Lady Barbara Hervey (1709-1727)

attributed to Joseph Brook (fl.1690 - d.1725). Oil painting on canvas, Lady Barbara Hervey (1709-1727), attributed to Joseph Brook (fl.1690 - d.1725), inscribed in large, red letters, bottom right: Lady Barbara Hervey, circa 1725. A three-quarter-length portrait of a young woman, standing in a landscape, gazing at the spectator, wearing a blue dress trimmed with pale grey bows down the front of the bodice, worn over a white chemise, there is a white satin scarf draped over her left arm and carried round her waist, her left hand is resting on the trunk of a tree, her right hand holds a fold of her scarf. Dark trees to the left and distant dim landscape in background to the right. Lady Barbara Hervey (1709-1727), twelfth child of John Hervey, 1st Earl of Bristol (1665-1751), and ninth by his second wife, Elizabeth Felton (1676-1741). She is buried at Ickworth. There was evidently a little awkwardness about the naming of Barbara, since John, Lord Hervey’s grand relation, the Duchess of Grafton, had evidently agreed to be a godmother once the child’s sex was known, and would therefore have expected it to be named after her, Isabella. For some reason, however (presumably the insistence of his wife, whose grandmother, still alive, was Barbara Villiers, Countess of Suffolk) she was instead baptised Barbara. Lord Hervey, therefore, had to use the good offices of his friend and country neighbour, Sir Thomas Hanmer, at one and the same time to thank the duchess for becoming a godmother to the infant, and excusing himself for its not having taken her name. So, in a letter to Sir Thomas, dated 8 or 9 June 1709, he wrote: “Sir, My wife and I, consulting how to make our thanks most acceptable to ye Dutchess of Grafton for ye great honour she hath done us, resolv’d to give you ye trouble of conveying them. I hope my Lady Grantham [who stood proxy for her] will do me ye justice to lett her Grace know, how zealously I stickled to have ye child’s name Isabella, knowing so many excellent persons who have born it” [including, of course, not only the Duchess herself, but his mother, and his first wife and their still living daughter – so his second wife may not have regretted having a second Isabella in the family too much!] (cf. The Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer, Bt., ed. Sir Henry Bunbury, Bt., 1838, p.1118; and Letter-Books of John Hervey, First Earl of Bristol, 1894, letter 305, vol.1, p.257). Ickworth, Suffolk (Accredited Museum)