Mrs Elizabeth Carnac

Elizabeth Rivett (1751-1780), daughter of the MP for Derby, Thomas Rivett, married in 1769 at the age of eighteen John Carnac (1721-1800), Brigadier General of the East India Company, thirty years her senior.
Carnac had by the time of their marriage accumulated a fortune during his military career in India. His career there began as a Lieutenant of the 39th Foot, serving in Madras (Chenai) as secretary and aide de campe of its colonel, John Adlecron. He transferred to the East India Company Army in 1758, to the rank of Captain, based in Bengal. Soon after his arrival he became Secretary and aide de camp of Robert Clive, Governor of Bengal, whom he described as ‘the person to whom I owe everything.’ By 1760, he was the major of the company’s forces in Bengal and with a seat in the council. According to his memorial plaque in St Thomas's Cathedral, Mumbai, ‘he distinguished himself by the most important victory gained over the Shah Zaddah in the year 1761.’
Carnac appears behind Robert Clive as his second-in-command in Benjamin West’s painting commemorating the transferal of the right of the Diwani (to collect taxes in Bengal) from the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam, 1774, following the Battle of Buxar, a pivotal moment in Indian history (a copy, c. 1818, presented by his son the Earl of Powis to the East India Company, now in the collection of the British Library, is on loan to Powis Castle). Following Clive’s return to London, Carnac supported his interests in India, including his right to receive a gift from the puppet ruler of Bengal, Mir Jafar. At Clive’s invitation, Carnac himself accepted a gift of £32,000 from the Mughal Emperor and the Rajah of Benares. His wealth was estimated at around £80,000.
On returning to England with Clive in 1767, Carnac, like most returning ‘nabobs’, used his vast wealth to acquire an estate and secure a seat in Parliament. In 1768, he was elected MP for Leominster, Shropshire, a seat previously held by the brother of his great patron, Robert Clive. Carnac and his wife Elizabeth spent the first five years of their marriage at his recently-acquired estate of Cams Hill, Fareham, Hampshire, in a newly built mansion.
During this time, and shortly before their hasty departure for India, Carnac commissioned this full-length portrait of his wife strolling through the estate, looking every bit the aristocratic lady, wearing the fashions made popular by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in Reynolds’s recent portrait: her spectacular headdress and hairstyle, complete with ostrich feathers and wearing the finest (Indian) silk trimmed with gold and ribbon (see Reynolds’s full-length portrait, Huntingdon Library and Art Gallery, California).
In the four years following their wedding, the East India Company suffered grave financial losses caused by drought in Bengal, which led to a wide-scale famine for which the company was held at least in part accountable. This caused the collapse of many banks and a massive government bail-out. In 1772, a parliamentary committee investigated Clive and other officers of the company for corruption and financial incompetence. In 1773, Carnac declared before Parliament: ‘I have not a shilling that causes me to blush. There should not be an universal brand of infamy put on every person who has been in India. Had I been rapacious I might have had 4 times the fortune I have.’
At the same time, he found himself in financial straits due to a failure to have his fortune remitted to him in England. On the recommendation of Clive, Carnac was appointed a member of council at Bombay (Mumbai), and the couple set sail on 11 April 1776, arriving in Bombay on 18 August. They were given only four months’ notice, and the fact that they neither collected Reynolds’s portrait nor payed him for it would indicate that they left in some haste. They were accompanied on the voyage by Elizabeth’s unmarried sister Frances, and her brother James, whom Carnac sponsored as a new recruit for the company, three maids and a Black servant called Caesar. Frances married soon after their arrival in Bombay.
The couple did not have children, and Elizabeth died, aged 28, in January 1780, at Broach (Bharuch), Gujurat. She was buried in St Thomas’s Cathedral, Bombay; her brother James Rivett Carnac, the residuary legatee of John Carnac, was the father of the future Governor of the Bombay Presidency of British India, 1858-1841. Three months after Elizabeth’s death, John Carnac was dismissed from the Company. In 1783 he sold his English estate and sat for a portrait miniature by Ozias Humphrey in Calcutta, which is now at the NPG (6284). He died in Mangalore in 1800, where he was buried.
The portrait remained in Reynolds’s possession until his death in 1792. An engraving after it by J.R. Smith in 1778 presumably commissioned by Reynolds indicates that the painter was satisfied with it. It was sold at his posthumous studio sale of 1796. It was acquired in c. 1820 by the sitter’s nephew, Sir James Rivett Carnac and following the death of his widow was sold at Christie’s, 15 June 1861, where it was bought by Haines for Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800-1870). According to his correspondence with his agent Samuel Mawson, he was concerned that the work should be in ‘good preservation and it is not faded which is so often the case with Sir Joshua’s work… if it is perfect in every respect and if you can get it at a reasonable price we may add it to our Manchester family.’ While acknowledging the high price he paid for it (1,710 guineas) he was glad to have found a companion piece to the magnificent portrait of Mrs Robinson by Reynolds’s rival, Gainsborough, already in his collection and which hangs nearby in the West Room of Hertford House.