ABSTRACT
Although better known today for his fanciful Gothic Revival country estate of Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole also has achieved lasting art historical renown for compiling one of the key biographical sources on British artists, the multi-volume Anecdotes of Painting in England. Although the historian was friends with a number of prominent women artists in England, such as Lady Diana Beauclerk and Anne Damer, and had dedicated the 1762 edition of the Anecdotes to a woman, Mary Lepell, his interest in recording the achievements of women painters seems rather negligible. Thus to a limited degree the Anecdotes might reflect a growing cultural acceptance of women artists by the latter half of the eighteenth-century in England. In many ways, Anne Killigrew is the British counterpart to the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Irene di Spilimbergo: both were talented painters and poets, came from aristocratic families, died prematurely, and were promptly eulogized in poetic verse.
