round the Cauldron," depicting Damer, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Lady Melbourne as Macbeth's weird sisters. The inclusion of that image on the book's cover foregrounds Gross's richly detailed close readings of Damer's own works and various artistic representations of her. Gross's attention to the Gardner portrait in particular and his closing remarks on her having "carved out an identity for...