On the stairwell of the Rosenbach Museum & Library’s historic house hangs a portrait of a woman and her child (1954.1882). The woman’s elbow rests on a plush sofa while the child combs her mother’s dark hair. The identity of the woman has long been a source of confusion, and our limited documentation on the portrait is often contradictory. Is she the Marquise du Blaisel, the wife of a French nobleman? Is she Mrs. Henry Baring, the ex-wife of a prominent English banker? Or is she Maria Mathilda Bingham, the disgraced daughter of a wealthy Philadelphian politician? By interrogating the language historically used to describe this portrait, and working through the confusion and contradiction, its subject might slowly come into focus.
Marquise du Blaisel/ Mrs. Henry Baring
Philip Rosenbach purchased the portrait in 1926 from the collections of the late Viscount Leverhulme. The auction catalog provides the title “Marquise de [sic] Blaisel and Child” and describes the portrait a “very charming example of Lawrence,” in reference to Thomas Lawrence, the English portrait painter (1926, pp.102-103). Yet, with our spotlight on these men, – the renowned art collectors, Leverhulme and Rosenbach, alongside the brilliant but troubled artist, Lawrence, – the woman depicted in the portrait slips away. She is the “half-length figure,” “the mother,” and “the lady,” identified only by the title of her husband, Auguste du Blaisel. The French nobleman inherited the title from his father, and then married twice in the first half of the 19th century, lending further confusion to contemporary identification.
After Philip Rosenbach’s death in 1953, the portrait was appraised and accessioned into the collections of the Rosenbach Foundation (the precursor to the Rosenbach Museum & Library) under the same title. The name appears again sporadically, in an inventory in the late-1960s, and then in correspondence with the Frick Collection in New York in December 1980. However, by the summer of 1981, someone on staff had made a startling discovery. Another portrait had been found in a private collection, also attributed to Lawrence and likely the source for the Rosenbach copy. The larger group portrait includes the mother and child, depicted in the same serene domestic view, except that now a rambunctious dog approaches from the right, barely restrained by a young boy at the foot of the sofa. The larger portrait led the staff member to Lawrence’s catalogue raisonné, a comprehensive account of all known works by the artist, which in turn provided a new title: “Baring, Mrs. Henry, and children” (Garlick 1964, p.27).
According to the entry in the catalogue raisonné, it seemed that the woman was not the Marquise du Blaisel, the wife of a French nobleman; she was in fact Maria Mathilda, or Mrs. Henry Baring, the wife of an English banker and politician. Whoever made the discovery documented the original title as an error, the title “Mrs. Henry Baring and Child” stuck, and we would tell the unhappy story of Mrs. Henry Baring for the next forty years; she was the daughter of the Philadelphian statesman William Bingham, who exiled her to England at the turn of the 19th century. She married her sister’s brother-in-law, Henry Baring, in 1802, and the couple had three sons and two daughters before they eventually divorced in 1824.
This might have been the end of Mrs. Henry Baring’s story. Yet, elsewhere in the Rosenbach’s collections, there are hints to her second act. The Baring divorce was a scandal, significant enough to warrant the attention of the satirist George Cruikshank. In the first panel of Cruikshank’s two-part print “Bearing & Forbearing” (1954.1880.1754), a customs official presents a man with a box of jewels, confiscated as the man’s wife had attempted to elope to France with her lover. In the second panel, the man returns the jewels to the wife, on the condition that she promises never to return. Indeed, Mrs. Henry Baring divorced Henry Baring in 1824, left England for France, and later married a Frenchman by the name of Auguste du Blaisel. The woman in the portrait is both Mrs. Henry Baring and the Marquise de Blaisel; she is also, perhaps most significantly, Maria Mathilda Bingham, the woman who chose to leave a loveless marriage, who had Henry Baring painted out of the larger group portrait, and who, it is possible, commissioned the Rosenbach copy before her death in the 1840s.
