Bright Souls - The Forgotten Story of Britain's First Female Artists

The Forgotten Story of

Britains First Female Artists A N E X H I B I T I O N C U R AT E D B Y

Dr. Bendor Grosvenor

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The Forgotten Story of

Britains First Female Artists “Thus nothing to her genius was deny’d, But like a ball of fire the further thrown, Still with a greater blaze she shone, And her bright soul broke out on evry side.”

John Dryden's

Ode to Anne Killigrew

Contents Acknowledgements 2 Foreword by Gavin Strang

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Introduction 4 Chapter 1 Joan Carlile 7 Chapter 2 Mary Beale 17 Chapter 3 Anne Killigrew 29

Produced by Lyon & Turnbull to accompany the exhibition Bright Souls: The Forgotten Story of Britain’s First Female Artists, held at Lyon & Turnbull, 22 Connaught Street, London, 24 June to 06 July 2019 All text by Dr. Bendor Grosvenor Non-executive Director of Lyon & Turnbull

Appendix A Checklist of works by Joan Carlile

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Appendix B Verse by Anne Killigrew

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Appendix C Checklist of works by Anne Killigrew 46

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Acknowledgements I am most grateful to those who have generously lent pictures; Henrietta Boex and Natalie Rigby at Falmouth art gallery, Alex McWhirter at the West Suffolk Heritage Service, Edward and Sarah Maitland-Carew at Thirlestane Castle, The Earl of Haddington and the Dowager Countess of Haddington at Mellerstain House, Charles Berkeley at Berkeley Castle, George Drye at Lamport Hall, all immediately understood the initial idea of the exhibition, and responded with enthusiasm. I am also grateful to Joshua Nash, curator at Berkeley Castle, for his kind support and help.

At Lyon & Turnbull, Gavin Strang, Paul Roberts and Nick Curnow had little hesitation in agreeing to the exhibition, and Rohan McCulloch, Carly Shearer, Alex Dove, Jess Curnow, Alex Robson, and Matt McKenzie have made organising the loans and compiling the catalogue both possible and enjoyable.

I have benefited significantly from the research and advice of Adam Busiakeiwicz and Jane Eade in relation to Joan Carlile, and Penelope Hunting for Mary Beale.

No art historian can function without the industry of those who have gone before them, and while the study of female artists in 17th Century Britain was pioneered by the likes of Margaret Toynbee and Richard Jeffree in the 1950s and 70s respectively, their greatest champion today is Tabitha Barber, to whom, for her advice and wisdom over many years, I am indebted.

Bendor Grosvenor Edinburgh May 2019

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Foreword Gavin Strang Managing Director of Lyon & Turnbull When Bendor first discussed the idea of this exhibition with us we were immediately taken by it, not only for its timely ‘call to action’ in championing the rediscovery of Britain’s early women artists, but also because its purpose struck a chord with an ethos central to what we do as auctioneers and valuers: the unearthing of ‘hidden treasures’. At Lyon & Turnbull, we are embarking on a new series of sales, ‘The Classic Tradition’, which also aims to do just that; looking for the best examples of paintings and sculpture from centuries gone by. We therefore felt that the timing was right for us to stage this gem of an exhibition.

I would like to thank all the generous lenders who have entrusted their prized works to our care for a few weeks this summer, we are very much indebted to them. I would also like to thank Dr. Bendor Grosvenor for coming up with this wonderful idea for an exhibition and for making it happen. We hope you enjoy this show as much we have enjoyed being involved with it and that it leaves you with an appreciation of the important role these artists played when we re-examine our cultural history.

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Introduction ‘Women have no souls… no more than a goose’; or so the preacher George Fox was told at a meeting in Nottingham in 1646.1 It was not an uncommon view in Britain in the 17th Century. In an age of intense religiosity, a woman’s place in society was dictated by the Bible. And the Bible said that Eve’s original sin not only made women inferior to men, but also more susceptible to evil. Satan stalked the towns and villages of Britain, and women were his target. Furthermore, St Paul’s advice in Ephesians chapter 5 - ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord’ compelled women to ‘love, honour and obey’ their husbands.

Women thus had no property rights in marriage. And as the Bible went, so did the law. As Antonia Fraser concludes in The Weaker Vessel, in English common law at the outset of the 17th Century ‘no female had any rights at all’. The situation was little different in Scotland.

In fact, the beginning of the 17th Century was a particularly bad time to be a British woman. The Reformation had reduced the already few opportunities women had to be educated, thanks to the dissolution of the convents. The new king, James I & VI was a quixotic misogynist. Learned women were mistrusted. What we would now regard as mere eccentricity in a woman could see her condemned as a witch, and killed. In employment, a woman’s choice was also limited. The law, the church, politics and medicine were closed to women. Depending on their class, a woman was expected variously to clean, to cook, to sew, to spin, to nurse, to sing (‘but not perpetually’ as Sir Thomas Overbury wrote in 1614, for ‘silence in a woman is the most persuading oratory’), to dress well, to bring dowries, and above all, to breed. 2

1. Antonia Fraser, ‘The Weaker Vessel - Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England’, (London 1984) p.3, still the best book on the subject.

2. Ibid, p.125.

But, in certain circumstances, she could also paint. Art was open to wealthier women as an occupation; that is, in an amateur sense as something to occupy the time. There had been professional women artists working in Britain in the 16th Century, though these came from Europe, such as the miniaturist Lavinia Teerlinc of Flanders, where women enjoyed greater freedoms. But when it came to easel painting in oil, no British woman had ever attempted - or more likely, been allowed - to work professionally.

The political upheavals in 17th Century Britain, however, so shook the traditional structures of society that just occasionally opportunities arose which allowed gifted amateur female painters to try their hand at painting for money. Joan Carlile can claim to be the first professional female British painter, and was probably taking paying commissions in the late 1630s. But she first established a London studio during the Protectorate, when it briefly seemed that something approaching women’s rights might come onto the political agenda. Mary Beale took to painting professionally full time in the 1670s partly because her husband, Charles, had lost his job after the Restoration.

Not that such opportunities were easy to grasp. Britain’s long-standing reliance on foreign artists, from Hans Holbein to Godfrey Kneller, meant that there was no established ‘British school’ for aspiring British male artists to flourish in, yet alone female ones. There were no art academies. No major artist of the period is recorded as having employed a female assistant. The three artists in this exhibition, Joan Carlile, Mary Beale, and Anne Killigrew, thus fought against the odds to become pioneers in the story of female British artists. Today we would say they broke the glass ceiling.

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They began as amateurs. Carlile and Beale started painting professionally after first gaining success through painting friends and neighbours. Killigrew’s early death meant she never had the chance to become a professional, though she evidently had the talent. Critics might today point to elements of their work as ‘weak’, but on the whole these reveal only a lack of formal training. The elongated and occasionally awkward figures seen in both Carlile and Killigrew’s work reflect their inability to practice drawing from the life, that essential stepping stone for any figurative artist.

And yet what makes the work of Carlile, Beale and Killigrew so interesting is just how different it is from their male counterparts. Perhaps because their route into painting was not initially one dictated by the need to be commercially successful, their work betrays an interest in subjects beyond the jobbing, formal portraits demanded by most British patrons, and which the likes of Sir Peter Lely were obliged to churn out day after day with the support of assistants. Arguably, Carlile is the first British artist of any sex to revel in - and excel at - painting the modern landscape as she saw it. Beale’s portraits are the first by a British artist in which we regularly find something approaching a smile. And even on the limited evidence of her surviving works, Killigrew’s ability to depict still life was highly advanced. As the following chapters will show, all three artists were hailed in their time. When Anne Killigrew died in 1685 (the same year Alice Molland became the last woman to be executed for witchcraft in Britain), the Poet Laureate, John Dryden, lavishly praised her ‘bright soul’.

Nonetheless, even the efforts of Mary Beale could create no discernable school of female British painters after her death.

The few freedoms won by women in the middle of the 17th Century did not last until the end of it.

Nor, in the centuries since, has art history been kind to Britain’s first female painters. As was common for the time, Carlile and Beale rarely if ever signed their works.

Inevitably, their paintings either lost their attributions, or came to be attributed to male artists. Killigrew did sign at least some of her paintings, but always modestly, and the signatures were easily overlooked as they became obscured by dirt and old varnish. In more recent times, art history as an academic discipline has eschewed the tools necessary to rediscover the stories of Britain’s early women artists. First, the monographic study of individual artists became unfashionable (partly because, ironically, it was believed that the ‘canon’ of western art was too male) and instead scholars focused on broader themes of context and generalisation. At the same time, the skill of connoisseurship - the ability to tell who painted what, when - was derided. Consequently, not enough art historians have either been willing or able to reconstruct the oeuvres of neglected figures like Killigrew by making new discoveries.

Happily, as the following chapters will show, the efforts of a small number of determined scholars have helped to write Carlile, Beale and Killigrew back into the broader story of British art. And yet there is much more work to be done.

Dozens of women are recorded as members of the Company of Painter Stainers in London, probably as decorative artists, but we know nothing of their work 3. A few records and photographs of now untraced paintings hint at the lives of other female artists at work in the 17th Century, including Mary More (d.c.1713), ‘Mrs Weimes’ and ‘Mrs [Sarah] Brooman’. But no major institution has attempted to bring the work of these artists to the attention of a wider public. ‘Bright Souls’ is the first exhibition of its kind. It is a small exhibition, and does not aspire to be comprehensive or definitive. But it is, hopefully, a call to action.

3. Helen Draper, ‘Mary Beale and Art’s Lost Laborers: Women Painter Stainers’, Early Modern Women: an Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol.10, No.1, 2015, pp.141151.

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Cat. 2 Joan Carlile, ‘The Stag Hunt’ [detail].

Joan Carlile with her husband, Lodowick, and two children, Penelope and James.

The earliest known self-portrait by a female British artist.

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Joan Carlile (c.1606-1679) “Mrs. Carlile … the great paintress” In 1654, Joan Carlile decided to move to London and further her career as a professional artist. She was in her late forties, and had had six children (of whom two survived).

Her husband, Lodowick, had been Keeper of Richmond park under Charles I, and as an amateur playwright and poet had enjoyed some success1. He had also contributed £1500 to the Royalist cause during the Civil War. But now Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector, and it appears the Carliles were obliged to try some other means of improving their fortunes2. Joan Carlile had been painting professionally for some years, perhaps even since the late 1630s, but now she and her family moved into the artist’s neighbourhood of Covent Garden, where lived the likes of Peter Lely, then establishing his reputation as successor to the late Sir Anthony Van Dyck. Only two years later, however, the Carliles returned to Richmond, in ‘a declining condition (for Painting and Poetry have shut out of dores Providence…)’, according to the Bishop of Salisbury, Brian Duppa3. Carlile had apparently not found it possible to sustain a living working as a female British artist in London.

But she had been the first to try, and for that she leaves an important legacy in British art history.

