Lady Archer
This lady, formerly Miss West, lived to a good age—a proof that cosmetics are not so fatal as some would have us suppose. Nature had given her a fine aquiline nose, like the princesses of the House of Austria, and she did not fail to give herself a complexion. She resembled a fine old wainscoted painting, with the face and features shining through a thick incrustation of copal varnish.
Her ladyship was for many years the wonder of the fashionable world, envied by all the ladies of the Court of George the Third. She had a well-appointed house in Portland Place. Her equipage was, with her, a sort of scenery. She gloried in milk-white horses to her carriage, the coachmen and footmen wore very showy liveries, and the carriage was lined with silk of a tint to exhibit the complexion to advantage.
Alexander Stephens, amongst whose papers was found this account of Lady Archer, tells us that he recollected to have seen Mrs. Robinson (the Perdita of the Prince of Wales’s love) go far beyond all this in the exuberance of her genius, in a yellow lining to her landau, with a black footman, to contrast with her beautiful complexion and fascinating figure, and thus render both more lovely. Lady Archer lived at Barn Elms Terrace, and her house had the most elegant ornaments and draperies to strike the senses, and yet powerfully address the imagination. Her kitchen-garden and pleasure-ground, of five acres—the Thames, flowing in front, as if a portion of the estate—the apartments decorated in the Chinese style, and opening into hothouses stored with fruits of the richest growth, and greenhouses with plants of great rarity and beauty, and superb couches and draperies, effectively placed, rendered her home a sort of elysium of luxury.
Barn Elms will be remembered as the scene of an older eccentricity—Heydegger’s instantaneous light reception of George II., a device worthy of the master of the revels.