English: Daniel Gardner (Kendal 1745 - 1805 London)

Portrait of Albinia Louisa, Countess of Buckinghamshire, née Bertie (1738-1816) wife of the 3rd Earl of Buckinghamshire

Pastel and bodycolour;

signed lower right: Dan. Gardner

836 by 535 mm

The sitter was raised at Branston, Lincolnshire, in 1757, at the age of nineteen, she married the Hon. George Hobart, the eldest son of the 1st Earl of Buckinghamshire by his second wife, who was initially employed as secretary to his half-brother, the British Ambassador to the Court of the Empress Catherine II in St Petersburg. By 1766, the couple were living at Nocton Hall in Lincolnshire, a house given to George Hobart by the infamous Sir Francis Dashwood, a founder of the Hellfire Club and one-time Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Like Dashwood, Albinia was known for her extravagance as an entertainer and gambler. She lived between Nocton Hall and Hobart House in Richmond, hosting large parties and dramatic performances at both. It was also at this time (in the late 1770s to early 1780s) that her husband took over the management of the Haymarket Opera House. Excluded as a woman from gambling clubs such as Brooks’s, Albinia made her own house available as a centre for unlicensed, high stakes gambling. She would also plough her own furrow in the male world of politics, publicly canvassing for her cousin, the Tory MP Sir Cecil Wray in the 1784 General Election. It was during the same election that Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, would so visibly lend her support to Charles Fox’s Whigs. Both women were unsparingly caricatured by Thomas Rowlandson and James Gilray, with Albinia being the subject of some fifty prints.

On the death of her heirless brother-in-law, Albinia's husband became the 3rd Earl of Buckinghamshire, and Albinia, a Countess. They had eight children, the eldest son succeeding his father as the 4th Earl in 1804, twelve years before the Dowager Countess’s death in 1816.

A version of this work exists in the Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris, for which the provenance for the present pastel, has been claimed erroneously.