Lady Anne Carey, later Countess of Clanbrassil, was the eldest daughter of Henry Carey, Earl of Monmouth, who was celebrated for his knowledge of languages. Anne, too, was highly educated and also, according to a family history compiled in the late seventeenth century, quick witted and very handsome. Among her possessions was a copy of her father’s translation of a treatise by the Augustinian philosopher Jean-François Senault—inscribed “Anne Clanbrasill, 1650”—which is now in the Frick Art Reference Library.
In 1635, she married James Hamilton, second Viscount Claneboye, a Scottish nobleman who received large plots of land in Ireland under King James I. During the English Civil War, the viscount fought for the royalist cause and was eventually elevated, in 1647, to the English peerage as Earl of Clanbrassil.
About 1635, Van Dyck painted several other members of the Carey family, including Lady Anne’s mother and her aunt, set against a similar pastoral background. This rustic setting catered to the taste of the English aristocracy, which sought refuge from an unstable political situation in Arcadian fantasies. Under Cromwell’s rule, the fortunes of the Clanbrassils started to dwindle. After her husband’s death, in 1659, Anne stayed in Ireland. In 1668, she married Sir Robert Maxwell, of County Down. She died in 1689.
Lady Anne Carey, Later Viscountess Claneboye and Countess of Clanbrassil
Anne Carey, later Countess of Clanbrassil, was the daughter of Henry Carey, second Earl of Monmouth, and Martha Cranfield. According to a family history, the Countess of Clanbrassil was a “very handsome and witty” woman who was “extraordinary in knowledge, virtue, and piety.” This portrait was likely painted on the occasion of her engagement to James Hamilton, heir of a Scottish family that had received large land grants in Northern Ireland. Lady Anne strides to the left in an Arcadian landscape, with the boulder behind her framing a woodland vista. Van Dyck reused this backdrop in other portraits, catering to the taste of English aristocrats who sought refuge from an increasingly unstable political situation in pastoral fantasies.
Said to have belonged to the Duke of Buckingham. Lord Torrington. His sale (anonymous), January 24, 1778, Christie’s, Lot 172, sold for £58 16s to the sixth Earl of Denbigh. Earls of Denbigh, Newnham Paddox, Warwickshire. Frick, 1917.
Source: Paintings in The Frick Collection: American, British, Dutch, Flemish and German. Volume I. New York: The Frick Collection, 1968.
