El retrato de Lady Anne Cliford

Abstract

The Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando holds a portrait of a young woman long identified as Barbara de Braganza. Originally, the canvas was attributed to the Italian painter Jacopo Amigoni, later to the Frenchman Pierre Subleyras. With the discovery of the cargo of the English ship the Westmorland, full of art and antiques, we can now reconstruct the history of this portrait. Since it was shipped in a crate labeled W.C., the intended owner of this work, we may now identify the sitter as Anne Clifford, Countess of Mahony, the cousin of a British aristocrat, William Constable. In 1778, William Constable commissioned a painter named Domenico Cherubini to copy an original portrait of the young woman by Pierre Subleyras through the Scottish agent James Byres. Since the Westmorland had been captured in the Mediterranean en route to Great Britain, Constable was unable to recover the lost work, so he commissioned a second copy from Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, completed in 1785 and also based on the original by Subleyras. Today three variant portraits exist.The original by Subleyras is in the Musée de Beaux Arts de Caén (France), the copy by Cherubini hangs in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, and finally, the copy by Batoni in the home of the intended owner, William Constable, in Burton Constable Hall (England).