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17 William Larkin (c.1585 - 1619) An Unknown Noblewoman in a feigned oval Oil on panel: 22 ¾ x 17 ¼ in. (57.8 x 43.8 cm.) With an old inventory number on a label, verso: ‘16112’ Painted c. 1615 - 1616 Provenance The Lords Willoughby de Broke, Compton Verney, Kineton, Warwickshire until presumably, 12 - 13 June 1924, ‘the property of Lord Willoughby de Broke’, on site, Woodley House, Kineton, Co. Warwick, including 47 pictures (as ref. Fritz Lugt); possibly Agnes Beryl Spencer-Churchill (1881 - 1948), granddaughter of 6th Duke of Marlborough; The Hon. Harold Miller Pearson, 2nd Viscount Cowdray (1882 - 1933); The Hon. Mrs. Daphne Lakin (1918 - 2015), daughter of 2nd Viscount Cowdray, Hammerwood House, Iping, Midhurst, Sussex, England; thus by descent until Christie’s, London, 7 July 2016, lot 1. Literature C.H. Collins Baker, Lely and the Stuart Portrait Painters, vol. I, London 1912, pp. 30 [illus.] & 77, as ‘Paul van Somer, Portrait of a Lady, c. 1612’.
This portrait of a noblewoman, with her piercing green eyes and almost white-blonde hair, is in remarkable state of preservation, the braille-like paint surface providing a superb and jewellike example of the work of the renowned Jacobean artist, William Larkin. It can be dated to around 1615 – 1616, after which the large cartwheel ruff fell from fashion. The sitter’s heavily embroidered and bejeweled black dress is cut very low, a typical feature of high Jacobean fashion, to reveal a pearlescent chest of milky skin and a maze of aristocratic ‘blue-blooded’ veins. Our portrait was published in 1912 by Collins Baker as by the Flemish émigré artist Paul van Somer (c. 1577 - 1622). At that time the portrait was in the collection of Richard Verney, 19th Baron Willoughby de Broke (1869 - 1923), at Compton Verney, Kineton in Warwickshire. Collins Baker compared it stylistically as an influence on another female portrait which he attributed as an early Cornelius Johnson, that of ‘A Lady, possibly Frances Cotton, Lady Montagu, of Boughton Castle, Northamptonshire’ - then in the Lords North collection at 65