Anne (Luttrell), Duchess of Cumberland

Anne Luttrell was born at St. Marylebone, London, on January 24, 1743, the eldest daughter of Simon Luttrell (1713-1787) of Luttrellstown, county Dublin, Ireland, and his wife Judith Maria, daughter and heiress of Sir Nicholas Lawes, governor of Jamaica. Successive generations of her family had gained notoriety for their outrageous conduct and she, too, would court controversy for most of her life. On August 4, 1765 she married Christopher Horton ("a sporting squire") of Catton Hall, Derbyshire. She was reportedly devastated when he died in August 1769, a few days after the death of their only child. Two years later, she began a whirlwind romance with George III's youngest brother, Frederick (1745-1790), Duke of Cumberland, who had recently been tried and found guilty of adultery with a married peeress. She married the duke secretly at her house in Mayfair on October 2, 1771 and they fled to Calais, France. The king's displeasure on hearing of this marriage (and soon thereafter of the surreptitious marriage of another brother, the Duke of Gloucester) provoked the Royal Marriage Act of 1772, which forbade members of the royal family under the age of twenty-five from marrying without the monarch's consent. For the next several years the duke and duchess were banned from court. They divided their time between England and continental Europe, where she raised eyebrows by insisting on high ceremonial treatment. Horace Walpole described her as "extremely pretty, not handsome, very well made, with the most amorous eyes in the world, and eyelashes a yard long. Coquette beyond measure, artful as Cleopatra, and completely mistress of all her passions and projects." Following the duke's reconciliation with the king in 1780, the duchess continued to attract notice by hosting lavish entertainments in London. She and her husband also traveled frequently abroad. The duchess sustained this pattern after her husband's death in 1791, spending much time in Germany and Switzerland. Her traveling companion was an unmarried cousin, Sarah Bettina Lawley, who became the principal heir to the duchess's estate on her death in February 1809 in Switzerland.


Gainsborough's first acquaintance with the woman in this portrait was at Bath in 1766, when he painted her as Mrs. Anne Horton, wife of a relatively obscure member of the gentry (National Gallery, Ireland). Within five years, her scandalous, clandestine marriage to the king's youngest brother had transformed her into a royal duchess--though one who was barred from court and shunned by much of polite society. Her contested social position no doubt contributed to the ostentatious displays of wealth and status for which she became notorious. The numerous portraits she commissioned of herself and of her husband suggest a similar concern with ratifying a carefully orchestrated public image.
One of her first acts on returning to England as Duchess of Cumberland was to coax her husband into sitting to Joshua Reynolds for a pair of full-length portraits in the spring of 1772. Although the stately solemnity of these paintings was clearly calculated to entrench the sitters' claims to regal dignity, they themselves deemed the portraits unsatisfactory and never bothered to pay for or retrieve them from Reynolds's studio. The duchess proved equally troublesome to Joseph Wright of Derby. From Bath in February 1776 he complained, "The Duchess of Cumberland is the only sitter I have had, and her order for a full-length dwindled to a head only, which has cost me so much anxiety that I would rather have been without it; the great people are so fantastical and whining they create a world of trouble, though I have but the same fate as Sir Joshua Reynolds, who painted two pictures of Her Royal Highness and neither pleases."