Live Auction Old Masters. Lot Louis Gauffier Poitiers or La Rochelle Livorno Portrait of Elizabeth, Lady Webster, later Lady Holland , full-length, in a white dress and feathered hat, with her spaniel, Pierrot, on a chaise-longue , with a guitar signed, inscribed, and dated 'L. Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 13 December , lot 63, where acquired by the present owner. Earl of Ilchester, ed. Thesis, Ohio State University, , pp.
Gauffier painted the present portrait, one of the most compelling likenesses of his Florentine period, two years after he had settled in the Arno City. Elizabeth Vassall, successively Lady Webster and Lady Holland , was the only child of Richard Vassall, who owned extensive estates in Jamaica. In she married Sir Geoffrey Webster, Bt. She subsequently travelled extensively, accompanied at times by her husband, briefly visiting Florence in June She returned to the city on 8 January , leaving some five weeks later for Rome and Naples, but was back in Florence in June, remaining in Tuscany for over a year.
Her marriage, never happy, broke down irretrievably in , and Henry Richard Fox, 3rd Lord Holland, whom she met on his Grand Tour in January , was widely known to be her lover: following the birth of their son and her divorce in , they married in July Lady Holland was to become one of the most forceful women of her generation, and it was due in large measure to her personality that Holland House had so central a place in political and intellectual life until her husband's death in Lady Webster's residence in Florence must be seen against the background of the European War that resulted from the French Revolution.
There were fewer English tourists than in recent decades but, as her journal demonstrates, those who passed through Florence were met with friendship and warm comradery. Of the identified English sitters whose commissions establish Gauffier's claims as the last in the series of major 18th-century grand tour portraitists, almost all were friends of Lady Webster: Sir George Webster, her first husband private collection ; her second husband, Lord Holland examples from Holland House and a private collection ; the Countess of Bessborough, with whom he had previously been in love examples respectively inherited from the sitter and from Holland House ; Holland's travelling companion, Lord Wycombe private collection ; and the latter's Wiltshire neighbors, Lord and Lady Ailesbury private collection.
Unlike other portraits, which are of uniform vertical format, those of Lady Webster and Lady Bessborough are of horizontal format and may well have been intended, however loosely, as pendants.
