Anna Isabella Milbanke (Lady Byron)
#SUBHEADING#Who was John Hoppner?#SUBHEADINGEND# John Hoppner (1758-1810) was a leading portrait painter who admired Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence. He was the son of a domestic servant in the Royal Palace. He enjoyed patronage from King George III which later led to rumours that the king was his natural father, he never denied it. Hoppner later became the official portrait painter of the Prince of Wales in 1789, later the Prince Regent. He had become a very fashionable and successful portrait painter, regularly exhibiting at the Royal Academy. #SUBHEADING#Who was Anna Isabella?#SUBHEADINGEND# Anna Isabella Milbanke (1792-1860) was a highly educated woman in a period when women, even women of her class were not educated to this high standard. She studied classical literature, philosophy and unusually science and maths which she excelled at. She later married Lord Byron romantic poet and satirist in 1815. This unhappy marriage brought about the birth of a daughter named Augusta Ada. Isabella got out of the marriage through a scandal about Byron and his half sister. Isabella was a rich, well connected and ill-used woman; she later became Baroness Wentworth, by her own birth right and was extremely wealthy. She devoted much of her time to campaigns for prison reform and the abolitionist cause. #SUBHEADING#Anna's daughter Ada#SUBHEADINGEND# As a reaction to her husband's wild ways Annabella brought their daughter Ada (1815-1823) up extremely strictly, her education was mainly mathematics. Ada married and became Ada King, Countess of Lovelace known as an extra ordinary woman in her own right, she had three children. Ada's mathematics and scientific talents led her to work with Charles Babbage with his pioneering mechanical computer that did not have to be restricted to maths. Ada is credited with writing the world's first computer programme. Ada was still her father's daughter and she became addicted to alcohol and opium and left massive gambling debts when she died of cancer at the young age of 36. #SUBHEADING#What does the painting show?#SUBHEADINGEND# Knowing the background behind a painting helps us understand the meaning behind it. Through this picture of innocence we can see some of the stories behind it, Anna's brief marriage to Byron and how she influenced the way she raised her own unique and troubled daughter. And that perhaps one of the ways of bringing portraits alive is through understanding some of the stories linked to them. However this painting can also be seen as just a magnificent portrait of a young girl on a shoreline.
