Portrait of Lady Caroline Montagu in Byronic Costume

This portrait depicts Lady Catherine Montagu as a figure of social unconventionality, sporting a dress reminiscent of both the piratical and the gypsy lifestyle as romanticized by writers of the era. More specifically, she seems to be portrayed as Haidée, a character from Byron's Don Juan.

The portrait depicts a young woman, in colorful costume, seated on the ground against a large rock by the sea. The large outcrop of rock is crowned with a variety of vegetation. Mountains can be seen against the clouded blue sky to her left. The female figure is shown in the three-quarter position traditional for portraiture: her upper body is turned towards the picture plane, her face tilted slightly to one side, and she smiles and looks flirtatiously out at the viewer. She wears a square red veil affixed to her head with a large golden pin; her dress has a red bodice and red-striped olive-green skirt. The puffed white sleeves of her costume are worn off the shoulder and trimmed with blue, gold, and red ribbons. Over the dress she wears a striped and delicately fringed apron of red, olive, pale pink, coral, indigo, and gold, as well as a patterned sash knotted at the waist and joined in a tassel. Additionally, she wears gold rings, hoop earrings, two chain necklaces, and a bracelet; she holds a rosary in her right hand. She wears black shoes with silver buckles, and a dagger is tucked behind the sash at her waist. To her right is an open treasure chest spilling forth pearls, jewels, fabrics, a pistol, and a large spindle. In the background and to her left are two male figures in pointed hats (one leans on a rifle), conversing and looking out over the sea. Further off, three additional male figures crouch at the shoreline, and we can see a lighthouse structure on a distant protrusion of land.

During most of the Romantic period, members of parliament and other government officers were required to profess allegiance to the Church of England through the Test and Corporation Acts; consequently, Catholics were prevented from entering parliament. Beginning in 1778, a series of Catholic Relief Acts, prompted by the need to unite with Ireland against France, led to the gradual loosening of these restrictions. Through the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, Catholics were finally allowed to sit in both houses of parliament (McCalman 446). William Montagu seems to have been sympathetic to the Catholic cause, and Lady Montagu’s decision to be painted with a rosary may reflect the family’s political position on Catholic emancipation and the slightly less hostile environment post-1829, or it may simply function as an attribute of the exoticized Italian peasant.

This portrait appears to have been commissioned shortly after Hayter’s return to London in the autumn of 1831. He had been abroad to Italy (1816-1818, and again from 1826-1828) and Paris, where he had just exhibited portraits of French and British nobility at the 1831 Salon (Noon 191). Though Hayter did not become the official Portrait and Historical Painter to Queen Victoria until 1838, he was already well-known at this time for aristocratic portraiture (Bryant).

Lady Montagu participates in the fashionable trend of having one’s portrait painted “in the guise of some literary or dramatic persona, as her costume is a mélange” of folk and fashionable dress (Noon 191). Specifically, Montagu wears a faux-dirndl (the gold lacing of the bodice appears to be merely decorative), which combines elements of Neapolitan and Alsatian folk dress—the colorful, striped apron, large sash and pinned head-veil—with fashionable evening-wear of the period—dropped sleeves in an un-cuffed gigot style and centrally-parted hair (Anawalt 117; Foster 51).

She is surrounded by both domestic and piratical accessories (a spindle, as well as a treasure box, pistol, and dagger). These piratical accoutrements, and the fantastical hybrid nature of her costume, suggest the Romantic fascination with the wandering, dangerous lifestyle of seafaring vagabonds. The spindle, though a symbol of feminine domesticity, is also a very portable tool and thus underscores the fantasy of a nomadic existence. Additionally, the spindle may have been specifically associated with gypsy fortune-telling and prophecy. Meg Merrilies, the tempestuous gypsy of Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering or The Astrologer (1815) and one of the most notorious literary gypsies of the era, famously divines Harry Bertram’s horoscope “by assistance of those ancient implements of housewifery, now almost banished from the land, the distaff and spindle” (quoted above; see Associated Texts). Not only were illustrations of this scene well-known through the various prints of Scott’s novel, but the figure of Meg Merrilies became the popular subject of paintings and poetry, including John Keat’s poem “Meg Merrilies” (1818).

The portrait also draws on conventions of the pastoral in which a young maid, typically a shepherdess or milkmaid, rests in a rural landscape. Lady Montagu’s folk costume seems both to heighten the sense of exoticism, especially through the inclusion of a rosary that announces the Catholic loyalties of some continental peasants, and to temper the criminal associations of piracy with the idealized connotations of rural folk traditions. The apparent citation of a Byronic character, Haidée, speaks to a larger conflation of the artistic persona with the figure of the exoticized, even criminal, wanderer in the Romantic imagination.