It is a legacy which, however, remained almost entirely unrecognised for centuries. She was first recorded in 1634 by the physician Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne as being ‘a worthy lady who paints very well’. 4 There is a brief mention in William Sanderson’s list of female artists in 1658; ‘And in Oyl Colours [to distinguish from miniaturists, or ‘Limners’] we have a virtuous example in that worthy artist Mrs Carlile.’5 A painting was sold in 1690 described as being of ‘Mrs Carlile … the great paintress’.6 In the early 18th Century she becomes mis-identified as ‘Anne Carlile’

by Bainbrig Buckeridge. Buckeridge nonetheless gives us the valuable information that ‘she Copy’d the Italian Masters so admirably well, that she was much in favour with King Charles I, who became her Patron, and presented her and Sir Anthony Van Dyck with as much Ultra-marine at one time, as cost him above 500 L [pounds].’ 7 She may also have copied portraits of Charles I himself, on a small scale, including those by William Dobson. 8 Until the mid-twentieth century, only two works were loosely attributed to her. But in 1954 Dr Margaret Toynbee, together with Sir Gyles Isham, wrote an article for The Burlington Magazine which impressively expanded Carlile’s oeuvre to eight works, correctly identified her as Joan rather than Anne, and brought to light a number of previously unidentified documents. There was little to definitively link some of the works to Carlile save connoisseurship, but subsequent discoveries have vindicated Toynbee and Isham’s instincts. We can now count 18 paintings as being by, or attributable to, Carlile. Four are displayed here (Cats.1-4).

Cat.1 is probably the earliest known work by Carlile, and is here on loan from Thirlestane Castle in Scotland, formerly home to the Dukes of Lauderdale.9 It is a small head and shoulders portrait on panel, with just enough room for a hand. Interestingly, the blue dress and sky are painted with a generous helping of ultra-marine. The picture’s scale may suggest a tentative foray into large scale painting from first painting miniatures. Throughout the 17th Century there is a tradition of women artists painting miniatures - such as Susannah Penelope Rosse (1652-1700) - which was an easier format to practice in terms of not requiring a large studio or assistants. There is some evidence that Carlile was also a miniaturist. 10

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Cat 1. Joan Carlile, Portrait of a Lady, probably Catherine Bruce, Mrs William Murray, Countess of Dysart, c.1640, oil on panel, 22x17 cm, kindly lent

by Thirlestane Castle, Scotland, accession no. H.4703. Probably the earliest known portrait by Carlile, its commission likely came about through social connections. The sitter was a neighbour and, like Carlile’s husband, a Scot.

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The sitter in Cat.1 has been identified as Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and later Duchess of Lauderdale (1626–1698), but this cannot be right, not least because the costume dates the picture to the late 1630s or early 1640s.

The sitter is more likely instead be Elizabeth Murray’s mother, Catherine Bruce (d.1649), wife of William Murray, a Scot who had been the ‘whipping boy’ of Charles I. William Murray became a favourite of Charles, and was later made Earl of Dysart. In the late 1630s he was granted the lease of the manors of Ham (where he lived, with Catherine, in Ham House) and Petersham, where the Carliles lived in a house called Petersham Lodge. It must have been through this local introduction that Joan Carlile was commissioned to paint Cat.1, though the fact that Lodowick Carlile was, like the Murrays, a Scot may also have helped. The connection was a fruitful one, for a few years later Carlile did indeed paint a portrait of Elizabeth Murray, along with her first husband, Sir Lionel Tollemache, and her sister, Margaret Murray, Lady Maynard (National Trust, Ham House, fig.1). 11 Elizabeth Murray later married the 1st Duke of Lauderdale, which accounts for Cat.1’s descent at Thirlestane Castle.

Who else, though, do we see in The Stag Hunt? Much depends on the picture’s date. If it was painted in or after 1653, then the seated woman in front of Isham may be his second wife, Vere Leigh (Isham’s first wife, Jane, died in 1639). The grouping in front of Isham may therefore show the elder children from his first marriage welcoming his second wife. Toynbee was also confident that on the left of the picture we see Joan Carlile herself, together with Lodowick and their children. There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence to confirm that this is correct, and that The Stag Hunt does indeed contain Carlile’s self-portrait, the first by a female British artist. The two figures behind the Carliles are the right ages to be their two surviving children, Penelope and James. Penelope was baptised in 1632, and while we have no baptism date for James, we do know he was born after the family moved to Petersham in 1637, and was thus considerably younger than Penelope.

The most significant of Carlile’s known pictures is The Stag Hunt (Cat.2), here on loan from Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire, formerly the seat of the Isham family.12 The picture is not signed, but has been convincingly linked to Carlile by Margaret Toynbee and Gyles Isham through the letters of Bishop Duppa. Duppa was for a time a neighbour of the Carliles, and a friend of Sir Justinian Isham 2nd Bt (1610-1675), who we can be certain appears in the picture on the right, behind the seated woman. 13 Isham was a scholar and a politician, and it seems a man of some enlightenment.

Unusually for the time, his daughters were educated alongside their brothers. We can tell by his occasional imprisonment under Cromwell that he had been a Royalist. He was evidently well acquainted with the Carliles, and at some time in the 1650s was a guest of theirs in Petersham Lodge (they seem to have regularly taken in lodgers during the Interregnum, especially Royalist ones). In 1658 Carlile would petition her distant relation by marriage, the Secretary of State, John Thurloe, to intercede on Isham’s behalf. 14

Fig.1 Joan Carlile, Elizabeth Murray (1626–1698), Countess of Dysart, with Her First Husband, Sir Lionel Tollemache (1624–1669), and Her Sister, Margaret Murray (c.1638–1682), Lady Maynard, late 1640s, oil on canvas, 109x92.5 cm, National Trust, Ham House, no. 1139727.

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Cat. 2 Joan Carlile, The Carlile Family with Sir Justinian Isham in Richmond Park, ‘The Stag Hunt’, 1650s, oil on canvas, 61x74 cm, kindly lent by the Lamport Hall Trustees, accession no.95. The Carlile and Isham families relax after a hunt, probably in Richmond Park. The combination of scale and informality make The Stag Hunt quite unlike other pictures painted at the time, and an early precursor of the British ‘conversation piece’.

Lodowick took his job as Keeper of Richmond Park seriously, writing; “This author hunts and hawks and feeds his Deer,/Not some, but most fair days, throughout the year.” 15 And the scene is likely to be in Richmond Park, with the river at the bottom of the hill before us being, presumably, the Thames. The depiction of the trees owes much to Van Dyck, and the view to the landscape is impressively naturalistic (that is to say, English, rather than Italianate). 16

The atmosphere of the picture is one of some jollity, and challenges the common assumption that the years of the Civil War and Interregnum were either brutal or Puritanically grim. Here, everyone is having a nice time (except of course the stag, who watches us mournfully through an open eye). Irrespective of exactly when it was painted or who is in it, The Stag Hunt represents an innovative departure in British art, and in both its conception and informality is like little else painted in preRestoration England. It boldly pre-dates the English craze for ‘conversation pieces’ by three-quarters of a century.

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Cat. 3 Joan Carlile, Portrait of a Lady, 1650s, possibly Elizabeth Massingberd (d.1708), wife of the 1st Earl Berkeley, oil on canvas, 142x71 cm, kindly lent by The Berkeley Will Trust, Berkeley Castle.

The overwhelming demand from British patrons in the 17th Century was for formal portraits which showed off a sitter’s wealth and status. Carlile was adept at painting expensive looking white satin dresses, but also relished creating detailed landscape settings.

There appears, however, to have been little commercial demand for such pictures. The engaging triple portrait of the Murray family at Ham House is the closest Carlile comes to recreating The Stag Hunt. Like most professional artists at the time, the requirement was to paint more conventional portraits, to show status and wealth, not friendship. An example of Carlile’s more conventional

portraits is Cat.3, on loan from Berkeley Castle. 17 By some strange irony, it has been given a later inscription attributing it to Mary Beale. Perhaps the picture was long associated with a female 17th Century artist, and whoever painted on the inscription simply added the name of the only one they had heard of, the more famous Beale.

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Cat. 4 Joan Carlile, Portrait of a Lady, 1650s, oil on canvas, 120x93 cm, kindly lent by the Mellerstain Trust, Mellerstain House, Scotland. The crown and sceptre, and probably the red table, are a later addition here, added to turn an anonymous sitter into a Queen. In the process, the attribution to Carlile was lost too.

The sitter in Cat.3 is not known,but Jane Eade has plausibly suggested she is Elizabeth Massingberd (d.1708), wife of the 1st Earl Berkeley (who incidentally was painted by Mary Beale, see fig.4 in chapter 2).18 But like all Carlile’s extant individual full-length portraits, she is placed in front of a beautifully depicted landscape. In this example, a glowing, Italianate sky illuminates a mountain range, beneath which we see a shoreline (detail right). The sea reflects the sky, and we can pick out the exquisitely detailed profile of a range of buildings. It is just the sort of landscape someone whose formative study emerged from copying works in Charles I’s Old Master collection might have painted.

The landscape is of far greater finesse than those on offer from most portraitists at the time, and may speak to Carlile’s frustration at what Thomas Gainsborough, over a century later, would call ‘the curs’d face business’.

Cat.4, on loan from Mellerstain House in Scotland, is a similar portrait from the 1650s, with a related pose and an almost identical white satin dress.19 It is a more recent addition to Carlile’s oeuvre, and was first identified by Catharine Macleod. The landscape is less developed than the Berkeley Castle picture, while on the left we see a crown and sceptre, which have been added by a later hand. This appears to have been done in an ambitious attempt to turn the sitter into Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I. The Queen’s name has been added lower left, again by a later hand, together with the signature ‘Rawlison P.’, which appears to be an entirely made up attribution, since no artist of that name is known from the period. Again, the sitter is unknown, though there is a faint chance that the crown was added to bolster some traditional ‘royal’ identification. In her will, Carlile does mention a portrait of ‘The Princess - in white satin’,20 and while this has baffled art historians until now (there being few suitable royal candidates) Jane Eade has pointed out the reference might instead point to Mary Villiers, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox. 21 She was not a princess by birth, but was a ward of Charles I, and was referred to by Lodowick Carlile as ‘The Illustrious Princess, Mary Dutchess of Richmond and Lenox’ in the dedication of his 1655 play, ‘The Passionate Lovers’.

The likeness between the Mellerstain picture and known portraits of Mary Villiers is temptingly close.

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The newly discovered Mellerstain picture is one of a number of closely related works. Carlile seems to have found a niche painting these detailed, full-length portraits of women in a landscape setting, about a metre high. They are easily recognisable, for she favoured the same basic pose for her sitters, and clothed them all in white satin dresses. Several have been discovered in recent years, and we now have a much broader idea of Carlile’s output. These include a portrait identified in a regional auction house by this writer in 2014, and subsequently acquired by Tate, becoming the first work by Carlile to enter a national collection (fig.2). As is so often the case with Carlile, it had been attributed to Lely. Jane Eade has published another previously unknown portrait in the Bute Collection at Mountstuart, of a sitter identified as Elizabeth Murray, Duchess of Lauderdale. 22 And Adam Busiackiewicz has made the crucial discovery via Instagram no less - of a portrait of a lady identified as Catherine Lyttleton standing beside a deer in an English private collection.23 This picture finally confirms the link (first made by Margaret Toynbee in 1954) between certainly attributed pictures like The Stag Hunt and the full-length individual portraits.

