New Aquistion: Ann Forbes in Rome

By Duncan MacMillan, 30.07.2024

Ann Forbes, Portrait of the Duchess of Hamilton, c.1760, The Fleming Collection

Elizabeth Gunning (1733–1790) was a glamorous Anglo-Irish actress with a taste for dukes. She became a duchess after her swift and impulsive wedding to the sixth Duke of Hamilton, and following his death, she was briefly engaged to the Duke of Bridgewater. After that engagement was broken off, she went on to marry another duke to become Duchess of Argyll.

Gunning’s glamour is recorded in one of Gavin Hamilton’s (1733–1790) finest portraits, probably painted shortly after her first marriage in 1752. Twenty years later, Anne Forbes (1745–1834) made a very fine pastel copy, recently acquired by the Fleming Collection, a half-length version of the Duchess’s portrait. A half-length work by Hamilton, presumably painted in preparation for his formal full-length, gives a much more vivid sense of the Duchess’s vivacity and charm.

 

This half-length was evidently still in Hamilton’s possession when Anne Forbes made her copy two decades later. She and her mother had travelled to Rome in 1768 and stayed until 1771. The purpose of their sojourn was for Anne to pursue her studies under Hamilton, with tutelage supported by James Nevay (c.1730–1811). A fellow Scot, Nevay had himself been one of a number of younger artists whom Hamilton looked after: ‘mentored’ might be the modern word.

A genial and likeable man, Hamilton kept an open studio where he appears to have been liberal with encouragement and advice to those who sought it. As this was Hamilton’s own picture, however, it seems likely that Anne Forbes copied it in his studio and so it is perhaps witness to a closer relationship between teacher and pupil.

Anne Forbes was the granddaughter of portrait painter William Aikman. The Aikmans were a Lanarkshire family: Gavin Hamilton also came from Lanarkshire and the Aikman and Hamilton families were acquainted. On 29 August 1767, Anne’s uncle, John Aikman, wrote warmly of the painter whom he had known since childhood:

‘Mr Gavin Hamilton can be more useful to Annie with respect to cultivating her natural genius for painting than any man . . . All the young students apply to him for direction and instruction in their studies. I have known him well from his infancy. He is a sweet blooded, polite gentleman and being now the most renowned of all the history painters of this age, is highly respected in Rome.’

Contrary to assumptions about the difficulties faced by a woman who chose art as her career in the 18th century, there does not seem to be any hint in the correspondence that Anne Forbes’ choice of career and her determination to enjoy time in Rome (essential for any aspiring artist) were exceptional. The only concessions to her gender seem to have been the company of her mother as chaperone and concern for her ability to stand the summer heat in the city.

The artist’s grandfather, William Aikman, was nephew to Sir John Clerk. Inheriting the baronetcy, his son James later became patron of John and Alexander Runciman in Rome at the same time as Anne Forbes and her mother were there. Anne brought a letter from James Cumming to his friend Alexander, and in March 1768 she and her mother were living at the same address in the Via Gregoriana as the Runciman brothers.

The Clerks, the Aikmans and the Forbes families were closely linked. Together they enthusiastically supported Anne’s ambition and it was a family whip-round that funded her sojourn in Rome. Effectively she and her mother were supported by a family-funded scholarship of £200 a year, though Mrs Forbes’ sometimes plaintive correspondence indicates that life in Rome was nevertheless a struggle. The first year she reckoned cost them not £200 but £270 and in March 1768 she wrote:

‘I am forever calculating and grumbling that I cannot fall into any more reasonable way of doing it; but I find it to no purpose, for it’s true that when one lives in Rome one must do as they do there, and nasty, clarty and awkward are all their ways, I do assure you.’

Hamilton, however, clearly took a close interest in his pupil and wrote to John Aikman in September 1768:

‘I can now with pleasure acquaint you that Miss has great talents as well as love for her profession, her industry is equal to her genius which qualities being so happily united success must follow. She has a strong memory which will be of good service to her in the practice of portraits. I propose that she should begin to paint in oil in the month of October and hope that in another year and half she will be able to make a considerable figure in her own country.’

Hamilton’s letter suggests the Forbes’ pastel of the Duchess of Hamilton is dated before October 1768 when he proposed she should move to oil paint. It was not all plain sailing for a woman artist however. On 13 September 1769, Mrs Forbes wrote to her son about rumours of an engagement between Anne and James Nevay:

‘These rumours, having got amongst the artists in the coffee house have given the gumples to Mr Nevay who never now comes near us but when he is sent for when formerly he used to come almost every day to see what she was doing.’

 

Anne made progress nonetheless and as well as her copy of the Duchess’ portrait, there is one other striking witness to her time in Rome. In 1772, John Raphael Smith published an engraving of a lively and romantic portrait of Signora Maria Giovanna Felice: it is inscribed A.Forbes pinxit in Roma. Curiously, given the subject of this feature, what appears to be the original painting by Forbes (facing the other way, it is not a copy of the engraving) was sold by Christies in 2019 with the sitter misidentified as Elizabeth Hamilton, daughter of the sixth Duke and his wife, the former Elizabeth Gunning.

Anne Forbes’ portrait of the Duchess of Hamilton is exhibited until 2^nd September at the FE Mc William Gallery & Studio in Banbridge, County Down as part of Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perceptions

A little more about Scottish artists in Rome in the 18^th century…

Anne Forbes was one of a considerable company of aspiring Scottish artists who gathered around Gavin Hamilton in Rome.  James Nevay and Colin Morison had been in the city since the 1750s. John Baxter, architect of Penicuik House, arrived in 1761 and David Allan in 1767. Alexander Runciman also arrived 1767 and his younger brother John a few months later that year. John was consumptive and died in Naples late in 1768 or early in 1769. He fled there after a bitter quarrel with James Nevay. The Irishman, James Barry, accompanied Alexander to Naples after hearing of John’s illness, but they arrived too late. The sculptor William Jeans, who like Alexander Runciman was employed at Penicuik House, and James Clark from Inverness both arrived in Rome 1768. Clark stayed in Rome for the rest of his life, not as an artist but as an antiquarian and cicerone. John Brown joined the group in 1769, Richard Cooper junior a year later and Jacob More, who had been Runciman’s apprentice in Edinburgh, arrived in 1773. He too then made his career in Rome. It was of course an international community. Alexander Runciman and John Brown, for instance, both became close friends with the Dane Tobias Sergel and the Swiss Henry Fuseli. Much later, too, Antonio Canova became very close to Gavin Hamilton and looked on him, he said, ‘in loco de padre’, as a kind of father.