There is a Damery hanging in Boston

A cousin from the Canadian branch of the name, Greg Damery, has been in touch, and he sent me something wonderful.

This is the Presumed Portrait of the Chevalier de Damery, painted around 1765 by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, one of the most fashionable painters in eighteenth-century Paris. It hangs today in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession 1982.140). The sitter is believed to have been an officer in the French Guards, and not just a customer but a patron and close friend of the artist: the decoration painted so carefully on his coat is the cross of the Ordre de Saint-Louis.

The Chevalier belonged to the old French line of the name, from the Champagne country where a village called Damery still stands among the vineyards on the Marne. And the painting travelled as handsomely as its sitter dressed: through the collection of Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, Napoleon's niece, across the Atlantic in 1904, and to rest at last in Boston, of all places, where a colony of Damerys had long since put down roots. While one branch of the name farmed West Cork, another was sitting for Greuze in Paris. It is all one story, and room in it for everyone.

There is more from Greg's treasure trove in the next post in this series: it turns out the name did not just sit for painters. It held the brush.