Joan Carlile died in 1679, four years after Lodowick. She was in debt, principally because the royal annuity of £200 a year given to the Carliles in 1661 was rarely paid. She instructed her executors to sell her remaining paintings to clear the debt. She is buried in Petersham churchyard. Appendix A is a checklist of known, attributable and recorded but lost works. As far as we can tell, Joan Carlile painted hardly any individual portraits of men. Was that her choice, or theirs?

It is just one of many unanswered questions about her life.

With luck, we may yet find more works, and discover just how great the ‘great paintress’ really was.

1. In his plays he is usually referred to as Lodowick Carlell.

12. Provenance: the picture is first mentioned in the will of Vere Isham in 1760; thence by descent at Lamport Hall.

2. The death of Joan’s reasonably wealthy mother, Mary, in 1653, may also have been a factor. See M. Toynbee and G. Isham, ‘The family connections of Joan Carlile’, in Notes and Queries, Volume CC, 1 December 1955, p.518.

13. The likeness of Isham accords well with the portraits of him still at Lamport Hall, and he was identified in the picture by his grandaughter, Vere Isham, in her will of 1760. See Eade 2018, p.24.

3. M. Toynbee and G. Isham, ‘Joan Carlile (1606?-1679) - An Identification’, in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 96, No. 618 (Sep., 1954) [hereafter Toynbee 1954], pp. 276.

14. But without success. M. Toynbee and G. Isham, ‘The family connections of Joan Carlile’, in Notes and Queries, Volume CC, 1 December 1955, p.518.

4. J. Eade, ‘Rediscovering the Worthy Artist Mrs Carlile’, in Women artists, Collectors and Patrons, National Trust Historic Houses & Collections Annual, 2018, p.23 [Hereafter, Eade 2018].

15. Toynbee, 1954, p.276.

5. William Sanderson in Graphice in 1658, Toynbee p.275.

17. First identified by Margaret Toynbee in, ‘Joan Carlile: An Additional Note’, in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 100, No.666 (Sep., 1958), p318. Perhaps because of the picture’s confused attribution, there is no early record of the picture in the Berkeley Castle inventories.

6. Sale catalogue of paintings at the Barbados Coffee House in Exchange Alley, 25th June 1690, lot 111, ‘A collection of curious pictures, viz paintings and limnings by the best masters’; transcribed

by P. Moore in The art world in Britain 1660 to 1735, at http:// artworld.york.ac.uk.

7. Toynbee, 1954, p.276. The £500 might, however be an exaggeration, given the trouble Van Dyck had in getting far smaller amounts out of the king.

8. Examples are at Belton House - inscribed verso ‘by Mrs Carlile’ - illustrated Toynbee 1954, p. 278, and possibly at the National Gallery of Ireland (currently attributed to Henry Stone), Object number NGI.251.

9. Provenance: by descent in the collections at Thirlestane Castle.

10. A Portrait miniature of a Lady, traditionally identified as Barbara Villiers, oil on copper, 4.29 inches, 10.90 cm height, was sold as attributed to Carlile, 20 November 2013, Christie’s London.

11. Accession number 1139727.

16. The Grove Dictionary of Art rather meanly describes it as ‘unconvincing’, with ‘stout, frozen figures’.

18. In discussion with Joshua Nash at Berkeley Castle.

19. Provenance: probably in the Baillie family collection since at least the beginning of the 18th Century. Ellis Waterhouse [Dictionary of 16th & 17th Century British Painters (Woodbridge, 1988) p.222] states that the inscription lower left is in the hand of Lady Grizell Baillie (1665-1746).

20. The National Archives, PROB 11/367, fols. 177r–178 21. Eade 2018 op.cit., p.24.

22. Reproduced ibid., p.21.

23. Adam Busiackiewicz, ‘A Portrait by Joan Carlile reappears’, on Painted Eloquence, an art history blog, March 12th 2019. https:// adamfineart.wordpress.com/2019/03/12/a-new-joan-carlile/

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Fig.2 Joan Carlile, Portrait of a Lady, 1650-5, oil on canvas, 110.7x90 cm, Tate Britain, T14495.

Another white satin dress, perhaps evidence that Carlile hit on a winning formula with female patrons in the mid-1650s. She always paid great attention to varying the landscape backgrounds, however. This picture was later attributed to Sir Peter Lely.

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Cat. 5 Mary Beale, Self-Portrait holding a Palette, c.1670, oil on canvas, 45.7x38.1 cm, kindly lent by the West Suffolk Heritage Service, Moyses Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds, accession no. 1993.35.

The first example of a British woman depicting herself as a professional painter, Beale’s intimate self-portrait reveals how seriously she took her occupation.

Mary Beale (1633-1699) “The excellent Mrs Mary Beale” In 1670 another artist decided, as Joan Carlile had done over a decade before, to move to London and become a professional painter. But for Mary Beale it was a bold gamble. She, her husband Charles and two children had left the city in 1665 to a live in a small house in Hampshire in straitened circumstances. Charles had lost his job, and the plague was raging. But the Beales trusted in Mary’s undoubted artistic talents, rented a house in Pall Mall, and prepared to accept commissions at the competitive rate of £5 for a half-length portrait, and £10 for a three quarterlength. Within a year, the gamble had paid off. In 1671 the Beales’ income was £118 5s, and soon she had no shortage of sitters, from the aristocracy down. By 1677 her income had risen to £429, thanks to a healthy demand for pleasingly colourful portraits such as those seen in figures 3 & 4.1 Thus Mary Beale is credited as being the first successful female British artist.

Cat.5, on loan from Moyses Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds, is a self-portrait of Mary at about this time.2 She is shown in a typically formal pose for a seated female sitter of the later 17th Century, with a column and billowing drapery behind her. But in her left hand is a palette, and in her right she holds a maulstick. Any male artist working in England at the time would have hesitated to portray themselves in such a way, preferring instead to be seen not as painters, but gentlemen. The closest Sir Anthony Van Dyck ever came to showing himself as an artist, for example, was through the mere suggestion of a raised arm in his self-portrait of the late 1630s (National Portrait Gallery).3 But for female artists, there was evidently a need to emphasise their painterly skills.4 Of course, the range of portrait poses available to most 17th Century women was

limited: there was idly seated; idly seated holding something (usually flowers); idly standing; idly standing with a dog; occasionally a shepherdess; or topless. In Cat.5, the inclusion of the palette transforms what is otherwise a probably deliberately normal composition. Mary was proud of her talent.5 Partly because of such self-portraits, as well as her prolific output, Mary Beale has not suffered the fate of her fellow female artists from the 17th Century. She has also benefited from the detailed notebooks kept by her husband, who acted as her colourman and studio manager.6 If people were aware of an early British female artist, it was Beale.

It has helped too that Beale has been lucky in her modern champions. In 1975, The Geffrye Museum in London showed a large number of her paintings, in an exhibition organised by Elizabeth Walsh and Richard Jeffree (and with the assistance of the indefatigable Margaret Toynbee).7 Jeffree, an amateur art historian, amassed a large number of Beale’s works (including Cats. 5 & 7) and on his death left his collection to the town of Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk.

The Bury collection of Beales - the most substantial in the world - formed the basis of Christopher Reeve’s ‘Mrs Mary Beale, Paintress’ exhibition in 1994. In 1999 Tabitha Barber organised another well-received Beale exhibition at the Geffrye, and continues to unearth previously lost works.

Later this year, Penelope Hunting will publish the first biography of Beale.8 All that remains to be written is a catalogue raisonné. To that extent, this exhibition seeks only to offer a brief assessment of her work, in context with that of Joan Carlile and Anne Killigrew.

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Left: Fig.3 Mary Beale, Portrait of George Berkeley, 1st Earl of Berkeley (1628-1698), oil on canvas, 127x101 cm, Berkeley Will Trust, Berkeley Castle.

Right: Fig.4 Mary Beale, Portrait of a Lady, probably a member of the Vaughan family, 1670s, oil on canvas, 127x101 cm, Carmarthenshire County Museum.

Two examples of Mary Beale’s work from the 1670s, the period of her greatest commercial success.

Mary Beale’s origins are quite unlike those of Carlile and Killigrew. She was not born to parents at court, nor the gentry, but was the daughter of the Puritan Rector of Barrow in Suffolk, John Cradock (d.1652). He was also an amateur artist, and was the first to teach Mary to paint. In 1652, she married Charles Beale (1631-1705) and moved to London for the first time. Charles Beale became Deputy Clerk of the Patents, a post which came with a house in Fleet Street large enough for Mary to have a dedicated painting room. In 1656 she gave birth to Bartholomew Beale, and in 1600 Charles ‘the younger’. One of her earliest paintings - a self-portrait with her husband and Bartholomew (fig.5) - is dated to about 1660. Despite the architectural grandeur of the backdrop, it is striking in its intimacy, and for the impression that Mary plays the leading role. While there is little evidence of Mary winning paying commissions at this time, it must have been pictures like this which earned her a place in William Sanderson’s Graphice of 1658 as one of four female artists practicing in London in oil, after Joan Carlile. In 1661 Charles Beale spent the not inconsiderable sum of £5 5s on ‘painting tools pencills, brushes, goose & swan fitches’ for Mary.9

In the absence of regular commissions at this time, Mary’s output was dominated by portraits of friends. Such pictures appear to have had a dual role of helping Mary practice and improve her portraiture, as well as developing the Beales’ social circle. Cat.6 was recently identified by the present writer, and in its technique dates to the earlier 1660s. It is noticeable for both its informality - the sitter wears plain dress, and short hair - and the confidence of its technique.

Much has been written about Beale’s dependence on Lely for instruction, and it is true that Lely gave Beale much encouragement, allowing her to copy works in his collection, and even to watch him paint. But she was not his pupil, and instead learnt her craft mostly by observation.

