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Lord William Campbell, circa 1777

Born to the British aristocracy, Anne Seymour Damer was an accomplished neoclassicist sculptor whose rank and wealth afforded her career both advantage and detraction. Having shown an early inclination for art, she received formal training abroad from the Italian master Giuseppe Ceracchi and in England from sculptor John Bacon the Elder. It was, however, in the wake of her troubled marriage to John Damer, the dilettante son of Lord Milton, and his subsequent suicide that she immersed herself in her work.

Best known for her portrait busts and animal sculptures in stone and marble, her grand-scale masks of the mythological characters Isis and Thame can be found on the keystones of the Henley-on-Thames Bridge in Oxford. From 1784 to 1818, she exhibited regularly at London’s Royal Academy under the status of "Visitor." Her work is held today in the collections of the Tate Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Courtauld Institute of art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

An amateur actress and writer who travelled widely in society, Damer led a life of some celebrity. Following her husband and parents’ deaths, she came under the guardianship of her cousin, Horace Walpole, the Whig politician and noted man of letters. Walpole was an enthusiastic advocate of his kinswoman’s art, writing that she had "chosen a walk more difficult and far more uncommon than painting. . . . Mrs. Damer’s busts from the life are not inferior to the antique; and theirs, we are sure, were not more like." Upon his death, Damer was left a life tenancy in Walpole’s famous estate, Strawberry Hill.
Lord William Campbell, born circa 1730, was Anne Damer’s uncle, the brother of her mother Caroline. As a second son, William Campbell pursued a military career in the Royal Navy and served as commander of the HMS Nightingale, an assignment that brought him to Charleston, South Carolina. There, he met and married Sarah Izard, one of the colony’s most eligible, well-connected heiresses. Following service in the British House of Commons and as governor of Nova Scotia, William Campbell was appointed governor of South Carolina. Upon his arrival in the Charleston harbor in 1775, he was met with rebellion from colonists clamoring for independence and was eventually forced to leave the city. He returned to Charleston in June 1776 as an officer aboard the HMS Bristol. Campbell, along with his ship, was badly injured in the Battle of Fort Sullivan that same month. He died two years later, having never fully recovered from his war wounds.

 

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