Elisa de Lamartine

Elisa de Lamartine (born Mary Ann Elisa Birch; 1790–1863), also known as Marianne de Lamartine, was a French painter and sculptor believed to be of English ancestry.

Biography The artist was born 13 March 1790, in Languedoc, France. (Some sources say she was born in London, but that has not been substantiated.) She was the daughter of Major William Henry Birch and Christina Cordelia Reessen, and was baptized on 31 May 1792 at the parish of Saint Anne in Soho, City of Westminster, in London. The couple had two children: Félix Marie Emilius Alphonse de Lamartine (born in Rome, Italy in 1821 and died in Paris in December 1822 of fever before reaching two) and Marie Louise Julie de Lamartine, known as Julia, (born in Mâcon, France 14 May 1822). Julia died in Beirut, Lebanon in 1832, at ten years of age, during a family expedition to Lebanon, Syria and the Holy Land in 1832–33.

Elisa died on 24 May 1863 in Paris at age 73.

In 1843, Lamartine worked with her teacher, the sculptor François Jouffroy, on a font made of Trinitarian marble at the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois in Paris, which was described as "a holy water font executed on the drawings of Mme de Lamartine, puppets parading around a cross."

Selected work in public collections

Lamartine was known as a painter, watercolorist, sculptor, draftswoman, illustrator and musician. Johann Ender, Portrait of Mary Ann Elisa Birch (1790-1863), 1821, drawing engraved by Thomas-Casimir Regnault. A copy of the engraving is kept at the Palace of Versailles.