Here the warm, ochre colouring and the almost nervous touches around the eyes speak far more of Van Dyck’s later English portraits.10 The sitter of Cat.6 is unidentified, but it may be the Beales’ close friend, the Rev. Samuel Woodforde (16361701). In 1661 Woodforde married Charles Beale’s cousin Alice Beale, who unfortunately died in January 1664 after giving birth to their son, Heighes. Woodforde spent a great

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Fig.5 Mary Beale, Self-Portrait of Mary Beale with her Husband, Charles and Son, Bartholomew, c.1660, oil on canvas, 60.2x74 cm, The Geffrye, Museum of the Home, 49/1978. An early example of Beale’s depictions of herself with her family. Is she adopting the role usually taken by men in such portraits.

deal of time with the Beales, writing poems about Mary Beale - describing her as ‘the excellent Mrs Mary Beale’ and introducing her to his clerical circle, many of whom later became her patrons. The likeness in Cat.6 accords well with Thomas Flatman’s 1661 miniature of Woodforde (fig.6) - even the piercing blue eyes - as well as Beale’s much later portrait of him painted in 1692.11 We know from Woodforde’s diaries that he sat to Beale twice in the 1660s for portraits which have so far remained untraced. The first, which he recorded in the diary he called his ‘Lib[er] primus’, was 15th September 1662; ‘sate to my Cosen Beale for my picture’.12 The second sitting came in 1664, after his wife’s death, and is recorded in the diary he called his Liber

Dolorosos . In that year, partly for health reasons, he decided to cut his hair short, and wrote on 28th September 1664: ‘I sate some part of yesterday & this day to Cosen Beale for my picture, she hath done it very like as all say that see it & are better judges of its likeness than myself.’ 13 Achieving a close likeness was of great importance for Beale, a philosophy which was as much spiritual as it was artistic. Unusually for painters of the period, we have a good idea of her personal philosophy through her Discourse on Friendship, written in 1667. Beale was, like her husband, deeply religious, but her belief in friendship was almost as strong as her faith in God. She wrote that ‘Friendship

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is the nearest Union which distinct Souls are capable of (and is as rare to be found in sincerity, as it is excellent in its quality)…’ Tabitha Barber has summarised how this approach was reflected in Beale’s portraiture, writing; ‘It does not seem unreasonable to seek an association between Mary’s aims in friendship and her aims in portraiture: through friendship she aimed to emulate the virtue of her friends, so in portraiture she strove to portray it.’ 14 As someone who defied convention, Mary relished the celebration of individuality.

Samuel Pepys famously declared of Sir Peter Lely’s portraits that they were ‘good, but not like’, and Beale eschewed Lely’s formulaic approach. His sitters, after all, could chose which ready-made body their head would sit upon, as part of a process which aimed to celebrate wealth and status above character and likeness.15 But as Mary wrote in her Discourse, ‘Flattery and dissimulation is a kind of mock friendship’.16

Fig.6 Thomas Flatman ( 1635-1688), Portrait miniature of the Rev. Samuel Woodforde, D.D., F.R.S. (1636-1701), 1661, watercolour on vellum, 6.9x5.4 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, 3842.

Furthermore, it was through friendship that women had the ability to achieve equality with men. Eve, Beale wrote, was given to Adam ‘for a friend, as well as for a wife’. Thus, despite that unfortunate business with the apple causing woman’s original fall from grace, ‘a small number [of women] by Friendship’s interposition, have restored the marriage bond to its first institution’. In other words, marriage could be a partnership of equals.

Needless to say, this was a radical thought in Britain the 17th Century.

How else might such beliefs have influenced Beale’s art? It is noticeable that she did not produce any significant amount of subject or classical pictures, as Anne Killigrew did. Painting was for Beale a profession, and in portrait-loving Britain this meant a reliance on the depiction of people, in which she was determined to excel. And yet Beale’s portraits are subtly but significantly different from those produced by her male contemporaries. If we are ever to find sitters with a smile in Restoration Britain, it is in Beale’s portraits. (Drawings attributed to Charles the Younger in the British Museum are full of humorous incidents that occurred Beale’s studio).

Judging character in portraits of people long dead is always dangerous, but Beale’s sitters are usually portrayed with great sensitivity, and above all sympathy. In short, they are charming.

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Cat. 6 Mary Beale, Portrait of a Gentleman, possibly Samuel Woodforde (1636-1700), early 1660s, oil on canvas, 76.2x63.5 cm, Private Collection, Scotland.

An example of the ‘friendship portraits’ which first helped Beale establish her reputation.

The short hair and informal beard are unusual for portraits of the time. If the sitter is Woodforde, it shows him in mourning, following the death of his wife, Alice Beale.

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Left: Fig.8 Mary Beale, Portrait study of Bartholomew Beale ( 1656-1709), oil on paper laid onto canvas, 34x29 cm, Private Collection, reproduced courtesy of Andrew Clayton-Payne. Right: Fig.9 Mary Beale, Portrait study of a child, probably Charles Beale the Younger, oil on paper laid onto canvas, 35.6 × 27.9 cm, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. Two examples of Beale’s studies of children, which she excelled at, and which are rarely rivalled in British art history.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in her depictions of children. Although her portrait commissions diminished into the 1680s and 90s, she seems still to have been sought out to paint children. An example is a previously unknown portrait group at Mellerstain House, Scotland (fig.7).17 Painted in about 1693, it shows Mary Scott (1660-1698), the second wife of Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, with four of their children. The two girls clutching each other are twins, Mary and Elizabeth.18 Mary Scott had seven children in all, and like so many women in 17th Century Britain spent her short life in a state of of almost perpetual pregnancy. Two of her children died young, and in the cloudy sky of fig.7, barely possible to see with the naked eye, is the tiny face of a baby.

Combine Beale’s probing, sympathetic eye with her own maternal instincts, and you get a group of portrait studies unparalleled in the history of British art. In the opinion of this writer, they are Beale’s greatest works. Two of the best

examples are a study of her eldest son, Bartholomew Beale, (fig.8, Private Collection) and a boy identified as Charles Beale (fig.9, Yale Center for British Art). Two others are in Tate Britain.19 The fact that they are unfinished lends them an even more powerful immediacy.

Occasionally, Beale would work up these portrait studies of children into finished pictures. Cat.7 is perhaps the best example, and is another work kindly lent from Moyses Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds.20 As with so many of her works, it was long attributed to a man, this time William Dobson. It was first identified as a Beale by the late Sir Oliver Millar, but when it was first exhibited it was described as Young Girl as a Bacchante. The model is clearly that seen in fig.9, so he should be known as The Young Bacchus.21 The boy wears a wreath of grapes and vine leaves, and clutches a bunch of grapes over a porcelain bowl. A bottle is at his waist.

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Cat. 7 Mary Beale, The Young Bacchus, 65.4x55.7 cm, 1660s, kindly lent by the West Suffolk Heritage Service, Moyses Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds, accession no.1993.45.

This highly accomplished picture is the only surviving example of Beale’s ability to paint still life.

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The picture is thus one of very few examples of Beale painting still life. In 1663 she wrote a short document ‘Observations by MB in her painting of Apricots’, about painting still life. Beale’s depiction of apricots is now sadly lost, but the document itself is the earliest known text about painting in Britain written by a female artist. Given the care with which the still life is shown in Cat.7, together with the

link to the study at Yale, we can reasonably certain that The Young Bacchus was painted at about the time Observations was written. Finally, a drawing in the British Museum (fig.10)22 relates a tender moment in the creation of The Young Bacchus; the child, wearied by his modelling duties, has fallen asleep.

Fig.10 Mary Beale or Charles Beale the Younger, A young Bacchus asleep, red chalk on paper, 20.7x15.6 cm, British Museum Gg,5.159. The model from Young Bacchus exhausted by his posing duties.

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Fig.7 Mary Beale, Portrait of Mary Scott (1660-1698) and her Children, oil on canvas, the Mellerstain Trust, Mellerstain House, Scotland. Beale carried on painting professionally into the 1690s, but her commissions began to diminish. As an economy, she began to paint on bed ticking rather than canvas.

She still seems to have been favoured for painting children. Barely visible in the sky is the face of a child, a son of Mary Scott’s who died young.

Mary Beale died in 1699, six years before her husband.

Although she carried on painting well into her last decade, even a cursory glance at works like the Portrait of Mary Scott and her Children (fig.7) shows that Beale was not as financially successful as she had been in the 1670s; it is painted on bed ticking, which, due to the coarseness of its weave, was much cheaper than canvas. Although Beale employed at least two female assistants, Keaty Trioche and Sarah Curtis (1676?-1743), there were no Beale disciples to carry on her engaging and distinctive style after her death.

Of Trioche little is known, and while Curtis did carry on painting - as Sarah Hoadly, after her marriage to Benjamin

Hoadly, Bishop of Winchester - it was only infrequently, and as an amateur. One might say that for all her success, for all the charm and thoughtfulness of her paintings, Beale did not in fact shatter an artistic glass ceiling. But Beale’s legacy was simpler, and in a sense far more important. In achieving what she did from what she was - the self-taught daughter of a rural cleric - Beale was the first to show it could be done.

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Cat. 7 Mary Beale, The Young Bacchus, [detail]

1. C. Reeve, ‘Mary Beale’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

2. Provenance: Sotheby’s 23 February 1966, lot 62, bequeathed

by Richard Jeffree to West Suffolk Heritage Service through the National Art Collections Fund, 1993.

3. In the 16th Century, however, both Gerlach Flicke and George Gower painted themselves with a palette in their hand.

14. T. Barber, Mary Beale: portrait of a seventeenth-century painter, her family and her studio (1999) [exhibition catalogue], Geffrye Museum, London, 21 Sept 1999 – 30 Jan 2000 p.35.

15. Although none of this, it has to be said, prevented Mary from making money by painting small copies of Lely’s more celebrated portraits.

16. T. Barber, Mary Beale: p.35

4. Including Artemisia Gentileschi in her self-portrait now in the Royal Collection.

17. It is painted on bed ticking, which Beale used more frequently at the end of her career. It was cheaper than canvas.

5. Another self-portrait with the accoutrements of painting is in the National Portrait Gallery, NPG1687.

18. I am grateful to Tabitha Barber for her advice on this portrait.

6. Only two survive, for 1677 and 1681, in the Bodleian Library and National Portrait Gallery respectively. George Vertue made some notes from others before they were lost.

7. E. Walsh, R. Jeffree, and R. Sword, The Excellent Mrs Mary Beale (1975) [exhibition catalogue], Geffrye Museum, London, and Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, 13 Oct 1975 – 21 Feb 1976.

8. Unicorn Publishing.

9. H. Draper, ‘’Her Painting of Apricots’: The Invisibility of Mary Beale (1633–1699)’ Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 48, Issue 4, October 2012, p.396.

10. Of course, after the Restoration, patrons often wanted to return to the Van Dyck-ian portraits they knew from before the Civil War. 11. Private Collection, reproduced in The Excellent Mrs Mary Beale, op. cit., p.40.

12. C. Gibson-Wood, ‘Samuel Woodforde’s First Diary: An Early Source for Mary Beale’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 147, No. 1230 (Sep., 2005), pp.606-607. The 1662 portrait may be the portrait of a previously unidentified cleric in the Bowes Museum, which despite an attribution to an unknown artist of the 18th Century is certainly

by Beale; O.317.A. 13. H. Draper, ‘’Her Painting of Apricots’: The Invisibility of Mary Beale (1633–1699)’, op.cit., p.397. I am also grateful to Penelope Hunting for this information.

19. Of Bartholomew Beale, T13245 & T13246. They were discovered in the window of an antiques shop in Paris by the art historian James Mulraine.

20. Provenance; In the collection of the Viscounts Cobham since at least 1776, then acquired by Richard Jeffree, by whom bequeathed to West Suffolk Heritage Service through the National Art Collections Fund, 1993. See ‘The Excellent Mrs Mary Beale’, op.cit., p.30 for the history of the attribution to Dobson.

