Lady Jane Harriet Pleydell-Bouverie Interior at Ampney Park, Gloucestershire

Signed l.r.: JHP Bouverie, watercolour over traces of pencil with touches of white and gum arabic

22.5 x 34 cm; 8 3/4 x 13 3/8 inches

Provenance

Augusta Raymond-Barker of Fairford Park, Gloucestershire, by family descent until 2016.

Ampney Park is a late 16th century house. The large room on the south-west corner of the ground floor is a complete Jacobean survival with oak panelled walls with strapwork pilasters, elaborate plaster ceiling with pendant bosses, and a very large carved stone fireplace and overmantel with the figures and arms of the Pleydell family, the original owners of house till 1724.

(David Verey, Buildings of England - Gloucestershire: the Cotswolds, 1979).

The artist was the daughter of the 3rd Earl of Radnor born at Coleshill in Berkshire, and the wife of William Ellice (1816-1892) whom she married in 1847. She was a childhood friend of Princess Victoria with whom she was taken to play aged six and told by the young princess that she could not play with her toys and was not to address her by her christian name. She was one the Queen’s bridesmaids, the last survivor of the group, and wrote about it in the Cornhill Magazine of June 1897.

Jane was actively involved in the temperance movement from the mid-1850s and chaired many meetings in London and elsewhere on the subject and was President of the Faringdon, Berkshire branch of the British Women’s Temperance Association. In 1887 Jane wrote a book titled ‘The shadow of a coming danger to the cause of temperance from the celebration of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria’ which highlighted the social problems caused by alcohol.

There is a portrait of her after John Hayter in the Royal Collection and a portrait of Jane as a young girl was illustrated in the 23 June