Grace Dalrymple Elliott
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88)
Grace Dalrymple Elliott, 1778
Oil on canvas
92 1/4 × 60 1/2 in. (234.3 × 153.7 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Bequest of William K. Vanderbilt, 1920
Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art/ArtResource
Raised in a convent in France after her parents' separation, Grace Dalrymple Elliott (ca. 1754–1823) married Dr. John Elliot at age seventeen but soon earned a reputation for having scandalous affairs with prominent men. Her highly public liaison with the married Lord Valentia led to her husband's 1776 divorce suit and settlement, after which, as was conventional, she continued to use the name "Mrs. Elliott" (spelled with two t's). Here, in the towering hairstyle of the 1770s and a vibrant yellow dress that combines Van Dyck style with elements of masquerade, Elliott gathers her skirts and turns in profile as if returning from a walk into a classicizing architectural space. Her figure lives up to her nickname, "Dally the Tall," a reference to her height. When Gainsborough exhibited this portrait, British newspapers teemed with reports about her relationship with George, 4th Earl of Cholmondeley, who hung this portrait at Houghton Hall. Quoting a poem by Alexander Pope, art critics alluded to her "errors" but, overwhelmed by her beauty, were inclined to "forget them all."
Transcript
Speaker: Aimee Ng
Every summer, crowds piled into London’s Royal Academy to see the latest works on exhibit by the fledgling British School of artists. Art criticism flourished in daily newspapers, with critics praising and criticizing the works on view. Most of these were portraits, and people recognized the faces of actors, aristocrats, and other society figures looking down from their frames, even though the names of the paintings’ sitters were almost always withheld in the printed exhibition catalogues. This elegant full-length, for example, was exhibited as “Portrait of a Lady,” but viewers recognized immediately that it depicted the scandalous Grace Dalrymple Elliott, infamous for her affairs with prominent men. The gossip columns were full of talk about her recent divorce and relationship with George, 4th Earl of Cholmondeley, when Gainsborough exhibited this portrait. He pictures her demurely, turning her face into profile, and dresses her in a somewhat fantastical yellow dress that combines Van Dyck style with elements of masquerade wear, the skirts of which she pulls toward her chest in a gesture of modesty. The critics went wild. While they took every opportunity to mention her scandalous reputation, they found Gainsborough’s portrayal of her ravishing and were willing to forgive all her sins.
This was not the case four years later, when Gainsborough painted a second portrait of Grace, a bust-length portrait of her looking straight out to the viewer, which is shown nearby. The critics were vicious. Maybe it was because she had just given birth to a child—rumored to have been fathered by the Prince of Wales—or maybe it was the frankness with which he presented her here, having shed the modest pose and fantastical dress for a direct, intimate gaze out and her own contemporary clothing that hugged the contours of her breasts. “A wanton countenance,” one critic wrote, “and such hair; good God!”
Critics protested what they deemed to be inappropriate social mixing on the exhibition walls: that a painting of a courtesan hung on the same wall as a royal, both dressed and posed similarly. Fashion in portraits could be dangerous in this way. It could blur the lines of the British social class system, turning a servant into a gentleman and a courtesan into a duchess.