21. If the sitter in both Cat.7 and the oil study at the Yale Center for British Art is not Charles Beale the younger, then there is perhaps a likeness to Beale’s later portrait of Samuel and Alice Woodforde’s son, Heighes. See ‘The Excellent Mrs Mary Beale’, op.cit., no.25, p.33. This might accord with a record of Mary Beale painting Alice Woodforde as an ‘Artemisia’, the only other known instance of her painting a mythological portrait.

22. Museum number Gg,5.159. All of the drawings in the sketchbooks now at the British Museum are today attributed to Charles Beale Junior. However, since he might have been the sitter in this drawing, then either the drawing is a copy of a lost work by Mary Beale, or, as this writer has argued, a good number of the drawings attributed to Charles in the British Museum are in fact by Mary Beale.

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Cat. 9 Anne Killigrew, Self-Portrait [detail]

Anne Killigrew (1660-1685) “Still with a greater Blaze she shone, And her bright Soul broke out on ev’ry side.”

When Anne Killigrew died of smallpox in 1685, it shocked all ‘who were acquainted with her great virtues’, according to her contemporary, Anthony Wood. Soon after her death, her grieving family arranged for the publication of a number of poems found in her possession (fig.11). The volume also included an elegy by the then Poet Laureate, John Dryden; “To the Pious Memory Of the Accomplisht Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew, Excellent in the two Sister-Arts of Poesie, and Painting.” 1 It is a well known but rather flamboyant and at times convoluted poem. But Dryden’s use of the phrase ‘sister arts’ is key to understanding Killigrew’s brief and highly accomplished life.

The phrase is usually known from Horace’s dictum, ‘ut pictura poesis’, ‘as is painting, so is poetry’, but the earlier Greek poet, Simonides, put it more usefully; ‘a poem is a speaking picture, a picture is a silent poem’. In the years since Killigrew’s death, her extraordinary talents have been all but forgotten.

Some literary scholars, it is true, have more fully analysed her poems, with Margaret J. M. Ezell writing an important introduction putting Killigrew’s life and literary works into context.2 Often, however, the verdict of scholars on Killigrew’s poems has been rather damning - ‘juvenalia.’3 But it is only by linking Killigrew’s poems to her paintings that we can fully assess her remarkable talents.

Whether you like Killigrew’s poems or not, few in Britain in the 17th Century came as close to successfully practising the ‘sister arts’ as Anne Killigrew. The much more celebrated poet Alexander Pope tried to take up painting, but with little success. And while both Carlile and Beale may have been in their own way literary, they were, like their male counterparts, professional artists for whom the demands of a patron or sitter left little room for the inclusion of anything else in their painted works. Killigrew, however, was only an amateur artist - or as Bainbrigg Buckeridge put it, painted ‘for her diversion’ 4 - and thus had licence to practice poetry and painting as two aspects of a single creative act. Whereas the output of almost all other British artists of the period, including Beale and Carlile, is dominated by portraiture, Killigrew painted a broad range of biblical and mythological paintings, as well as portraits.

Fig.11 Frontispiece of Anne Killigrew’s posthumously published collection of poetry, 1686

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Left: Fig.14 Isaac Beckett ( 1652/3-1719), after Anne Killigrew, Self-Portrait, mezzotint, c.1685, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. Right: Cat. 8 Abraham Bloteling after Anne Killigrew, Self-Portrait, mezzotint, 1680s, Private Collection, Scotland.

Bloteling’s mezzotint makes Killigrew demonstrably cheerier than the melancholic image originally printed in the book of her poems.

Killigrew would doubtless not have approved.

Unfortunately, only four paintings by Killigrew are known to us today. This exhibition includes three, (Cats. 9, 10, & 11), assembled together for the first time. The fourth is a portrait of King James II in the Royal Collection (fig.12).

A fifth composition, Venus and Adonis, is known through a mezzotint by Bernard Lens in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art (fig.13).5 The frontispiece to her posthumous poems was illustrated by a head and shoulders self-portrait, which also remains lost, but was first recorded in mezzotint by Isaac Beckett (fig.14). The self-portrait is shown here in a slightly later mezzotint by Abraham Bloteling (Cat.8), who has tinkered with the image to make Killigrew look less melancholic; an early form of sexist photoshopping?

More happily, twenty five complete poems6 were published soon after Killigrew’s death. Killigrew saw herself as a poet first, with painting playing an essential but supportive role. One of the notes found and published by her father was her own intended epitaph; “When I am Dead, few Friends attend my Hearse/And for a Monument, I leave my VERSE.” It is from the poems, and a brief reference by the 18th Century art historian George Vertue, that we are able to put together an idea of Killigrew’s painted oeuvre.

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Fig.15 Simon Verelst (1644-1710), Portrait of Mary of Modena (16581718), c.1680, oil on canvas, 125x102 cm, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

Mary of Modena created a court that encouraged poetry and the arts, a direct contrast to the sexual free-for-all of her brother-in-law, Charles II. It was an environment in which Killigrew flourished.

Before we look at Killigrew’s paintings and poems in more detail, however, we should first examine the circumstances of her upbringing. We have no record of her birth, but she was born in 1660. Her parents were Dr Henry Killigrew (1613-1700) and Judith Killigrew (d.1683), a lady-in-waiting to Charles II’s queen, Catharine of Braganza, and said to be an accomplished musician. Henry and Judith had three other children, Elizabeth (d. 1701), Henry (c.1652-1712), later an Admiral, and James (1664-1695), who also served in the Navy, and was killed in an engagement with the French. Dr Killigrew was a Church of England chaplain, long attached the Stuart court. He had first served in the household of Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, and from 1642 was chaplain to James Duke of York, later James II, who he followed into exile after Charles I’s defeat in the Civil War.7 The fact that Dr Killigrew christened his daughter Anne in the year of Charles II’s Restoration may be related to the Duke of York’s controversial marriage in the same year to Anne Hyde (controversial because she was a ‘commoner’).

For James’ chaplain to indicate his support for Anne Hyde through naming his daughter after her would have been a politic course of action. Either way, from Anne’s point of view, Dr Killigrew’s career meant a life of some gentility - he had an income of at least £100 a year - and most important of all, proximity to the royal court, with its unrivalled art collection.8 In 1683 Anne Killigrew was appointed a maid of honour to Mary of Modena (fig.15), second wife of James, Duke of York. The role of a maid of honour was little more than to look pleasant and be generally cheery. But given that the court of Charles II - Britain’s most priapic monarch regularly revolved around sex, the term ‘maid of honour’ was often seen as a euphemism. Killigrew would have been constantly aware of the threats to her dignity. Charles II openly pursued the maids of honour of his queen, Catherine of Braganza, and in the 1650s had even fathered an illegitimate child with Killigrew’s aunt, Elizabeth Boyle.

Mary of Modena’s maids of honour, however, seem to have largely resisted the fate of their colleagues in the queen’s court. Killigrew’s fellow maids included Sarah Jennings,

later the Duchess of Marlborough and favourite of Queen Anne, and the poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea.

On a cultural level, Mary’s court was an enlightened place, and this allowed the likes of Finch and Killigrew to seek solace in literature. Mary circulated translations of Greek and Latin legends and poems,9 and she encouraged poetry writing. We can see through the verses of both Killigrew and Finch a determination not to let men and male attitudes get the better of them. Finch has recently been identified as the possible author of a masque performed at court, Venus and Adonis. But another of Finch’s poems, ‘An Introduction’, gives an insight into the challenges faced by aspiring female poets at the time: Alas! a woman that attempts the pen, Such an intruder on the rights of men, Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed, The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.

They tell us we mistake our sex and way; Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play Are the accomplishments we should desire; To write, or read, or think, or to inquire Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time, And interrupt the conquests of our prime; Whilst the dull manage of a servile house Is held by some our outmost art, and use.10

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At some point, Killigrew summoned up the courage to begin to circulate some of her own work. But it prompted at least one painful moment when they were credited to someone else - and, it appears, a man. Since Killigrew believed that poetry was one of the few ways a woman could rival men’s success in 17th Century England, the pain was all the greater; ‘What ought t’have brought me Honour’, she wrote, ‘brought me shame!’ Her response to the allegation, ‘Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another’, is one of Killigrew’s best poems, and is printed here as Appendix B. In it she shows her determination to be a poet above all else, and pledges to the ‘Queen of Verse’ that, ‘An Undivided Sacrifice I’le lay / Upon thine Altar, Soul and Body pay; / Thou shalt my Pleasure, my Employment be.’

In contrast to her literary career, we know nothing of Killigrew’s artistic training. No personal papers or drawings survive. Her ability to wield a brush appears to emerge almost fully formed, and we can probably assume some degree of prodigiousness. Certainly, there would have been no conventional artistic school available to her. Anything approaching life drawing classes - that cornerstone of artistic training - would have been out of the question (just as it was even to celebrated female artists such as Angelica Kauffmann in the 18th Century). Both Sir Peter Lely and Mary Beale are occasionally mentioned as instructing Killigrew, but can be discounted with some certainty. First, Killigrew’s work betrays little if any relation to Lely’s work, either in technique or manner. Secondly, her name does not figure once in any of the extensive documentation surrounding Beale’s life and workshop. Finally, while Lely was formally attached to the court, neither he nor Beale were ‘of’ the court.

But one clue may be found in the fact that all Killigrew’s works betray a particular facility for detailed landscapes painted in the style of Italian Old Masters, a rarity in British art at the time. Is it too much of a coincidence here to see similarities with the work of Joan Carlile?11 As seen above, Carlile seems to have enjoyed painting landscapes

so much that her portrait sitters are often overshadowed by the meticulous and complex scenery behind them. The occasionally awkward build of their figures speaks to a reliance on copying Old Masters for instruction, rather than life drawing. Might Joan have encouraged or taught Anne?

We can with reasonable certainty assume that the Killigrews and Carliles were acquainted: they lived very close to each other near Whitehall; both were involved with the royal household; and as a playwright Lodowick Carlile worked with Dryden, and must have known both Thomas and William Killigrew, Anne’s playwright uncles. Another tantalising lost painting described by George Vertue could yet be revealing; ‘Mrs... Carlile taught a Lady... to draw & paint. & drew her own picture setting with a book of drawings on her lap. & this Lady Standing behind her. this picture was in poses of Mr Carlile in Westminster.’12 Was the ‘Lady’ Anne?

For centuries, the only certainly known painting by Killigrew was a self-portrait at Berkeley Castle (Cat. 9).13 She is shown standing on a terrace in what appears to be a strong evening light, and in front of a large column framed by a raised curtain. She points to a sheet of paper in her hand, a gesture which, together with the fall of her dress and outstretched toe, gives a sense of movement. She is almost being presented to us, with some drama, on a stage. On the left of the canvas is a fragment of a marble frieze, apparently showing a half female, on whom a cherub is being menaced by a monster. The figure might be a sea nymph (which today we would call a mermaid), or is more likely a wood nymph, since the lower half seems to consist of foliage. Any further identification is speculative, but we might be tempted to see Myrrha, who was turned into a tree whilst giving birth to Adonis. On the right we see a large urn decorated with more cherubs, on top of a base which features a relief of a woman bearing a basket of fruit on her head. The same relief appears in Killigrew’s portrait of James II in the Royal Collection.14

Cat. 9 Anne Killigrew, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 74.3x55.9 cm, kindly lent by the Berkeley Will Trust, Berkeley Castle.

