Museum report·London
Three Georgian power brokers, painted as Macbeth's witches: a 1775 portrait's hidden politics
Daniel Gardner's 1775 portrait dressed three of Georgian England's most influential women as the witches from Macbeth, turning a theatrical fancy into a coded image of female political power. Now in the National Portrait Gallery, the painting is the subject of a new Artsy essay on how witch imagery became a metaphor for women who wielded influence.
In 1775, the British portraitist Daniel Gardner painted three of the most powerful women in Georgian England in an unlikely guise: as the three witches from Shakespeare's Macbeth, gathered around a cauldron. The sitters were Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne; Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire; and the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer. The work, now in the National Portrait Gallery in London, is the subject of a new Artsy essay on how the witch became a metaphor for female political power.
Gardner was a fashionable society portraitist and a student of George Romney, and the painting stands out in his career as the only occasion on which he showed his sitters in costume. Society women were more often portrayed as classical or pastoral figures, so casting three real, recognisable women as characters in a theatrical scene was a deliberate provocation. It also reflected a wider moment: by the mid-to-late 1700s, a craze for Macbeth had swept English public life, and artists including Henry Fuseli, William Blake and Romney himself produced their own versions of the three witches.
The political charge lay in who the women were. All three held prominent positions and shared a passion for Whig politics. Lady Melbourne had been friends with Damer since the early 1770s, while her friendship with the Duchess was newer, and the portrait may have been intended to publicise that growing intimacy. The Duchess would go on to host England's most influential political salon from 1776. The National Portrait Gallery describes the cauldron scene as a reference to the women's shadowy political manoeuvring at the centre of the Devonshire House circle, the witches being the figures who urge Macbeth toward power and then toward his downfall.
The painting was never exhibited in its time, but contemporaries knew of it: Lady Mary Coke recorded in her journal in 1775 that the three women were being drawn together as the three witches. Two and a half centuries later, the portrait reads as a wry comment on how women who sought power were cast as dangerous and uncanny, a framing that has shadowed female politicians ever since.
