1660s Portrait Paintings

This superb Dutch Golden Age portrait is attributed to circle of Dutch artist Wybrand Simonsz de Geest. Painted in 1666 it is a full length portrait of a young William Stonestreet. He is holding the paw of a clipped little white dog with drapes and clouds beyond. (It was common practise to dress young boys in dresses up to the age of about 6 or 7 when they were 'britched' or wore britches). An excellent example of Dutch Golden Age art that wouldn't look out of place in a museum. Wm Stonestreet 1666, Prebend of Selsely is inscribed top left. Provenance. Berkshire estate. Condition. Oil and canvas, 44 inches by 36 inches and in good condition. Frame. Housed in an ornate gilt frame, 52 inches by 44 inches and in good condition. Wybrand Simonsz. de Geest (16 August 1592 – c. 1661) was a Dutch Golden Age portrait painter from Friesland in the Netherlands. Wybrand de Geest was born and died at Leeuwarden. He learned painting from his father, Simon Juckesz, a stained glass worker. He studied later with Abraham Bloemaert. From 1614 to 1618 he travelled in France and Italy on a Grand Tour. In 1616 he met up with Leonard Bramer in Aix-en-Provence. While in Rome he became a member of the painters' circle known as the Bentvueghels. He earned the nickname 'De Friesche Adelaar', or "the Frisian Eagle". De Geest married Hendrickje Fransdr Uylenburgh in 1622, a niece of Saskia van Uylenburgh...

Sir Peter Lely (Soest 1618 – 1680 London) Portrait of lady with a crown, possibly Bridget Drury Lady Shaw, formerly Viscountess Kilmorey, later Lady Baber (d.1696) c.1665 Oil on canvas 46 1/2 x 40 3/4 inches, Framed 42 1/4 x 36 1/4 inches, Unframed Inscribed left [……….]Isabella James Mulraine wrote the following for this piece: This portrait dates to the middle of the 1660s, the decade when Lely’s career took off as successor to Sir Anthony van Dyck. At the Restoration Charles II had appointed him Principal Painter to the King and paid a pension £200 per annum ‘as formerly to Sr. Vandyke...’1 Lely had trained in Haarlem and he was in his early twenties when he came to London in 1643. He was an astute businessman and a wise courtier. In 1650 he painted a portrait of Oliver Cromwell (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) while maintaining links with the Royalist exiles through the 1650s. He had arrived in England as a painter of small-scale portraits and lush scenes of nymphs in landscapes in a Dutch style. His experience of Van Dyck in English collections transformed his painting. His lavish and alluring vision of Arcadia exactly captured the spirit of the Court and as Principal Painter he dominated English portraiture for the next twenty years. Lely ran a highly efficient studio along Netherlandish lines, employing a team of specialists like the drapery painter John Baptist Gaspars and young artists-in-training like Nicolas de Largilliere. He had numerous rivals during that period, and by 1670 he had introduced numbered standard poses to speed up production, while collaborating with printmakers for further revenue and advertising. He died in 1680 of a stroke while painting, working to the last. The portrait, painted at a date when Lely’s poses and execution were still individual and inventive shows a lady sitting at three-quarter length facing away from the viewer. She has begun to turn towards the viewer, a pose with a long pedigree in art, first used by Leonardo da Vinci in the Mona Lisa (Louvre). She steadies her blue drapery where it might slip from her arm with the movement, a flash of realism beautifully captured. Like Van Dyck, Lely painted his female sitters in a timeless costume rather than contemporary fashion, showing a loose gown and floating silk draperies. It presented the sitter as a classical ideal. The portrait would not date. The saffron dress may be the work of a drapery painter but the brown scarf must be by Lely himself, and appears unfinished, broadly sketched in behind the shoulder. The delicate blue glaze and nervous highlights suggest shimmering translucence. Lely was a master of painting hands – his hand studies are marvels of drawing – and the lady’s hands are superb, exactly drawn, delicately modelled and expressive. The fidgety gestures, clutching the gown, fiddling with the edge of the scarf, give the portrait psychological bite, suggesting the personality behind the calm courtier’s expression, adding to the sense shown in the look of the eyes and mouth that the lady is about to speak. The portrait’s language is Vandykian. The inspiration comes directly from Van Dyck’s English portraits of women. Lely owned Van Dyck’s Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Thimbleby and Dorothy Viscountess Andover (National Gallery, London) and the sitter’s costume quotes Lady Andover’s saffron dress and brown scarf. But Lely paints a generation who sat nearer to the ground and through a dialogue of expression and gesture he shows sitters who are more flesh and blood than Van Dyck’s. The background with a column and curtain is different to those shown in most of Lely’s portraits of women. They tend to include trees or fountains, with a glimpse of landscape. But there are other examples. A portrait of the King’s reigning mistress, Barbara Villiers Duchess of Cleveland...