Doubtless reflecting Killigrew’s ambition to be seen as both a painter and a poet, this self-portrait shows no hint of anything like a palette or a brush.

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Fig.12 Anne Killigrew, Portrait of King James II, oil on canvas, 104.7x86.4 cm, Royal Collection RCIN 403427, (C) Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Killigrew painted both James and Mary of Modena in about 1685, though the latter is lost. This painting was for many years attributed to Sir Peter Lely.

The particular detail of the sculptures in both the selfportrait and the portrait of James II may well have some impact on the pictorial narrative, as yet undiscerned. But the mere inclusion of such sculptural elements, so carefully painted, takes on an added significance when we consider some of the books on painting that Killigrew would doubtless have known. In his 1672 ‘The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects’ Giovan Pietro Bellori stresses that an artist’s central ‘Idea’ was to carefully mimic the Divine - that is, paint objects so realistically we might be fooled into thinking we are looking at the real thing - just as it had been for the artists of ancient Greece. Only then could a painter master the sister arts of poetry and painting, for they could ‘form in their minds’, Bellori writes, ‘an example of superior beauty, and in beholding it they emend nature with faultless colour or line. This Idea, or truly the Goddess of Painting or Sculpture, when the sacred curtains of the lofty genius of a Daedalus or an Apelles are parted, is revealed to us and enters the marble and the canvases.’15 John Dryden later made much of Bellori’s ‘Idea’ when he published a translation of Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy’s ‘The Art of Painting’, with a preface entitled ‘Of Poetry and Painting’.16 Was Killgrew attempting to present herself as a goddess of painting? We cannot know for sure, and either way it is interesting that there is no trace of anything as obvious as a paint brush or palette. As we will see, her

careful, even painstaking technique was likely driven by a desire to paint as illusionistically as the likes of Apelles, so that she could tell the story of her poems through paint.

The largest and most ambitious demonstration of Killigrew’s technique is here on loan from Falmouth Art Gallery.

Cat.10, Venus Attired by the Graces, gives a vivid insight into the role Greek and Roman mythology played in Killigrew’s life.17 For most of the 20th century it was known only from a black and white illustration published in The Burlington Magazine in 1915 (fig.16).18 In 2011 it was identified by the present writer in a minor English auction house, and was subsequently acquired by Falmouth Art Gallery in 2012. At some point, probably in the 19th century, the nude Venus, the Roman goddess of love, had been covered up with yellow drapery.

The earliest reference to the picture’s title comes from the English 18th Century art historian George Vertue, who in 1727 saw a ‘Venus attired by the Graces’ in a sale of the collection of Killigrew’s brother, Admiral Henry Killigrew (d.1712).19 He also noted other pictures by Killigrew; ‘Venus and Adonis; Satyr Playing the Pipe; Judith and Holoferness; A Woman’s Head; Herself.’ He was wrong, however, about the Judith and Holofernes, for in her poems Killigrew writes of a painting of Herodias presenting the head of St John the Baptist to her mother.

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Cat. 10 Anne Killigrew, Venus attired by the Graces, oil on canvas, 112x95 cm, kindly lent by Falmouth Art Gallery. Purchased with funding from the V & A Purchase Grant Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund, The Art Fund, The Beecroft Bequest, Falmouth Decorative and Fine Arts Society, The Estate of Barry Hughes in memory of Grace and Thomas Hughes and generous donations from local supporters. FAMAG: 2012.22.

Killigrew’s largest surviving work may be an allusion to her role as Maid of Honour to Mary of Modena, who was referred to as a modern day Venus.

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But Vertue must have been right about the picture’s title, for Killigrew’s attention to detail allows us to identify numerous clues that identify Venus and her attendants.

In the sky to the right of the central group is cupid, Venus’ son. To the left of the canvas we see the basin of an elaborate fountain; a scallop shell, on which Venus was first borne onto land after emerging from the sea. Venus’ elongated form is inspired by any number of Mannerist female nudes, or perhaps more specifically the work of the Fontainebleau School.20 The Three Graces attending Venus are the daughters of Jupiter, who personified beauty, charm and grace. Behind her, one Grace holds her clothes, while another ties a ribbon in her hair. The first Grace has her arm around the shoulder of the second, and they are in dialogue.

A kneeling Grace helps Venus into a sandal, but is evidently also in dialogue with the goddess.21 In what is probably an allusion to Killigrew’s own position at court - where Mary of Modena was often referred to as a Venus 22 - the Graces are at ease in Venus’ presence. A poem by Aphra Behn describing Mary of Modena’s coronation in April 1685 includes this revealing line; ‘Behold Her now by Loves and Graces drest!/Like the Great Wife of Iove in Venus Cest’.23 It is frustrating that we cannot see how Killigrew portrayed Mary of Modena in her lost 1685 painting of her.24

Fig.16 A 1915 photograph of Anne Killigrew’s Venus & Adonis; note the later prudish addition of drapery to spare Venus’ blushes.

Entering the composition from the right is a faun or satyr, carrying a basket of fruit. The figures in the centre of the composition appear to ignore him. Indeed, his presence is defined by his subservience; he is weighed down by the fruit, and turns his head away from the naked Venus before him. And when we notice that the Three Graces are shown clothed, and not naked or partially naked as they usually were at the time, we begin to see how Killigrew has rejected the traditional, masculine presentation of the subject. The faun or satyr, associated with mischief and fertility (and in ancient Greece shown with an erection), would more commonly have been depicted in a position of sexual aggression, leering at the naked nymphs or Graces before him. But here there appears to be a role reversal; the women are in charge, and he, not the women, is the one bearing fruit.

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Fig.13 Bernard Lens ( 1659-1725), after Anne Killigrew, Venus & Adonis, c.1685, mezzotint, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

Lens’ mezzotint, of a lost composition by Killigrew, shows her fascination with the story of Venus.

Likely based on Titian’s earlier depiction of the subject, it differs in presenting Venus to us from the front, perhaps to emphasise Venus’ determination to persuade Adonis not to go hunting (and so to his death).

It is ironic that Dryden, when writing about Killigrew’s mastery of the ‘sister arts’ of painting and poetry, in fact appears to have missed the true meaning of Venus attired by the Graces. In his Ode, Dryden describes the Graces as ‘nymphs’, and gives the satyr more of a presence than Killigrew intended; ‘Of lofty trees, with sacred shades, And perspectives of pleasant glades, Where nymphs of brightest form appear, And shaggy satyrs standing near, Which them at once admire and fear.’

(The remainder of Dryden’s poetic description of Killigrew’s paintings is printed in Appendix C.)

Killigrew’s refusal to follow convention in her depiction of mythological stories dominates her poems. For example, in A Pastoral Dialogue, the narrative begins not with the male character, Alexis, addressing the nymph Dorinda, but vice versa. Killigrew thus gives the female character control of the dialogue.25 But perhaps the most emphatic insight into what we might even be permitted to call Killigrew’s feminism comes from a poem she wrote to accompany another picture of two nymphs (which sadly remains lost).

“On a Picture Painted by her self, representing two Nimphs of Diana’s, one in a posture to Hunt, the other Batheing” is an engaging description of two almost super-human women able to do anything they wish. Moreover, although the two nymphs are described as being more beautiful than Venus, they appear to eschew male attention, preferring to enjoy instead their own secret world:

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‘We are Diana’s Virgin-Train, Descended of no Mortal Strain; Our Bows and Arrows are our Goods, Our Pallaces, the lofty Woods, The Hills and Dales, at early Morn, Resound and Eccho with our Horn; We chase the Hinde and Fallow-Deer, The Wolf and Boar both dread our Spear; In Swiftness we out-strip the Wind, An Eye and Thought we leave behind; We Fawns and Shaggy Satyrs awe; To Sylvan Pow’rs we give the Law: Whatever does provoke our Hate, Our Javelins strike, as sure as Fate; We Bathe in Springs, to cleanse the Soil, Contracted by our eager Toil; In which we shine like glittering Beams, Or Christal in the Christal Streams; Though Venus we transcend in Form, No wanton Flames our Bosomes warm!

If you ask where such Wights do dwell, In what Bless’t Clime, that so excel?

The Poets onely that can tell.’

Thatwesaid, here we need Bernard to examine Bernard Lens’ofmezzotint of lost That said, here need to examine Lens’ mezzotint Killigrew’s Killigrew’s lost (fig.14). painting, and Adonis (fig.14).reproduction If Lens’ printofis a painting, Venus and Adonis If Venus Lens’ print is a faithful of the original, thenanitalternative, reveals littleorattempt the original,faithful then it reproduction reveals little attempt to present rather, to present an alternative, rather, of Ovid’s less masculine, depiction of Ovid’s or legend.

Inless fact,masculine, quite the depiction opposite. The legend.

In fact, quite the opposite.

The composition of Killigrew’s composition of Killigrew’s image owes much to Titian’s Venus and Adonis (fig.17) image owesat much to Titian’s Venus and Adonis (fig.17) a picture - a picture well known the time through multiple versions and-copies - but known atwhere the time through copies - but with one keywell difference; Titian’s nakedmultiple Venus isversions turned and towards Adonis, with where Titian’s naked Venus is turned thus meaning weone onlykey seedifference; her back, Killigrew’s Venus is positioned to face towards Adonis, thusAdonis meaning back, Killigrew’s the viewer, as she grapples with notwe to only leavesee her.her Interestingly, in the Venusand is positioned to face the viewer, fellow as she maid grapples with Adonis masque of Venus Adonis written

by Killigrew’s of honour,26 leave her.

Interestingly, in theVenus masque of Venus and Adonis Anne Finch,not thetomoment where Adonis leaves to hunt is given the 26 Anne Finch, the writtentwist

by Killigrew’s maid of from honour, sort of alternative we might fellow have expected Killigrew’s own poems. moment where Adonis leaves Venus to hunt is given the sort Finch’s Venus does not try to stop Adonis going hunting, and instead tellsofhim alternative twist we might to leave. Killigrew’s Venus wants him tohave stay.expected from Killigrew’s own poems. Finch’s Venus does not try to stop Adonis going hunting, and instead tells him to leave. Killigrew’s Venus wants him to stay.

Below: Fig.17 Titian and workshop ( 1488/90-1576), Venus and Adonis, 1550s, oil on canvas, 106.8x136 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection.

Right: Fig.17 Titian and workshop ( 1488/90-1576), Venus and Adonis, 1550s, oil on canvas, 106.8x136 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection.

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A continuation of the Venus and Adonis story can be discerned from a previously lost painting shown here for the first time. (Cat.11) was identified by the present writer in an auction in Italy.27 It has never been published before, and it has no traditional title attached to it. But its meaning and purpose become clear when we consider it in the context of Killigrew’s other paintings and poems.

