Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Killigrew, Anne
KILLIGREW, ANNE (1660–1685), poetess and painter, daughter of Dr. Henry Killigrew [q. v.], master of the Savoy, was born in 1660 in St. Martin's Lane, London, shortly before the Restoration, and was christened privately, as the offices of the common prayer were not then publicly allowed. Her father was chaplain to the Duke of York, and in due course she became maid of honour to Mary of Modena, duchess of York; but in her twenty-fifth (or twenty-sixth?) year she was attacked by small-pox, and in June 1685 she died in her father's rooms in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. She was buried 15 June 1685 in the chancel of St. John the Baptist's Chapel in the Savoy (entry in register, communicated by the late Rev. Henry White). According to the copy of the inscription upon her monument (since destroyed by fire), and given in her poems of 1686, she died on 16 June.
In 1686 a quarto volume, ‘Poems by Mrs. Anne Killigrew,’ was published. To the hundred pages of verses there was prefixed a mezzotint engraving of the author by Becket, after a painting by herself, and by way of introduction there was Dryden's ode ‘To the pious memory of the accomplished young lady, Mrs. Anne Killigrew, excellent in the two sister arts of Poesy and Painting.’ Johnson considered this ode to be the noblest in our language—a judgment then bold and now scarcely intelligible. Her own verses are forgotten, but she seems to have been a woman of sincere piety and much charm of character. Dryden alludes to paintings of James II and his queen by Anne Killigrew, and to pictures of country scenery. Three of her paintings are mentioned in her poems, and six others were sold in her brother Admiral Killigrew's collection in 1727. Besides Becket's engraving of Anne Killigrew, an engraving was made by Chambers from her own painting for Walpole's ‘Anecdotes of Painting;’ and there is a scarce mezzotint from the same painting by Blosteling. Lowndes mentions large-paper (folio) copies of Anne Killigrew's ‘Poems,’ with a portrait different from that in the ordinary copies.
[Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, 1742, pp. 337–45; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, iv. 623; Loftie's Memorials of the Savoy, 1878, pp. 199–206; Cibber's Lives of the Poets, ii. 224–6; Granger's Biog. Hist. 1775, vol. iv. class x. p. 129; Boase and Courtney's Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, 1874, i. 286; Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, 1849, ii. 456, 457; Miss E. C. Clayton's English Female Artists, pp. 59–70.]