Mystery at the Museum – Is Elizabeth’s Portrait Really Her?
(LEFT: Portrait of “Anna Maria Brudenell” auctioned by O’Gallerie in 2013. RIGHT: Portrait of “Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson” acquired by Graeme Park in 1986.)
On a recent Google image search for Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, I encountered a photograph of the above left painting which is remarkably similar to the portrait of her that hangs in the Keith House. It linked back to a a portrait sold by O’Gallerie of Portland, Oregon in 2013. The interesting thing is that the portrait sold by O’Gallerie was identified on the back as “Anna Maria Brudenell, Countess of Shrewsbury, died 1702.” Anna Maria, identified by her maiden name on the back of the painting, was married to Francis Talbot, 11th Earl of Shrewsbury. She was born in 1642, 95 years before Elizabeth, so if she was 28 when this portrait was painted, that would date it to around 1670.
A 28-year-old Elizabeth Graeme traveled to England in 1765, and according to the conservation notes in our files, the back of her portrait is labeled “Copied for Dr. T. Graeme at the Seven Star’s in Picadilly [sic].” It is speculated that the reference is to the Seven Stars Inn, a pub in London dating back to the early 1600s. It was purchased by an antique dealer in Bath from a sale at Cliveden, the Astor family’s estate in England, sometime in 1971 or earlier. In 1971 the painting was purchased from this antique dealer by an American who brought it back to Pennsylvania. In 1986 he donated half the value of the painting, and the Friends of Graeme Park and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania split the cost of the remaining half in order to accession it into the PHMC’s permanent collection and display it in the Keith House at Graeme Park.
In corresponding with the curator at Cliveden, which is owned by the National Trust of the UK, there is no record of the sale, but he did share that William Waldorf Astor, who purchased Cliveden in 1893, was very interested in collecting things related to the history of the property. Anna Maria Talbot was the mistress of the Duke of Buckingham, who built the original mansion on the property, so he might have believed the portrait was of her when he acquired it.
So are the portraits of Anna Maria Talbot, or are they of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson? There are more questions than answers. Who labeled each of the portraits and when did they label them? Was our portrait labeled at the time of Astor’s acquisition as being copied for Dr. T. Graeme? Elizabeth was still living with her parents when she traveled to England in 1765 (her mother passed away while she was there), so if she had a portrait painted of herself, why would she need to have a copy of it made to send to her father? Who was the original made for and why wouldn’t she have just taken that one home to present to Dr. Graeme? Was the portrait of Anna Maria hanging in the pub and she asked the artist to make a painting of her “in that style” and he took it a little too literally? And would it still have been labeled as a copy if it was supposed to be her likeness? It doesn’t seem likely she would have had a copy made of a painting of an unknown woman. Did she think it looked enough like her (perhaps an ancestor — her mother and grandmother were English) to pass and would save her the time (or cost?) of sitting for her own portrait to be painted? Did the family have some connection to Anna Maria that a likeness of her would have been a welcome gift? Was it even Elizabeth who had the portrait copied? These are questions we cannot answer at this point.
We can look at other likenesses of the two women. While there are some similarities between the O’Gallerie portrait of Anna Maria and other contemporary portraits of her, particularly in the hooded, almond shaped eyes, eyebrows, and double chin, there are also many differences such as the cleft chin in one likeness, fuller lips and cheeks, more voluptuous figure, and hairstyle. The only other likenesses we have of Elizabeth are the engravings, whose origins and age we do not know and which may have been created in the 19th century based on the portrait identified as her.
The discovery of the O’Gallerie portrait does allow us to solve one mystery, however. A few years back, one of our eagle-eyed volunteers spotted the below portrait in the tv series Rutherford Falls. We knew it looked like our portrait of Elizabeth, but a little bit “off” in coloring and we couldn’t imagine how they had come to use it in the show (which was about a small town with a local history museum). Now we know!