The picture shows a figure in front of a pastoral landscape, which, comparing the likeness with Cats. 8 & 9, may well be Killigrew herself. As with Killigrew’s other works, the landscape is somewhat forbidding; a setting sun disappears behind a stormy sky, which is reflected in a river that flows through the scene, various elements of which may even have been referred to by Dryden in his Ode. The air is one of melancholy. On the left is a gold bowl of fruit, its handle a snake. The fruit is arranged in an almost identical manner to that seen in Cat.10. The sheen and lustre of the golden urn reflects the sitter’s pink dress, and also the space from which we, the viewers, see her. The most prominent fruit are grapes, with vine leaves trailing out onto the ground.28 On the right, the sitter leans on a classical relief, and sits on a broken stone plinth, which traditionally indicates some tragedy or sadness. Unfortunately, we can tell from the weave of the canvas that the picture has at some point been trimmed on the top and right. How much larger the picture was originally we cannot say, but it appears there is some form of structure to the sitter’s right.

The picture has recently been cleaned, allowing us to see how Killigrew’s impressive eye for detail is crucial to helping the viewer identify the narrative. The story here points to being a continuation of the story of Venus, in which Killigrew and her contemporaries were evidently very interested. There are two important clues as to why the sitter is playing the role of Venus. First, a carefully depicted red flower bottom right (which also appear in both Cats. 9 & 10) is that most symbolic of flowers, a red anemone. Originally, Killigrew painted the sitter pointing

directly at the flowers, but later changed her mind - the faint outline of the original gesture can still be seen. In Christian terms, anemones symbolise the spilt blood of Christ - but here they refer to forsaken love, specifically that of Venus for Adonis. (After leaving Venus to go hunting, Adonis is attacked by a boar, and dies, resting on a patch of anemones. His blood turns them red.) And directly above the anemone we see a suit of armour, which is identical to that seen in Bernard Lens’ mezzotint of Killigrew’s lost Venus and Adonis. The sheathed sword and a shield emphasise that the armour is no longer being used, that its owner has died. And so here Venus faithfully mourns Adonis. A small dog symbolises her fidelity. The urn of tempting fruit beside her - with its snake, a guardian of tombs - is cast aside. If the theme of a mourning Venus is correctly identified in Cat.11, then it makes sense of Killigrew’s depiction of Venus in her Venus and Adonis.

But who was Killigrew’s Adonis? If the sitter, who, through her contemporary dress is obviously intended to depict a real person, is meant to be Killigrew herself, then unfortunately we are left guessing as to why she chose to present herself in such a way. Although remaining unmarried at twenty-five might have been late for the Restoration court, there is no evidence to suggest, for example, the untimely or tragic ending of a romance.

What seems clear, however, not only from Killigrew’s poems and surviving paintings, but from the plays and writings of contemporaries such as Aphra Behn and Anne Finch, is that the story of Venus and Adonis was of central importance to the court of Mary of Modena. It is possible, therefore, that Killigrew saw her paintings as part of a single narrative, designed to be seen at once, and of course in conjunction with her poems. Unfortunately, Killigrew’s tragic early death means we will always be left speculating as to what her paintings and poems meant - and what might have been.

Cat. 11 Anne Killigrew, Portrait of a Lady, probably the artist, oil on canvas, 46.5x36.5 cm, Private Collection, Scotland. Cat. 11.

Although the contemporary dress marks this out as a portrait, the various motifs suggest an allusion to the story of Venus and Adonis, and probably refers to Venus mourning Adonis after his death.

If the sitter is Killigrew, is she marking a personal tragedy?

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1. First published in Anne Killigrew, Poems (1686).

2. Margaret M.J. Ezell, “My Rare Wit Killing Sin”: Poems of a Restoration Courtier (Toronto 2013). Other analysis of Killigrew’s poems includes, Brian Elliott ‘“To Love Have Prov’d a Foe”: Virginity, Virtue, and Love’s Dangers in Anne Killigrew’s Pastoral Dialogues’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 27-41.

3. A. Pinnock, ‘The Rival Maids: Anne Killigrew, Anne Kingsmill and the making of the court masque Venus and Adonis (music by John Blow)’, Early Music, Volume 46 (4) – Dec 31, 2018, p.634.

4. Roger de Piles, Bainbrigg Buckeridge, The Art of Painting and the Lives of the Painters (London 1754), p.440.

5. B1970.3.1054, paper size 26.4 × 35.6 cm, Inscribed in graphite, verso, lower left: “#38”, Lettered, lower left: ‘Mrs Ann Killegrew pinx: B Lens fe:’; lettered, lower center: ‘Venus & Adonis’; lettered, lower right: ‘printed for Jo. Bowles at the Black Horse Cornhill.’

6. Together with a number of fragments, some of uncertain authorship.

7. Dr Killigrew’s long service to James II might lead us to assume certain Catholic tendencies, but he stayed in London after James’ exile in 1688, and there is no evidence of subsequent Jacobitism.

8. J.P. Vander Motten, ‘Henry Killigrew (1613-1700)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

9. Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford 2003), p.149.

10. First published in Myra Reynolds ed., The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea (Chicago, 1903) p.4-6.

11. I am grateful to Tabitha Barber for first making this suggestion.

12. ‘George Vertue Notebooks’ Vol.1, The Walpole Society, Vol.18 (1929-1930) p.143.

13. Provenance: the picture probably entered the Berkeley Castle collection in 1773, when the collections of the Stratton branch of the Berkeley family were transferred from Bruton, Somerset, on the death of John Berkeley, 5th Baron Berkeley of Stratton. John, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton’s mother was Elizabeth Killigrew; her brother Robert was Anne Killigrew’s paternal grandfather. I am grateful to Joshua Nash for providing this information.

14. We can date this picture quite precisely to the first half of 1685, for the coat of arms proclaims the sitter as king, which James had been since January. While the composition is clearly Killigrew’s own, the head is probably based on Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait taken a year earlier, although as a maid of honour to the Queen, Mary of Modena, Killigrew would certainly have had access to the king. The portrait was acquired by George IV. Dryden tells us that Killigrew also painted the Queen, but this portrait remains lost.

15. Translation from M. Greenhalgh, The Classical Tradition in Art (London, 1978), p.10.

16. ‘De arte graphica The art of painting / by C.A. Du Fresnoy; with remarks; translated into English, together with an original preface containing a parallel betwixt painting and poetry, by Mr. Dryden’, London 1695, pp.1-25.

17. Provenance: The artist’s brother, Admiral Henry Killigrew; His sale, December 1727; Collection of Mr Stenhouse, Folkestone, Kent by 1915; English Private Collection; Philip Mould Ltd; from whom acquired by Falmouth Art Gallery in 2012, purchased with funding from the V & A Purchase Grant Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund, The Art Fund, The Beecroft Bequest, Falmouth Decorative and Fine Arts Society, The Estate of Barry Hughes in memory of Grace and Thomas Hughes and generous donations from local supporters.

18. L. Cust, C. H. Collins Baker, ‘Notes’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 28, No. 153 (Dec. 1915), p.113.

19. His full entry reads; ‘Sale Admiral Killegrews. Decem. 1727 Catalog Venus & Adonis by Mrs Killegrew. a Satyr Playing on a Pipe Judith & Holifernes. a womans head Venus attiring by the Graces Mrs. Killegrews picture by herself of these pictures by her I saw, but can say little.’ George Vertue Notebooks, Vol.II, The Walpole Society Vol.20 (1931-32), p.58.

20. The grouping of the figures bears some similarity to Guido Reni’s Toilet of Venus (National Gallery) which had been in the collection of Charles I, and which Killigrew may have known from copies (the original was sold overseas in the Commonwealth sale of 1650).

An example of the type of Fontainebleau School painting of nudes that might have been in circulation in Killigrew’s time is at the Treasurer’s House, North Yorkshire (National Trust); A Tepidarium with Female Nudes (NT 593145) contains various elements similar to the Venus here.

21. Interestingly, the gold and red robe on which Venus sits is identical to the coat seen in Killigrew’s portrait of James II - it must have been a fabric owned by Killigrew.

22. See for example Aphra Behn’s A pindarick poem on the happy coronation of His Most Sacred Majesty James II and his illustrious consort Queen Mary.

23. ibid.

24. In the opinion of the present writer, a photograph of a painting in the Heinz Archive at the National Portrait Gallery, London often said to show Killigrew’s portrait of Modena is likely to be neither of Modena nor by Killigrew.

25. See B. Elliott, ‘“To Love Have Prov’d a Foe”: Virginity, Virtue, and Love’s Dangers in Anne Killigrew’s Pastoral Dialogues’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2009), p.29.

26. See J.A. Winn, ‘‘A Versifying Maid of Honour’: Anne Finch and the Libretto for Venus and Adonis’, The Review of English Studies, Volume 59, Issue 238, February 2008, pp. 67–85.

27. In 2018 in Florence. No other provenance is known prior to the picture being in an Italian private collection.

28. One of which appears to form a stylised ‘K’.

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Appendix A Checklist of known paintings by or attributed to Joan Carlile Portrait of a Lady, probably Catherine Bruce, Mrs William Murray, Countess of Dysart, c.1640, oil on panel, 22 x 17 cm Thirlestane Castle, H.4703.

Portrait of a Lady, identified as Elizabeth Murray (1626–1698), Countess of Dysart, Duchess of Lauderdale, 1650s, oil on canvas 123 x 99 cm Bute Collection Mountstuart.

Elizabeth Murray (1626–1698), Countess of Dysart, with Her First Husband, Sir

Portrait of a Lady, 1650s, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 25.5 cm, Government Art

Lionel Tollemache (1624–1669), and Her Sister, Margaret Murray (c.1638–1682), Lady Maynard, late 1640s, oil on canvas, 109 x W 92.5 cm, National Trust, Ham House, no. 1139727.

Collection.

Portrait of Three Unknown Ladies, formerly at Okeover Hall, Staffordshire.

Portrait of a Lady, identified as Mrs Elizabeth Sandys, née Pettus, 1650s, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown, formerly at Hampton Court House, Herefordshire.

Portrait of a Lady, 1650-5, oil on canvas, 110.7 x 90 cm, Tate Britain, T14495.

Charles I, after William Dobson, oil on panel ,12.7 x 10.2 cm, Belton House, Grantham. Another possible repetition is in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Object number NGI.251.

Portrait of a Lady, 1650s, oil on canvas, 120 x 93 cm, Mellerstain House, Scotland.

Portrait of a Lady, identified as Abigail, Lady Pettus, 1650s, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown, formerly at Hampton Court House, Herefordshire.

Portrait of a Lady, 1650s, possibly Elizabeth Massingberd (d.1708), wife of the 1st Earl Berkeley, oil on canvas, 142 x 71 cm, Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire.

Portrait of a Lady, possibly Anne Wentworth, 1650s, oil on canvas, 125 x 101 cm, Private Collection, formerly Wentworth Woodhouse, sold Christie’s, January 26th 2009, lot 303.

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Portrait miniature of a Lady, traditionally identvified as Barbara Villiers, oil on copper, 4.29 inches, 10.90 cm height, 20 November 2013, Christie’s London.