Maria Mathilda Bingham
The Rosenbach is currently updating and expanding its online library and museum catalogs. We are using this ambitious IMLS-funded project as an opportunity to collaborate with community partners, and to review examples of harmful, insensitive or outdated language used in the past to describe our collections. You can learn more about the process by reading our statement on Harmful Content and Reparative Cataloging. In line with the work of reparative cataloging, we had a few questions. How do you reconcile all this biographical information about Maria Mathilda? Would it be possible to redress the historical naming conventions that had hidden Maria Mathilda’s identity for so long? Could these changes enrich our catalog records, and make the Rosenbach’s collections more accessible to researchers and the public?
Coverture was a legal doctrine in English law until the late-19th century. While an unmarried woman could own property and make contracts in her own name, a married woman had no independent legal existence of her own, as it was merged with that of her husband. The conventions that were used to entitle the Rosenbach copy, first “Marquise de Blaisel and Child” and later “Mrs. Henry Baring and Child,” are thought to be rooted in this legal doctrine, as Maria Mathilda’s identity is figuratively subsumed by the titles and identities of her respective husbands (Lamber 1973). In a case study for Yale Special Collections, Sandrine Guérin notes how these archival practices, while reflective of the accepted norms and practices of society in a particular historical moment, “have contributed to the erasure of women in the archival record” (2022).
Thomas Lawrence did not provide a title for the larger group portrait. At the same time, we do not know how Maria Mathilda would prefer to be remembered: by the surname of the father who exiled her, the name of the husband she divorced, or the title of the husband who outlived her. Yet, in this instance, outdated language practices have worked to confuse and obscure Maria Mathilda’s identity for at least one hundred years, from the appearance of her portrait in auction catalogs in 1918 and 1926, to the portrait’s accession into a museum collection in the mid-1950s, and to its appearance in a digital collections database in the early 21st century.
As of 2024, Thomas Lawrence’s larger group portrait is on long-term display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (SK-C-1649). It is loaned by ING Barings Bank, the current iteration of the merchant bank founded by Henry Baring’s father in 1762. Yet, likely aware of the subject’s complicated biographical history, catalogers at the Rijksmuseum have entitled the portrait “Maria Mathilda Bingham with Two of her Children.” We have elected to adopt and adapt the title, “Maria Mathilda Bingham and Child,” ensuring that Maria Mathilda’s first name is displayed front and center, that the two portraits share common key words to aid searchability, and that there is continuity with titles previously used by the Rosenbach. In addition, the object record, accessible via our online catalog Phil, has been updated with a free-text note that includes the previous titles and a brief explanation.
At the Rosenbach, we do not wish to erase our institution’s earlier actions or data, but instead hope to mitigate the presence of harmful and inaccurate content, while continuing to make our collections accessible for research and discovery. This means making decisions to augment records in line with current best practice and scholarship, and to document and share these decisions in ways that are as transparent as possible. This case study is just one example. However, the same processes discussed here are transferable across the Rosenbach’s object and library catalogs, which are already rich with the stories and experiences of countless women, from the creators of art, history, and literature, to the subjects of prints, drawings, and photography, and to the collectors and donors who helped to shape the collections as they exist today. These women are too often concealed behind the names and titles of husbands, who have little claim over the extraordinary lives and achievements of their wives. Reparative cataloging provides an opportunity to bring women like Maria Mathilda into focus, and to ensure that their stories are better told.
Bibliography and Further Reading
The Art Collections of the late Viscount Leverhulme. Part two. Paintings. February 17th-19 (1926). New York: Anderson Galleries.
Catalogue of Important Pictures by Old Masters and Works of the Early English School, the Property of Messrs. Thomas Agnew & Sons, Sold Owing to the Death of Mr. W. Lockett Agnew: On Friday, June 7 (1918). London: Christie, Manson & Woods.
Garlick, K. (1964). A Catalogue of the paintings, drawings and pastels of Sir Thomas Lawrence. Glasgow: Printed for the Walpole Society, by Robert Maclehose and Company Limited.
Guérin, S. (2022). ‘Case Study: Addressing Missing Name Information for Women in Yale Special Collections.’ Yale University Library Research Guides, November 28th. https://guides.library.yale.edu/c.php?g=1140330&p=9165488&t=108045 [accessed 06/06/2024].
Lamber, Julia C. (1973). “A Married Woman’s Surname: Is Custom Law?” Articles by Maurer Faculty. 969. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/969 [accessed 06/06/2024].