Caption

Described as "really deserving everybody's love", Dorothy was the first wife of Sir William Brownlow, 4th Bt, brother of the builder of Belton and its inheritor. Their eldest son was Viscount Tyrconnel. Her - more notorious - sister was the unfortunate Anne, Countess of Macclesfield, unjustly pilloried by the bohemian poet Richard Savage and his biographer Samuel Johnson as the mother who had borne him out of wedlock and abandoned him.

Summary

Oil painting on canvas, Dorothy Mason, Lady Brownlow (1665-1699/1700) by Sir Godfrey Kneller (Lübeck 1646/9 - London 1723), inscribed in gold bottom right: LADY BROWNLOWE WIFE TO SR WM/& MOTHER TO LORD TYRCONNEL./G KNELLER FECT. A full-length portrait of a young woman, facing, her head turned to the left, gazing to the left, her left foot raised on a step on which stands a tall urn containing an orange tree, her left hand rests on the urn and her right hand hold the folds of her blue cloak above her kneel, she has long dark brown hair with a tress falling on her left shoulder, she wears a red dress open at the breast to reveal a white chemise, her blue silk cloak is fastened on the shoulder and falls over her left knee and lies in folds on the ground to the left. She is standing on a terrace with an opening to the left revealing a formal garden with a fountain, poplar trees and a cloudy sky. Dorothy Mason was born in May 1664, at Sutton, Surrey, the daughter of Sir Richard Mason (c.1633-1685) and Anne Margaret Long (c.1637-1711). She married Sir William Brownlow 4th Bt.(1665-1702) son of Sir Richard Brownlow 2nd Bt (1628-1668) and Elizabeth Freke (1634-1684). Described as 'really deserving everybody's love'.Her children were: 1.Anne Brownlow (1694-17790) married Sir Richard Cust 2.Richard Brownlow (1689-1690) 3.John Brownlow, 1st and last Viscount Tyrconnel (1690-1754) 4.Dorothy Brownlow (b.1695) She died before May 1700. Her will was probated in May 1700. After her premature death, her sorrowing husband gave her an immense funeral procession and commemorated her with a monument by William Stanton (1639-1705) in St Nicholas Church, Sutton, in Surrey. dismissed by William Hone as 'a sort of hasty pudding, garnished with slices of gingerbread'. The monument is now completely concealed by the church organ.The design for the monument is in the collection of the V&A Museum.