The Carlile Family with Sir Justinian Isham in Richmond Park, ‘The Stag Hunt’, 1650s, oil on canvas, 61 x 74 cm, Lamport Hall, no.95.

Lady Dorothy Browne, née Mileham; Sir Thomas Browne, 1640s, oil on panel, 18.4 x 22.9 cm, National Portrait Gallery no.2062.

A small and somewhat damaged portrait of Sir Thomas Browne, oil on panel, 31.7 x 24.3 cm in Norwich Castle Museum NWHCM:1995.55:F may also be by Carlile.

Recorded but lost works A painting described as “Two Ladys and a Lamb by Mrs. Carlile” was lot 22 offered for an auction organised by a John Bullord on December 11th, 1691, ‘Sale of paintings at the Vendu next to Bedford Gate in Covent Garden’. 1 George Vertue records seeing in c.1724; 2 “Mrs . . . Carlile taught a Lady1 ... to draw & paint. & drew her own picture setting with a book of drawings on her lap. & this Lady Standing behind her. this picture was in poses of Mr Carlile in Westminster.

Many peices of Mrs Carliles painting still in poses of Widow Lady. Cotterell” Carlile’s will [The National Archives, PROB 11/367, fols. 177r–178] mentions the following paintings: ‘the picture of the Princess in white sattin’

IMAGE UNAVAILABLE

‘Two Ladies in a Landscape’, oil on canvas, 71 x 89 cm, cited by Toynbee in 1954 as ‘recently sold by Agnews’.

‘the little St Katherine and the mercury’ [it is not clear whether this is one painting, or two] ‘the picture of the Lady Bedford’

IMAGE UNAVAILABLE

Portrait of Anne Carr, Countess of Bedford, oil on canvas, 109 x 84 cm, Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire.

1. ‘The art world in Britain 1660 to 1735,’ at http://artworld.york.ac.uk] 2. The Walpole Society, Vol. 18, Vertue Note Books, Vol.1 (1929-1930), p.143.

IMAGE UNAVAILABLE

Portrait of a Lady with a Deer, identified as Catherine Lyttelton, 1650s, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown, Chippenham Park, Cambridgeshire.

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Appendix B ‘Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another’

by Anne Killigrew, first published 1686

Next Heaven my Vows to thee (O Sacred Muse!)

I offer’d up, nor didst thou them refuse.

O Queen of Verse, said I, if thou’lt inspire, And warm my Soul with thy Poetique Fire, No Love of Gold shall share with thee my Heart, Or yet Ambition in my Brest have Part, More Rich, more Noble I will ever hold The Muses Laurel, than a Crown of Gold.

An Undivided Sacrifice I’le lay Upon thine Altar, Soul and Body pay; Thou shalt my Pleasure, my Employment be, My All I’le make a Holocaust to thee.

The Deity that ever does attend Prayers so sincere, to mine did condescend.

I writ, and the Judicious prais’d my Pen: Could any doubt Insuing Glory then?

What pleasing Raptures fill’d my Ravisht Sense?

How strong, how Sweet, Fame, was thy Influence?

And thine, False Hope, that to my flatter’d sight Didst Glories represent so Near, and Bright?

By thee deceiv’d, methought, each Verdant Tree, Apollos transform’d Daphne seem’d to be; And ev’ry fresher Branch, and ev’ry Bow Appear’d as Garlands to empale my Brow.

The Learn’d in Love say, Thus the Winged Boy Does first approach, drest up in welcome Joy; At first he to the Cheated Lovers sight Nought represents, but Rapture and Delight, Alluring Hopes, Soft Fears, which stronger bind Their Hearts, than when they more assurance find.

Embolden’d thus, to Fame I did commit, (By some few hands) my most Unlucky Wit. But, ah, the sad effects that from it came!

What ought t’have brought me Honour, brought me shame!

Like Esops Painted Jay I seem’d to all, Adorn’d in Plumes, I not my own could call: Rifl’d like her, each one my Feathers tore, And, as they thought, unto the Owner bore.

My Laurels thus an Others Brow adorn’d, My Numbers they Admir’d, but Me they scorn’d: An others Brow, that had so rich a store Of Sacred Wreaths, that circled it before; Where mine quite lost, (like a small stream that ran Into a Vast and Boundless Ocean) Was swallow’d up, with what it joyn’d and drown’d, And that Abiss yet no Accession found.

Orinda, (Albions and her Sexes Grace) Ow’d not her Glory to a Beauteous Face, It was her Radiant Soul that shon With-in, Which struk a Lustre through her Outward Skin; That did her Lips and Cheeks with Roses dy, Advanc’t her Height, and Sparkled in her Eye. Nor did her Sex at all obstruct her Fame, But higher ‘mong the Stars it fixt her Name; What she did write, not only all allow’d, But ev’ry Laurel, to her Laurel, bow’d!

Th’Envious Age, only to Me alone, Will not allow, what I do write, my Own, But let ‘em Rage, and ‘gainst a Maide Conspire, So Deathless Numbers from my Tuneful Lyre Do ever flow; So Phebus I by thee Divinely Inspired and possest may be; I willingly accept Cassandras Fate, To speak the Truth, although believ’d too late.

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Appendix C Checklist of known paintings by or attributed to Anne Killigrew

Known works

Lost works

Self-Portrait, (Cat.9) oil on canvas, 74.3 x 55.9 cm, the Berkeley Will Trust, Berkeley Castle.

Venus & Adonis, reproduced in mezzotint by Bernard Lens, see fig.13.

Venus attired by the Graces, (Cat.10) oil on canvas, 112 x 95 cm, kindly lent by Falmouth Art Gallery. Purchased with funding from the V & A Purchase Grant Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund, The Art Fund, The Beecroft Bequest, Falmouth Decorative and Fine Arts Society, The Estate of Barry Hughes in memory of Grace and Thomas Hughes and generous donations from local supporters. FAMAG: 2012.22.

Self-Portrait, reproduced in Mezzotint by Beckett and Bloteling, among others.

Portrait of a Lady in a landscape, (Cat.11) probably a selfportrait, oil on canvas, 46.5 x 36.5 cm, Private Collection, Scotland.

‘St. John Baptist Painted by her Self in the Wilderness, with Angels appearing to him, and with a Lamb by him.’

Portrait of King James II, (fig.12) oil on canvas, 104.7 x 86.4 cm, Royal Collection RCIN 403427, (C) Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Portrait of Mary of Modena, mentioned by John Dryden.

In the posthumously published collection of Killigrew’s poems, there are verses entitled:

‘Herodias’s Daughter presenting to her Mother St. Johns Head in a Silver Charger, also Painted by her self.’

‘On a Picture Painted by her self, representing two Nymphs of Diana’s, one in a posture to Hunt, the other Batheing.’

In addition to Venus attired by the Graces and the lost Venus and Adonis, the art historian George Vertue (1684-1756) records seeing the following works in the collection of her late brother (Admiral Henry Killigrew, d.1712) in 1727 [George Vertue Notebooks, Vol.II, The Walpole Society Vol.20 (1931-32), p.58.]; ‘a Satyr Playing on a Pipe’ ‘Mrs. Killegrews picture by herself’ ‘a womans head’ ‘Judith & Holifernes’ [though this is probably the picture Killigrew painted as Herodias & the head of St John the Baptist, above]

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Verses VI & VII of John Dryden’s Ode to Anne Killigrew refer vaguely to a number of untitled Killigrew’s pictures, including to Venus attired by the Graces, and more certainly to Portrait of James II, and the lost Portrait of Mary of Modena.

VI.

VII.

Born to the Spacious Empire of the Nine, One would have thought, she should have been content To manage well that Mighty Government: But what can young ambitious Souls confine?

To the next Realm she stretcht her Sway, For Painture neer adjoyning lay, A plenteous Province, and alluring Prey.v A Chamber of Dependences was fram’d, (As Conquerors will never want Pretence, When arm’d, to justifie the Offence) And the whole Fief, in right of Poetry she claim’d.

The Country open lay without Defence: For Poets frequent In-rodes there had made, And perfectly could represent The Shape, the Face, with ev’ry Lineament; And all the large Demains which the Dumb-sister sway’d All bow’d beneath her Government, Receiv’d in Triumph wheresoe’re she went.

Her Pencil drew, what e’re her Soul design’d, And oft the happy Draught surpass’d the Image in her Mind.

The Sylvan Scenes of Herds and Flocks, And fruitful Plains and barren Rocks, Of shallow Brooks that flow’d so clear, The Bottom did the Top appear; Of deeper too and ampler Flouds, Which as in Mirrors, shew’d the Woods; Of lofty Trees with Sacred Shades, And Perspectives of pleasant Glades, Where Nymphs of brightest Form appear, And shaggy Satyrs standing neer, Which them at once admire and fear.

The Ruines too of some Majestick Piece, Boasting the Pow’r of ancient Rome or Greece, Whose Statues, Freezes, Columns broken lie, And though deface’t, the Wonder of the Eie, What Nature, Art, bold Fiction e’re durst frame, Her forming Hand gave Shape unto the Name.

So strange a Concourse ne’re was seen before, But when the peopl’d Ark the whole Creation bore.

The Scene then chang’d, with bold Erected Look Our Martial King the Eye with Reverence strook: For not content t’express his Outward Part, Her hand call’d out the Image of his Heart, His Warlike Mind, his Soul devoid of Fear, His High-designing Thoughts, were figur’d there, As when, by Magick, Ghosts are made appear.

Our Phenix Queen was portrai’d too so bright, Beauty alone could Beauty take so right: Her Dress, her Shape, her matchless Grace, Were all observ’d, as well as heav’nly Face.

With such a Peerless Majesty she stands, As in that Day she took from Sacred hands The Crown; ‘mong num’rous Heroins was seen, More yet in Beauty, than in Rank, the Queen!

Thus nothing to her Genius was deny’d, But like a Ball of Fire the further thrown, Still with a greater Blaze she shone, And her bright Soul broke out on ev’ry side.

What next she had design’d, Heaven only knows, To such Immod’rate Growth her Conquest rose, That Fate alone their Progress could oppose.

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Right: PAUL THEODOR VAN BRUSSEL (DUTCH 1754-1795)

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STILL LIFE £40,000-60,000 + fees To be offered 30th October 2019 at Carlton House Terrace, St James’s, London

CLASSIC TRADITION Open for Consignment Auctions Autumn & Spring in London

The Classic Tradition celebrates timeless quality in fine art.

This auction of painting and sculpture encompasses British & European art, from the Old Masters and Renaissance polymaths of the 15th, through the celebrity artists of the 17th & 18th, to the romance and realism of the 19th Century.

Rohan McCulloch Head of British & European Art, London 0207 930 9115 rohan.mcculloch@lyonandturnbull.com 22 Connaught St. London W2 2AF

Produced by Lyon & Turnbull to accompany the exhibition Bright Souls: The Forgotten Story of Britain’s First Female Artists, held at Lyon & Turnbull, 22 Connaught Street, London, 24 June to 06 July 2019