Lot 23: Samuel Cotes (British, 1734-1818) Mary Ann Yates (née Graham) (1728-1787), looking to her left, wearing blue robe, pinned at the shoulder and slashed sleeve with pearls, white smock, cream mantle, drop pearl earring, blue ribbons and white ostrich

Mary Ann Yates (née Graham) (1728-1787), looking to her left, wearing blue robe, pinned at the shoulder and slashed sleeve with pearls, white smock, cream mantle, drop pearl earring, blue ribbons and white ostrich feathers in her upswept powdered hair.
Signed on obverse with initials and dated SC/1776, turned pearwood frame, the inner ormolu mount with chasing oak leaf motif.
Oval, 83mm (3 1/4in) high
Provenance: Robert Bayne-Powell
Purchased in 1977
Exhibited: Portrait Miniatures from the Merchiston Collection, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 23 September – 11 December 2005, no.22
Literature: Robert Bayne-Powell, 18th Century Miniatures, Discovering Antiques
Stephen Lloyd, Exhibition Catalogue, 2005, p.32-3 and 62, ill.col.pl.9

Mary Ann Yates was London's leading tragedienne in the years between the death of Susannah Cibber and the rise of Sarah Siddons. She is first recorded acting the part of Anne Bullen in Henry VIII with Thomas Sheridan's Dublin company in January 1753 - an inauspicious début. Ignoring Sheridan's advice to abandon her theatrical ambitions, she sought employment with David Garrick at Drury Lane, where she made her début as Marcia in Henry Crisp's Virginia in 1754. Here she impressed some of the more discerning members of the Drury Lane company, among them the recently widowed comedian, Richard Yates (c.1706–1796), more than twenty years her senior and one of Garrick's stalwarts. When Mary Ann married him in 1756, her theatrical status rose and by the Spring of 1759 she had become a Drury Lane favourite.

Ambitious for control of her own life, Yates chafed under Garrick's regimen. It was in conscious defiance of the great manager's wishes that in summer 1761 she led her husband into alliance with Garrick's adversary Samuel Foote and Arthur Murphy in a Drury Lane season during the months when the playhouse was normally closed. The original idea was that Murphy and Foote would present three of their own plays in repertory, with Richard and Mary Ann Yates featuring in most of them. In the event, Mary Ann's persistent illness was a catastrophe for the enterprise.

In 1767, the Drury Lane management refused to meet her financial demands so she transferred her allegiance to Covent Garden, under the management of George Colman the elder. By the early 1770s there was clamour for a third London theatre, and in 1773, Mary Ann Yates joined Frances Brooke in the management of the King's Theatre—then the home of opera in London. With Richard Yates as a generally silent partner, the two women contrived to improve the failing fortunes of opera at the same time as mounting an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to persuade the lord chamberlain to permit them to stage plays. Fanny Burney's record of a visit to the opera house in 1774 suggests that Mrs Yates considered herself a hostess rather than a manager.

Despite the enmity between Garrick and Mary Ann Yates's managerial partner, Frances Brooke, she returned to Drury Lane for the 1774–5 season, and remained a member of the company after Garrick's retirement in 1776. Such was her eminence that she was chosen to deliver the elegy, written by Sheridan, at the great actor–manager's funeral in 1779. She made her last regular appearance as Hermione in The Winter's Tale in May 1783. She died four years later from dropsy.