Mary ('Molly') Lepel, Lady Hervey (1700-1768)
Allan Ramsay (Edinburgh 1713 - Dover 1784)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
circa 1762
Materials
Oil on canvas (oval)
Measurements
826 x 627 mm (32 ½ x 24 ¾ in)
Place of origin
England
Order this imageCollection
Ickworth, Suffolk
NT 851760
Caption
John, Lord Hervey (1696-1743), despite his somewhat ambivalent nature (which forced Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the conclusion that there were three human species – ‘men, women and Herveys’), made a love match with the beautiful and, by all accounts, delightful Molly Lepel, one of Queen Caroline’s maids of honour. Lord Buckinghamshire later wrote that ‘no one contributed more to the cheerful elegance of her age than Molly Lepel, Lady Hervey...with nothing natural about her she pleas’s like a French flower garden, where art appears in every fancy’d Border. In her youth she affected the matters of that country and in her age acquired them. The prime version, signed and dated 1762, now at Chevening, the official residence of the Foreign Secreatry of the United Kingdom, near Sevenoaks, Kent, was painted for Lord Stanhope.
Summary
Oil painting on canvas (oval), Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey (1700-1768) by Allan Ramsay (Edinburgh 1713 - Dover 1784), circa 1762. Inscribed, upper right hand corner: Beauty and wit each claim'd th'accomplish'ed Fair, / but Heav'n to Each decreed an equal Share. An oval half-length portrait of an elderly woman, turned to the right, gazing at the spectator, wearing a pale crimson dress lined with fur, white lace cap tied with black lace ribbon under shin, white lace bodice and cuffs. She was the daughter of the naturalised Dane, Brigadier-General Nicholas Lepel, and Mary Brooke, daughter and co-heiress of John Brooke of Rendlesham. Best known as ‘Molly’ Lepel, she married in 1720 to John, Lord Hervey (1696-1743). They had eight children. Molly Lepel was one of the most admired and universally loved women of her age, a celebrated liteary hostess. Her admirers included Alexnader Pope, Voltaire, who addressed his only known lines of English verse to her, beginning: “Hervey, would you know the passion / You have kindled in my breast”), d’Alembert (who sent her his portrait: ICK/P/[?]), Lord Chesterfield (who counselled his son to adopt her counsel in Paris) wrote: “Bright Venus yet never saw bedded/So perfect a beau and a belle,/ As when Hervey the handsome was wedded/To the beautiful Molly Lepel' and Horace Walpole who dedicated his Anecdotes of Painting in England to her in 1762, and composed the epitaph for her tomb at Ickworth) as well as David Hume, Allan Ramsay and Grisell, Lady Murray. She was a good letter writer, and her letters to her children’s former tutor, the Reverend Edmund Morris, Vicar of Nursling / Nutshalling, Hampshire, of between 1742 and 1768, were published in 1821. Though Maid of Honour to the Princess of Wales from 1717 to (?), she was a lifelong Jacobite, as expressed in such things as her symbolic garden, and in the imagery of the Capodimonte scent-bottle commissioned for her by her second son when on service in the Mediterranean, that was acquired by the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2007. This is an autograph version of the original at Chevening, the official residence of the Foreign Secreatry of the United Kingdom, near Sevenoaks, Kent.
Provenance
Possibly painted for the sitter herself (but not if the inscription is contemporaneous); by descent and inheritance at Ickworth, until valued for probate on the death of the 4th Marquess of Bristol (1863-1951); accepted by HM Treasury in lieu of tax and transferred to the National Trust in 1956
Credit line
Ickworth, The Bristol Collection (National Trust)
Marks and inscriptions
'Beauty and wit each claimed ? But Heaven to each decreed an equal share'.
Makers and roles
Allan Ramsay (Edinburgh 1713 - Dover 1784), artist
References
Farrer 1908 Edmund Farrer, Portraits in Suffolk Houses (West), 1908, no. 97, p. 218 Stuart 1936 D. M. Stuart, Molly Lepell, 1936, pp. 25, 222, 285, 340 Smart 1952 Alastair Smart, The Life and Art of Allan Ramsay, London 1952, pp.121, 210 Smart 1999 Alastair Smart, Allan Ramsay: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, ed. John Ingamells, New Haven & London, 1999, p.134, cat.258a