Anne Ford - Life and Music

Life and Music

Some aspects of Anne Ford's life are typical of talented and gifted women in the traditional class society of 18th-century England. She gained more education than most as she had a knowledge of five foreign languages and played several fretted string instruments, including the lute-like English guitar and the viola da gamba. This gave her a chance to perform with others giving Sunday concerts at her house. Her father, Thomas Ford, refused to allow her to perform publicly. She also was a singer with a beautiful voice by her early twenties, but her earliest attempts to appear in public venues were unsuccessful; her father went so far as to have her arrested twice to prevent her escaping his control. Eventually she made a successful escape, and held her first public subscription concert on March 18, 1760. She performed a series of subsequent concerts, including daily performances from Oct. 24 through Oct. 30 of that year, though her playing on the "masculine" viol da gamba, comparable to a modern cello, was somehow considered a point of controversy.

Ford gave a performance in 1761, 'English airs' accompanying herself on the musical glasses, at Spring Gardens. She also wrote publishing Instructions for Playing on the Musical Glasses, comparable to the glass harp of Richard Pockrich. These glasses were tuned with water, and preceded the 1762 armonica (Glass harmonica) produced by Marianne Davies.

Ford's accomplishments risked to be complicated by an infatuated lover, the Earl of Jersey, who offered her £800 a year to be to his mistress. When she refused, Lord Jersey tried to sabotage her initial public concert, but she earned £15 from it nonetheless. In 1761 she published a pamphlet, A Letter from Miss F—d to a Person of Distinction, defending her position. This in turn provoked a pamphlet from the Earl, A Letter to Miss F—d. The brief pamphlet war between them differed in subject and tone from others conducted in that era.

On 27 September 1762, she became the third wife of Philip Thicknesse,therefore establishing greater social standing and respect.

She and her husband were travelling to Italy in 1792 when Thicknesse died suddenly in Boulogne and his wife was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. After the execution of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794, she was released under a general pardon for all prisoners who could prove that they could earn their living; her profession stood her in good stead.

In 1800 Anne Ford published an autobiographical roman à clef entitled The School for Fashion, which included many public figures of the day in thin disguise. She herself featured as "Euterpe."

After two centuries, she is perhaps best represented as the subject of one of Thomas Gainsborough's acknowledged masterpieces, painted in 1760 and later known as his "Portrait of Mrs. Philip Thicknesse, née Anne Ford."