Setting up home

The two women met in Ireland in 1768 when Sarah was a teenager and Eleanor was in her late twenties. Both had been born into the Irish aristocracy, but were not prepared to follow the path that was expected of them, which typically involved being married off to an appropriate male suitor at a young age.

In 1778, when Sarah was 23 and Eleanor 39, they left Ireland together, much to the consternation of their families. They made their way to north Wales and for a while led a fairly nomadic life. Eventually they set up home in a modest stone-built cottage on the outskirts of the village of Llangollen, which they improved and converted into a Gothic fantasy home, filled with eclectic features from the medieval to the baroque. They renamed it Plas Newydd, meaning ‘the New House’ in Welsh.

Here Sarah and Eleanor lived in rural ‘retirement’, pursuing scholarly interests in the library they added to the house, farming on adjacent plots of land they acquired over time, and developing a carefully designed garden full of unusual Gothic features.

Secret portraits

This was a time when portraits of celebrities, in the form of prints, were widely circulated and keenly collected, and the fame of the Ladies of Llangollen meant that there was demand for images of them. Sarah and Eleanor were reputedly reluctant to sit for their portraits, but some visitors still attempted to capture their likenesses.

Chief among them was Mary Parker (1799–1864), later Lady Leighton, whose family’s ancestral home, Sweeney Hall, was only 15 miles from Plas Newydd. Mary was an accomplished amateur artist and occasionally sent Sarah and Eleanor drawings of their gardens and the surrounding countryside. She appears to have been a frequent visitor, and on one occasion managed to surreptitiously sketch simple pencil portraits of the two women.

After the deaths of Eleanor in 1829 and Sarah in 1831, Mary Parker worked up her sketched portraits of the ladies into an imagined composition, in watercolour, showing them sitting in their library. She is believed to have gained access to Plas Newydd one final time before it was sold in 1832, to record the interior of the library for this purpose.

The resulting image was subsequently translated into print by the lithographer Richard James Lane (1800–72) – an impression of which can now be found in the Audley End collection. Around this time Lane was becoming well known for his lithographs of society figures and theatre personalities, so he was presumably seen as the perfect person to undertake this commission.

Reaching Audley End

How the two lithographs ended up at Audley End is not documented, but a handwritten inscription on Lane’s helps to establish its provenance. A note at the top of the page reads: ‘With Lady Leighton’s compts [compliments] to Ld John Fitzroy’.

Lady Leighton was, of course, Mary Parker – the artist whose original portrait of the ladies in their library Lane’s lithograph reproduced. The inscription therefore tells us that Mary herself gave this copy of the print (an early and highly desirable ‘proof’ copy) to Lord John Fitzroy, who was an occasional visitor to Audley End during the 1840s.