Lady Morgan

Lady Morgan (about 1778-1859) was a highly successful Irish novelist, whose works championed the rights of women and dispossessed Irish Catholics. She was less than four feet high and had a slight deformity of the spine and face. This bust was commissioned by the sitter from Pierre-Jean David, usually called David D'Angers, the pre-eminent French portrait sculptor of the time. She is depicted as a confident woman who was in her fifties at the time the bust was executed. The work is a romanticised portrait of Lady Morgan which perhaps complements her literary background and captures her lively and determined personality. The absence of shoulders focuses attention on the intricately carved hair, head dress and slender neck of the sitter. At the time of the sitting, D'Angers noted in his notebook: 'She has the impatience of a child; she guesses at everything; it is the mark of a genius, but I think that often she does not look beyond the surface of things'.