Summary

Sculpture, marble; Portrait bust of Frederick William Hervey, 5th Earl and 1st Marquess of Bristol (1769-1859); Elizabeth Upton, Lady Templetown (1747-1823); London, c. 1798-1800. The second son of the 4th Earl of Bristol, known as the Bishop-Earl, Frederick William Hervey became heir to the title after the death of his elder brother. Sober and responsible, the Fifth Earl rebuilt the wealth of the Bristol estates, completed the Rotunda at Ickworth and acquired much of the contents of the house. This portrait was made by Lord Bristol’s mother-in-law Elizabeth Upton, Lady Templetown, a talented amateur artist. She is best-known today for supplying designs to the potter Josiah Wedgwood, but she was also a competent sculptor, as may be seen in her works at Ickworth. They include this marble portrait of her son-in-law, as well as plaster portrait busts of her grandchildren Augusta and Frederick William as infants.

Full description

A marble portrait bust of Frederick William Hervey, later 5th Earl and 1st Marquess of Bristol, made by the sitter’s mother-in-law Elizabeth Upton, Lady Templetown. The sitter is depicted facing frontally and dressed in a toga, fastened at the right shoulder with a large boss-like clasp. The bust is truncated at the shoulders and cut square across the chest. Mounted on a circular marble socle with an inscription plate, left blank. Frederick William Hervey was the second son of Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol (1730-1803), known as the Earl-Bishop. Frederick William inherited the title of Earl of Bristol following the early death of his elder brother John in 1796. As a young man, he had an extremely difficult relationship with his father who, when he in 1791 virtually cut him out of his will, described him as ‘my undutiful and ungrateful son’. It may be that the Earl-Bishop regarded his son as having in various disputes taken too much the side of his mother Elizabeth, with whom he was on hardly better terms. In 1796 Frederick again gravely disappointed his father, who had taken into his head that he should marry Marianne von der Marck (1780-1814), the illegitimate daughter of Frederick William II, King of Prussia and his long-standing mistress Wilhelmine Rietz, Countess Lichtenau (1752-1820), for whom the Earl-Bishop had shortly before developed an infatuation. The hair-brained scheme was doomed, not least because the young Frederick was already in love with the Hon. Elizabeth Albana Upton, eldest daughter of the Anglo-Irish courtier and peer, Clotworthy Upton, 1st Baron Templetown (1721-1785), whom he would marry in 1798. Ironically, the Earl-Bishop first met Wilhelmine in Munich in 1795, when she was travelling south to find distraction after she had been forced by Frederick William II to break off a love affair that she had been enjoying in Berlin with none other than Elizabeth Albana Upton’s brother John, later Viscount Templetown (1771-1846). He may, like his brother Arthur Percy Upton (1777-1855), have been attending the Military School in Berlin. In April 1794, their mother Lady Templetown wrote to Wilhelmine Rietz, to thank her for the care she had taken in looking after Arthur during his stay in Berlin (Lichtenau 1809, II, pp. 197-98, no. 83). Quite unlike his father, Frederick William Hervey proved to be a very normal person, a sober and reserved individual, who took seriously his responsibilities as a landowner and as a family man. He sat as MP for Bury St Edmunds from 1796 until 1803, when he entered the House of Lords. Reformist in his instincts, in 1807 Lord Bristol voted for the abolition of slavery. Whilst MP, he served as Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, where his brother-in-law and the future Prime Minister Lord Liverpool was then Foreign Secretary. It was thanks to Lord Liverpool that the Herveys' Earldom would be raised to a Marquessate in 1826. When his father died in 1803, the ‘undutiful and ungrateful son’ received in addition to the entailed English estates only £1,000, whilst the Earl-Bishop’s huge fortune and Irish estates passed instead to a distant cousin. The new Lord Bristol worked extraordinarily hard in the next decades to restore the fortunes of his estates, so it is largely thanks to him that Ickworth was not left a shell, the Rotunda being completed in 1821. Lord Bristol also set out to furnish the house appropriately, acquiring paintings and commissioning sculpture on the Continental tour that he undertook with his family between 1817 and 1821. In 1821 in Paris he bought back John Flaxman’s Fury of Athamas (NT 852233), the masterpiece that had been commissioned by the Earl-Bishop but lost with the remainder of his collections, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic invasion of Italy. Lord Bristol also commissioned much of the furnishings of Ickworth, including much furniture from the London makers Banting, France & Co. This accomplished portrait bust catches the seriousness and strongly-developed sense of responsibility of the sitter. It is the work of Elizabeth Upton, Lady Templetown (1747-1823), who became Frederick Hervey’s mother-in-law when, in February 1798, he married her eldest daughter Elizabeth Albana Upton. Elizabeth Upton was one of a small group of well-born women living in the second half of the eighteenth century, who were able to varying degrees to make use of their considerable artistic talents, by pursuing careers as amateur artists. Others included Diana, Lady Beauclerk (1734-1808) and the Honourable Anne Seymour Damer (1748–1828). Like Diana Beauclerk, Elizabeth Upton is best known today for the designs she made from 1783 for Josiah Wedgwood and delivered in the form of cut-outs, which were then modelled up in the factory and reproduced on Wedgwood wares (Hughes 1952). Born Elizabeth Boughton into a gentry family in Herefordshire, in 1769 she married Clotworthy Upton (1721-85), a courtier who in 1776 was created Baron Templetown of Templetown, Co. Antrim. Some of the couple’s wealth may have derived from slavery; Lord Templetown owned estates and enslaved people on Grenada which, on his death in 1785, he bequeathed in trust for his wife for life. However his wife does not seem to have been very well-off; when in the mid-1790s her future father-in-law the Earl-Bishop was trying in vain to persuade his son to marry the Countess of Lichtenau’s daughter instead of the younger Elizabeth Upton, he repeatedly described Elizabeth as having no fortune or settlement (Fothergill 1974, pp. 194-96). A miniature portrait of Lady Templetown by Anne Mee (c.1760-1851) at Ickworth, painted c. 1795-1800 (NT 851902), shows her as a younger woman. Another portrait by John Downman (1750-1824), painted c. 1790, is known from versions in the Victoria & Albert Museum (Wedgwood collection, Inv. WE.7906-2014) and at Ickworth (NT 851999). The only sculptures by Elizabeth Upton currently identified are those at Ickworth, a significant group. However, sculpting seems to have been an important artistic activity for her from early in her life. In 1773 she travelled to Italy with her husband in 1773, remaining until 1775. The sculptor Richard Hayward recorded the couple as being in Rome in 1774, Hayward noting that ‘Mrs Upton models in Clay and wax’ (Stainton 1983, p. 15). The Uptons must have come to know Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78), who dedicated a plate in his Vasi, candelabri, cippi, sarcofagi, tripodi, lucerne ed ornamenti antichi, writing fulsomely ‘To Mrs Eliza Upton, English Lady and most learned in every conceivable field of the liberal arts’: (‘Alla Signora Eliza Upton Dama Inglese Intendentissima in ogni sorta di Arti LIberali’). Accompanied by her three daughters, Lady Templetown returned to Italy as a widow late in 1792, spending the next three years in the country (Ingamells 1997, pp. 932-33). She was in Rome in December 1792, where she was said to have much admired works by John Flaxman, and by March 1793 was in Naples, where she would stay for two years, an active member of the resident British community. In early May 1795 the family left for Venice and by June were in Vienna, where they were joined by Lady Templetown’s eldest son John. It is not known whether Frederick Hervey first met Elizabeth Albana Upton on the Continent or at home in Britain. Lady Templetown must have been back in Britain by the later 1790s, since in 1798 the composer William Carnaby (1772-1839) dedicated to her a set of six songs. The portrait bust of Elizabeth Upton’s new son-in-law was most probably made in the months after his marriage to Elizabeth Albana Upton, which took place in February 1798. The only known work in marble attributed to Lady Templetown's hand, it lacks the vitality of the work of her best contemporaries such as Joseph Nollekens, whilst the bust is slightly awkwardly closed at the bottom. But overall it is a highly competent piece of carving, suggesting that Lady Templetown must have made more sculptures in marble that are now lost or unidentified. There is a second version in plaster at Ickworth (NT 852237). Also at Ickworth is a closely-related bust by Lady Templetown of Charles Rose Ellis, 1st Baron Seaford (1771-1845; NT 852241), probably made around the same time, as well as a group of portrait busts in plaster of two of Lady Templetown’s grandchildren, the two eldest children of Frederick Hervey and Elizabeth Upton, Lady Augusta Hervey (NT 852216) and Frederick William Hervey, later 2nd Marquess of Bristol (NT 852217.1 and 852217.2). Already in 1794 Lady Templetown was seeking remedies for her failing eyesight, so it may be that she was physically unable to practise her art in the latter decades of her life. The designs that she made for Wedgwood were in cut paper and it may be that her eyesight prevented her from working with scissors, and that she turned once again to sculpture instead. The series of portrait sculptures at Ickworth is quite likely to be among the last works of art that she made. Lady Templetown died at the end of September 1823 in London, ‘At her house in Portland-place, after a long illness’ (The Times, 1 October 1823, p. 3). Jeremy Warren July 2025