Anne 2nd Countess of Albemarle was born Lady Anne Lennox on 24 June 1703. She was the younger daughter of Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond (1672–1723), who was himself the illegitimate son of King Charles II and Louise de Keroualle.
On 21 February 1722, she married William-Anne Keppel, 2nd Earl of Albemarle, who was a courtier, Colonel of the Coldstream Guards, Knight of the Garter and Groom of the Stole. She became a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Caroline and a favourite of George II, and in 1743 escorted their youngest daughter, Princess Louisa, to Denmark to be married. Anne’s husband, the Earl, was famously extravagant, squandering his own fortune of £90,000 as well as his wife’s dowry of £25,000. They had 15 children, but only four sons and two daughters survived childhood. Albemarle was appointed ambassador to Paris, where he died on 22 December 1754. George II awarded Lady Albemarle a pension of £1,200 a year and she lived for a further 35 years.
Lady Albemarle is approaching 60 in this portrait, and the swirling rococo design of her dress would have been slightly old-fashioned by the end of the 1750s. She holds a shuttle and is engaged in ‘knotting’ – a pastime involving making knots in thread which could then be sewn as decoration onto other items. A pair of scissors and a workbasket lie on the table beside her. Knotting required less skill than embroidery but gave the impression of a useful activity. However, not a single knot is visible in Lady Albemarle’s thread.
She was a robust woman, who managed to scare off her muggers in 1750, when nine men ambushed and robbed her in London. By 1786 she had outlived all of her children. She died in 1789 at the age of 86. Her face in Reynolds’s portrait is almost dead-white as the paint has faded. The red lake pigment has been bleached from the flesh paint by the light. Other areas, such as the edge of the chair back, have also faded.
This portrait was probably commissioned by her eldest son, George 3rd Earl of Albemarle, but the idea that Lady Albemarle should be painted by Reynolds almost certainly came from her second son, Augustus Keppel, a Commodore in the Royal Navy. Reynolds portrayed Keppel at least seven times, and his second dynamic full-length portrait of the Commodore (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) made his name as a portraitist. During Reynolds’s long friendship with Keppel, he also painted 13 portraits of other members of the family.
Lady Albemarle sat for Reynolds 11 times between 26 September 1757 and 28 June 1759 and the portrait was finished by 1760, although Reynolds was not paid for it for a further 12 years.
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