BIOGRAPHY:
AMELIA ANGERSTEIN
1775 - 1848

Amelia Angerstein, nee Lock, was born in 1775 and became the wife of John Julius Angerstein, who was many years her senior. Mr. Angerstein (1735-1823) was German by birth, but moved to England in about 1750 and rose to success as a banker. His extensive personal collection of art became the nucleus of the National Gallery after his death.

Mother of seven children, Amelia Angerstein was also an amateur artist. The Angerstein family’s extensive and intelligent art-collecting brought her into contact with contemporary artists including William Blake and Henry Fuseli. Although Amelia Angerstein probably had no pretensions about her own talents, the quality of the collection certainly would have helped her refine her eye. For example, the rounded forms of her pencil sketches are similar in style to Fuseli’s sketches.

The Amelia Angerstein drawings at Savageau’s come from the artist’s sketchbooks and show modest domestic scenes of mothers with children. In other words, the artist was drawing what she knew, probably portraying friends and family from life. While the treatments may seem overly sentimental to the modern eye, Angerstein’s sketches tap the same sensibilities explored professionally a few years earlier in the paintings of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, 1755-1842, portraitist of Queen Marie Antoinette) and nearly a century later by Mary Cassatt (American, 1844-1926).
The appeal of the Angerstein pieces is their unselfconscious sense of intimacy, their total lack of pretension and the artist’s obvious affection for her subjects.

Did Amelia Angerstein have any thoughts of pursuing art professionally? Probably not, but the family’s artistic legacy was far-reaching nonetheless. In 1824, the year following her husband’s death, the Angerstein art collection was purchased by the Government of Lord Liverpool and became the founding nucleus of England’s National Gallery.