Damer (née Conway), Anne

Anne Damer (1749–1828) was Britain’s leading female sculptor in the Georgian period. Née Anne Seymour Conway, Anne was the daughter of Henry Seymour Conway, Horace Walpole’s cousin, and Caroline Campbell. After her husband’s suicide in 1776, Damer dedicated herself to sculpture, working in the courtyard of Lady Melbourne’s home at Piccadilly Square. Crowds assembled to see her finish her most important work, a sculpture of George III. She also completed a bronze portrait bust of Joseph Banks (1743–1820), one of the founders of the Royal Horticultural Society. While in Portugal, Damer wrote Belmour (1801), a novel that treats her friendship with Mary Berry and Horace Walpole and parodies some of Walpole’s more eccentric tendencies. Damer advised Berry on a marriage proposal from Edward Fawkner, which Berry, an important salonniste, declined. Damer also helped supervise and participated in many amateur theatricals, including Berry’s Fashionable Friends, at Strawberry Hill. Though she professed to despise the seventeeth-century sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Damer learned much by visiting Sir William Hamilton in Florence and Naples, where she undertook a bust of Lord Nelson shortly after his victory in the Battle of Trafalgar. She attempted to give her bust of Charles James Fox to Napoleon in 1802, during the Treaty of Amiens, receiving a snuff box encrusted with diamonds on a later occasion. She sent a copy of her bust of Charles James Fox to Ceylon, India, with a dedication professing the importance of Western parliamentary ideals (Noble, Anne Damer: woman of art and fashion. K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd, London, 1908).