Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri
Peniston Lamb as Mercury
- White marble
- 21 × inches · 535 × mm
- Inscribe on the verso of the socle: ‘ANNE SEYMOUR DAMER FECIT’
and on the verso of the helmet: ‘ANNA ΔAMEP ΛONA ININA EΠOIEI’
Carved in 1785
Engraved:
By John Jones, ‘Mercury form the original bust of the Honble Penisten Lambe executed in Marble by the Honble Anne Damer’, stipple engraving, published by James Roberts, June 26, 1790.’
Collections
- Elizabeth Lamb, Lady Melbourne (1751-1818);
- By descent in the family;
- Sotheby's, London, July 9, 2008, lot 166;
- Private collection, UK to 2024
Exhibitions
- London, Royal Academy, 1787, cat. no. 625 ‘Portrait of a boy in the character of Mercury, a head in marble’.
Literature
- Percy Noble, Anne Seymour Damer: A Woman of Art and Fashion 1748-1828, London, 1908, p.82;
- Ed. W. S. Lewis, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, New Haven and London, 1944, vol.XII, p.272 (‘Bust… Large as life – of Lady Melbourne’s son as infant Mercury…in marble 1785’);
- Ingrid Roscoe, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851, New Haven and London, 2009, p.336;
- Jonathan David Gross, The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist, Maryland, 2014, pp.174, 185 and 202