Some Old Time Beauties: After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and CommentWilling, Thomson
History
Some Old Time Beauties: After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment
Willing, Thomson
Great Britain -- Biography; Women -- Biography
Duchesse de Grammont, the sister and brother-in-law of Count D'Orsay.
She was a woman of great tact, of a sweet delicacy of manner, and of a
chivalrous devotedness to friendship. Her friends were carefully
chosen, and never deserted. Perhaps no woman of the century has had so
many men of mark as her friends and admirers. She had charity towards
others' failings. She gave pleasure where she could. She was elegant
and dignified in her bearing, though possessed of Irish wit withal.
She was very beautiful.
Lord Byron was induced to sing the praise of her picture here
given:--
"Were I now as I was, I had sung
What Lawrence has painted so well;
But the strain would expire on my tongue,
And the theme is too soft for my shell.
"I am ashes where once I was fire,
And the bard in my bosom is dead:
What I loved I now merely admire,
And my heart is as gray as my head.
"Let the young and the brilliant aspire
To sing what I gaze on in vain,
For sorrow has torn from my lyre
The string which was worthy the strain."
[Illustration: MARY ISABELLA DUCHESS OF RUTLAND by REYNOLDS]
HER GRACE OF RUTLAND
Rowlandson, the caricaturist, once published a cartoon entitled "Juno
Devon, All Sublime." The rival goddesses in competition with her
before that modern Paris, the Prince of Wales, being their Graces of
Gordon and Rutland. Beyond the various written records of the opposing
beauty of those aristocratic dames who dominated society in their day,
we have ample painted evidence of their loveliness. Of her Grace of
Devonshire, we have, first, the engraved renderings of "the lost
Gainsborough." There are other Gainsboroughs, too,--Georgiana as a
child, and a full-length of her standing at the edge of a lawn, her
face looking down, wearing a white dress, her right elbow on the base
of a column, a scarf in both hands, her hair piled high, but without
the hat, as in the more famous picture. There are then several by Sir
Joshua. The first, where she stands as a child beside her mother;
then, she as a mother with her own child,--a very charming profile,
and a picture that insinuates the vivacity of demeanor and the abandon
so characteristic of her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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