This engraving by Walker, which appeared in Johnson's Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum for 1778, was based on Richard Samuel's original portrait of The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (now owned by the National Portrait Gallery, London).
Elizabeth Carter commented on Walker's engraving in a letter to Elizabeth Montagu:
Deal, November 23, 1777
/47/ O Dear, O dear, how pretty we look, and what brave things has Mr. Johnson said of us! Indeed, my dear friend, I am just as sensible to present fame as you can be. Your Virgils and your Horaces may talk what they will of posterity, but I think it is much better to be celebrated by the men, women, and children, among whom one is actually living and looking. One thing is very particularly agreeable to my vanity, to say nothing about my heart, that it seems to be a decided point, that you and I are always to figure in the literary world together, and that from the classical poet, the water drinking rhymes, to the highest dispenser of human fame, Mr. Johnson's pocket book, it is perfectly well understood, that we are to make our appearance in the same piece. I am mortified, however, that we do not in this last display of our persons and talents stand in the same corner. As I am told we do not, for to say truth, by the mere testimony of my own eyes, /48/ I cannot very exactly tell which is you, and which is I, and which is any body else. But this must arise from the deficiency of my sight, for some of the good people of Deal, I am told, affirm my picture to be excessively like.
| --Letter CCVI from Letters from
Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, To Mrs. Montagu, Between the
Years 1755 and 1800, Chiefly Upon Literary and Moral
Subjects. 3 volumes. London, 1817. Volume 3, pages
47-48. |
- Central Figure (holding lyre):
- Elizabeth Linley Sheridan (1754-92),
singer and renowned beauty, she assisted her husband,
playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, when he was manager
of Drury Lane Theatre
- Seated at easel to the right:
- Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807), Swiss
painter who moved to London in 1766 and one of the
original 36 members of the Royal Academy
- Standing behind Kauffman on the left and gesturing toward Sheridan:
- Anna Lætitia Barbauld, poet,
critic, and editor
- Standing behind Kauffman on the right:
- Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806), scholar,
poet, letter-writer, and translator of Epictetus
- The group of five on the left are,
from left to right:
BACK ROW: - Charlotte Lennox (1729/30-1804),
novelist and woman of letters, author of The Female
Quixote (1752)
- Hannah
More (1745-1833), educator, dramatist, poet,
moralist, author of the Cheap Repository
Tracts, Strictures on the Modern System of
Female Education (1799), Coelebs in Search
of a Wife (1807), and lifelong friend of Anna
Barbauld
- FRONT ROW:
- Elizabeth Griffith (1727-93), writer
and actress
- Elizabeth Montagu (1720-1800),
Bluestocking literary patron, letter-writer, and critic,
author of Essay on the Writing and
Genius of Shakespeare (1769)
- Catherine Macaulay (1731-91), author of an eight-volume history of England and Letters on Education (1790)