Anne Seymour Damer
Active in: England
Biography
The English sculptor Anne Seymour Damer was born in Berkshire in 1748. Damer spent her youth in the care of her cousin Horace Walpole, who praised her work as an artist. She inherited the Strawberry Hill House from Walpole in 1797. In 1767, she married John Damer, son of Lord Milton, later the 1st Earl of Dorchester. She began making sculptures after his death in 1776. Between 1785 and 1811, Damer was an honorary exhibitor at the Royal Academy in London. Among her best-known works are the heads of the river gods Isis and Thame for the Henley bridge at Henley-on-Thames, Oxon. She was widely praised by her contemporaries for her naturalistic animal sculptures. Damer died in London in 1828.
Selected Works
Anne Seymour Damer, A Seated Woman, ca. 1780. Terracotta, 23.8 x 16.5 x 21.6 cm. Yale Center for British Art
Anne Seymour Damer, Sir Joseph Banks, ca. 1814. Bronze, 71 cm. British Museum
Anne Seymour Damer, Caroline Conway, Lady Aylesbury, n.d. Verona marble relief, mounted on rose velvet in an oval ebonized wood frame, 33 x 27.9 cm. Yale Center for British Art
Anne Seymour Damer, Mary Berry, 1793. Bronze, 34.3 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London
Anne Seymour Damer, Shock Dog, 1782. Carrara marble, 33.3 x 38 x 32.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Circle
Daughter of
Field Marshal Henry Seymour
Cousin of
Horace Walpole
Bibliography
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“DAMER, Anne Seymour.” The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
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Gross, Jonathan David. The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014.
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Yarrington, Alison. The Female Pygmalion: Anne Seymour Damer, Allan Cunningham and the Writing of a Woman Sculptor’s Life. London: Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, 1997.