Adelaide Kemble

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Adelaide Kemble (November 1815 – 4 August 1879), was a British opera singer of great promise in the first half of the nineteenth century. She was the younger daughter of actor Charles Kemble and sister to the noted actress and anti-slavery activist Fanny Kemble. Her first operatic performance on the London stage was made in Norma on 2 November 1841.

In 1843 she married Edward John Sartoris, a rich Italian, and retired after a brief but brilliant career. She wrote A Week in a French Country House (1867), a bright and humorous story, and of a literary quality not shared by other tales that followed. Her son, Algernon Charles Frederick Sartoris, married Ellen (Nellie) Wrenshall Grant, the daughter of the famous American general and president Ulysses S. Grant on May 21, 1874 in the East Room of the White House.

The young Frederic Leighton ( the painter of Flaming June and a president of the British Royal Academy of Art from 1878 until his death in 1895) was introduced to her circle in Rome, and was greatly influenced by her in many respects, most evidently, perhaps, in social and musical areas. Her soirees surely were an inspiration for his famous, annual "Leighton Musics" later in the great Victorian painter's career, held in his home (now Leighton House) in London. Mrs. Sartoris and the younger artist maintained a close friendship for the rest of her life.

Reference for Leighton connection, among many others: E. Barrington: The Life, Letters, and Work of Frederic Leighton, 1896.

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• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.