The Happy Mother

The Happy Mother is one of four stipple engravings by Gillray after drawings by the amateur artist, Countess Lavinia Spencer.

The subject, style, and oval format of this print are in keeping with the kind of sentimental furniture prints produced by Angelica Kauffman and Giovanni Cipriani and most often engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi. The idealized mother, dressed in vaguely classical attire, is shown with an embroidery frame on her lap, pleasantly interrupted, in her very feminine work, by a young child eager to show her mother a bird held delicately in her hand.

At the time of this print, Lavinia had a four year old son, George (born May 30, 1782) and was pregnant with a daughter, Sarah (born Juy 29, 1787). In between thise pregnancies, she had given birth to a stillborn child, so she was certainly familiar with the realities of of child-bearing. But like the print by Angelica Kauffman, Innocence, the faces, forms, and emotions are carefully stylized, leaving little of any reality it might have been based on.

The daughter of Margaret Bingham, herself a copyist and artist of (primarily) portrait miniatures, Lavinia was a precocious and prolific draughtswoman. In addition to the drawings engraved by Gillray, there are at least ten prints based on drawings of hers which appear to have been drawn before 1787. Most of them, like A Happy Mother include a woman and child interacting with one another like a kind of 18th century Mary Cassatt.

Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on The Happy Mother.
• Draper Hill, Mr. Gillray The Caricaturist, 1965, p. 27
• Tim Clayton, James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire p. 75.
• "Lavinia Spencer, Countess Spencer," Wikipedia
• "Embroidery hoops and frames," Wikipedia
• "Susanna Vivares," British Musuem
• "Francesco Bartolozzi," Wikipedia
• "Angelica Kauffman," Wikipedia
• "Giovanni Battista Cipriani," Wikipedia