Thomas Barber, Mrs Mary Garnett (1724-1809) in the Marble Hall, c.1800.
Oil on canvas, 89.5 x 69 cm, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire (National Trust).
Kate Retford
Thomas Barber’s portrait depicts Mary Garnett in her 70s. Housekeeper at Kedleston in Derbyshire from 1766 through to her death in 1809, she stands in the impressive Marble Hall at the house, one of its veined columns visible to the left, grasping a copy of the Catalogue of Pictures, Statues &c. This had been compiled by her employer, Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Baron Scarsdale, and was reissued every few years as items entered and left his collection, or were moved around the property. Mary’s own personal copy survives to this day, with additional notes written into the margins in order to assist with her tours.
Wikimedia Commons.
Mrs Garnett directly meets our gaze from under her large, black bonnet, as if we are newly arrived at the property, and she is about to escort us around the collection. By the time Barber painted her, she had gained a widespread reputation for her skills as a tour guide at the house. It was common for a housekeeper of such a country house to incorporate this role amongst her many duties – a fact used to good effect in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice of 1813, in the episode when Mrs Reynolds leads Elizabeth Bennet, her aunt and uncle around Pemberley.
Many visitors wrote warmly of Mary Garnett’s talents in their accounts. James Boswell, for example, in 1777 described her as ‘a well-drest elderly housekeeper, a most distinct articulator’. The most fulsome praise, however, was penned in James Plumptre’s account of his visit some years later, in 1793: ‘Of all the Housekeeper[s] I ever met with at a Noblemans House[s], this was the most obliging and intelligent I ever saw. There was a pleasing civility in her manner which was very ingratiating, she seem’d to take a delight in her business, was willing to answer any questions which were ask’d her, and was studious to shew the best lights for viewing the pictures and setting off the furniture.’
Further reading
- James Boswell, Boswell’s life of Johnson, 6 vols(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), III, p.161
- Catalogue of the Pictures, Statues, &c. at Kedleston (S.l. : s.n., between 1758 and 1769?)
- Alastair Laing, In Trust for the Nation: Paintings from National Trust Houses (London: The National Trust, 1995), pp.14-15, cat. no. 1
- National Trust Collections online entry: https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/108766
- James Plumptre, Journal of a Tour into Derbyshire in the year 1793, Cambridge University Library, Add. MSS. 5804, ff. 8-9