Page:Women in the Fine Arts From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentiet.djvu/165

98 study and practice of sculpture with enthusiasm. By some of her friends her work was greatly admired, but Walpole so exaggerated his praise of her that one can but think that he wrote out of his cousinly affection for the artist, rather than from a judicial estimate of her talent. He bequeathed to her, for her life, his villa of Strawberry Hill, with all its valuables, and £2,000 a year for its maintenance.

Mrs. Damer executed many portrait busts, some animal subjects, two colossal heads, symbolic of the Thames and the Isis, intended for the adornment of the bridge at Henley. Her statue of the king, in marble, was placed in the Register Office in Edinburgh. She made a portrait bust of herself for the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence. Her portrait busts of her relatives were numerous and are still seen in private galleries. She executed two groups of "Sleeping Dogs," one for Queen Caroline and a second for her brother-in-law, the Duke of Richmond. Napoleon asked her for a bust of Fox, which she made and presented to the Emperor. A bust of herself which she made for Richard Payne Knight was by him bequeathed to the British Museum. Her "Death of Cleopatra" was modelled in relief, and an engraving from it was used as a vignette on the title-page of the second volume of Boydell's Shakespeare.

Those who have written of Mrs. Damer's art have taken extreme views. They have praised ad nauseam, as Walpole did when he wrote: "Mrs. Damer's busts from life are not inferior to the antique. Her shock dog, large as life and only not alive, rivals the marble one of Bernini in