Full description

It is a lack that in this Ahnengalerie we do not have a Lely; but there is not an outstanding whole-length by him on view in any National Trust house - splendid though the ex-Wharton Garter Knights with Mary of Modena at Kedleston are as a set , not one of them is a prime or wholly autograph original. It is, in any case, arguable that Lely was rarely at his best in full-length; the 50 x 40 in. three-quarter-length, which he did as much as anyone to establish as one of the standard canvas sizes for English portraits, is the perfect format for his seated shepherdesses and languid beauties. Kneller, by contrast, excels on this scale, as his set of Hampton Court 'Beauties' amply demonstrates. It is on this canvas that he is able to deploy - as he otherwise so rarely had the opportunity to - the lessons of his long training and travel on the Continent, to manipulate the human form and swathes of drapery in space, with ancillary contributions from architecture, landscape, steps, and urns; thus ennobling even the least remarkable of sitters. Dorothy Mason, Lady Brownlow was just such a sitter. The eldest or - more probably - the youngest (according to whether one believes Dugdale and her tomb, or the implications of her sister's earlier marriage and marriage settlement) of the two daughters of Sir Richard Mason, of Bishop's Castle, MP (c.1619-1684/5), Royal Avenor, and then Clerk Comptroller of the Board of Green Cloth (whose portrait by Huysmans is also at Belton), she was married to William Brownlow (1665-1700/01) in the summer of 1688. Then and afterwards they seem chiefly to have resided at the house in Arlington Street that they had bought from Lady Frescheville, since even after William succeeded as the 4th Baronet, of Humby, on the suicide of his elder brother John in 1697, the latter's widow, Alice, held Belton until her death in 1721. Otherwise they often lodged with her mother at Worcester Park, near Sutton, Surrey, and it was from Arlington Street to St. Nicholas, Sutton that wound its way the immense funeral procession - which somehow seems consonant with the ambitions of this portrait - organised by her husband It was also for Sutton Church that he got William Stanton to erect a monument to her, now disgracefully concealed by the organ, which a tourist from Camberwell in 1831 described as "a dish of hasty pudding garnished with slices of gilt gingerbread" . The drawing for this is in the Victoria and Albert Museum . All that we know of Dorothy Mason herself is that she was amiable - described as "really deserving everbody's love". It is her sister Anne (commemorated at Belton in an oil-painting by Wissing and a plumbago drawing by Forster) who is of great - if unjustified - notoriety. For she is the woman who was excoriated, first by the bohemian poet, Richard Savage, and then by his biographer, Samuel Johnson, as the mother whose bastard son the former was, who deserted him, and who tried to ensure that his execution for murder was carried out. The facts were very different; she was herself a wronged and unhappy woman . Married in 1683, when she was in her teens, to the wild and violent Whig firebrand, Charles Gerard, Viscount Brandon (who succeeded in 1694 as 2nd Earl of Macclesfield), she escaped his rages within a few weeks, to live with her sister, Lady Brownlow, for the next twelve years. Desperate for affection, she fell in love with another rake, Richard Savage, 4th Earl Rivers, to whom she bore two children, a girl and a boy, both of whom died as babies, in quick succession and great secrecy. Lord Macclesfield got wind of this, but never proof of it, despite which he was able to obtain a divorce in 1698, though his reputation was such that he was forced to return his wife's personal fortune. In 1700 Anne Mason was married again, to the theatrically-connected Colonel Henry Brett, to whom she bore a daughter to whom she was devoted. Colonel Brett's sister in turn became the second wife of the short-lived Sir William Brownlow in 1700. After Colonel Brett's sudden death in 1724, Mrs. Brett became a virtual recluse - not even emerging from her retirement to refute Savage's calumnies, or to sue him or Samuel Johnson for libel. One reason for this may have been that her daughter had acquired notoriety in her own right, culminating in her becoming the mistress of George I in his 65th year. Her mother did not die until 1753, over half-a-century after the sister of whom she was so fond, and who is depicted here. It cannot have lessened her bitterness that for a period Richard Savage was taken up by the sitter's son, Viscount Tyrconnel, who promoted his claim to be Poet Laureate, and even had him to live at his house in Arlington Street - though his hospitality was abused to such a degree that he threw the poet out and broke with him. Kneller painted a pendant to this portrait, of Sir William Brownlow, which is also at Belton, as are another pair of whole-lengths of them both, by Riley & Closterman. A further portrait of Lady Brownlow alone, signed and dated 1687 by Wissing and Van der Vaart, and another by Dahl, are at Belton; whilst the full-length of her by Wissing that was scraped in mezzotint by J. Smith is at Grimshorpe - no doubt by descent from her niece Jane, Lady Willoughby. (i) Cf. Oliver Millar, 'Philip, Lord Wharton, and his collection of portraits, The Burlington Magazine, August 1994, pp.517-30, esp. pp.529-30. (ii) Visitation of Shropshire, 1668, f.101. (iii) Cf. for description of this, as well as for other details about Lady Brownlow, Lady Elizabeth Cust, Records of the Cust family: Series II: The Brownlows of Belton, 1909, pp.171-78, esp. pp.173-4). (iv) D.A., in William Hone, The Year Book, 1832, col.554. (v) Inv.no. D.1104-1898; cf. John Physick, Designs for English Sculpture 1680-1860, 1969, no.27, pp. 52-3. (vi) See, most recently, Richard Holmes, Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage, 1993, esp. Ch.4. (adapted from author's version/pre-publication, Alastair Laing, In Trust for the Nation, exh. cat., 1995)