Lady Mary Fox, the mysterious story of a portrait

Abstract

The author suggests an attribution of the miniature portrait of Lady Mary Fox-Holland from the collection of Tsarskoye Selo Museum. It is a painted oval ivory plate. According to the old inventory numbers and records in the museum archive the portrait came from the collection of the Catherine Palace. On the reverse there is the pencil inscription with the name of the sitter — “Lady Mary Fox, afterwards Lady Holland”. She was the elder daughter of John Fitzpatrick, the Earl of Upper Ossory and Lady Evelina Leveson Gower, the eldest daughter of the Earl Gower. Mary was descended from one of the most famous and wealthy aristocratic families in Britain. The portrait have not been not published until now. The author, researching the history of the Fox-Holland family, elucidates the circumstances of the creation of the miniature and its author — English miniature portraitist Edward Miles. During the period of his apprenticeship (1772–92), he created the miniature copy of the original portrait made by his teacher Joshua Reynolds in 1769. The original by Reynolds is still in the collection of the Holland family. The miniature copy was taken by Miles to Russia in 1797 as a recommendation together with the letter of Count Semen Vorontsov. Miles, being a court painter of Paul I and Alexander I until 1807, produced a series of miniature portraits of the imperial families. The miniature portrait of Mary Fox-Holland is stylistically similar to his other copies of Reynold’ s original paintings.