LADY MARY LOWTHER (later Lady Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck)
1785 – 1862
Lady Mary Lowther was the third of the five daughters of Sir William Lowther, created first Earl of Lonsdale (1757-1844), and his wife Lady Augusta Fane, daughter of the ninth Earl of Westmorland. The eldest daughter, named after her mother, died in childhood but Elizabeth, Mary, Anne and Caroline were all long-lived. In about 1801 Mary took lessons from the German émigré Conrad Martin Metz (1749-1827) who told her ‘after a short time … that she had no talent’ (Farington, IX.3484). However, her endeavours were encouraged by her kinswoman and namesake, Lady Mary Lowther (1738-1824), who presented her with some of the sketchbooks of the Scottish architect James Playfair some time before 1808. In 1809 she renewed her efforts under the assiduous tutelage of Joseph Farington, who was a frequent visitor at the family’s London house, and his guidance of her artistic progress over the next decade is well documented in his Diary: he lent her paintings and drawings to study and copy and gave her advice on materials as well as techniques (e.g. X.3658, 3668, 3671). She also received tuition from Peter DeWint, an artist patronised by her father and an occasional summer visitor to Lowther Castle, built for her father between 1806 and 1813; her name appears in a list of his pupils in one of his sketchbooks now in the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was on a family visit to the castle in 1810 that she drew the close-up depiction now in the Wordsworth Trust collection (2009.63.1). The Lowthers had recently taken delivery of two landscapes with distant views of the castle commissioned from J.M.W. Turner (Butlin and Joll, nos 111-12) and Lady Mary was present at a discussion between Farington and her father of how best to display them (Farington, X.3671).
Wordsworth, like Farington, was consistently supportive of Lady Mary who is variously described in contemporary sources as ‘spirituelle’ and ‘very agreeable’. She was the dedicatee of his sonnet ‘Lady! I rifled a Parnassian Cave’, which he sent her in 1819 when he compiled an anthology of earlier English verse for her enjoyment; the poem was published in 1820, the year in which she married Major-General Lord Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck, then MP for Weobley (1781-1828), fourth son of the third Duke of Portland (Prime Minister briefly in 1783 and again in 1807-9). There was one son of this marriage, born in 1821, who also became an MP. After Lord Frederick’s death in Rome from a persistent ailment she consulted Wordsworth over the wording of his epitaph in Lowther church and they remained in close touch until the late 1840s: she was among the first people to whom he wrote after initially declining the post of Poet Laureate on 1 April 1843 and, in his letter of condolence on the death of her father, written on 31 March 1844, he referred to the fact that, ‘We have known each other too long and too intimately’ for her not to be aware of the reasons behind his delay in writing.
Literature
The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kenneth Garlick, Angus Macintyre, Kathryn Cave and Evelyn Newby, New Haven and London, 17 vols, 1978-98, where she is indexed twice: once, erroneously, as ‘Lady Jane Lowther’ (with copious references to Farington’s encouragement) and also under ‘Bentinck’; Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, New Haven and London, revised edition 1984; www.historyofparliamentonline.org
7.6.2014
Powell, Cecilia
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