Studio of Sir Peter Lely, British 1618-1680- Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Lewis, standing three-quarter length, wearing a green cloak fixed by a jewelled clasp in a landscape setting; oil on canvas, bears old labels attached to the reverse, 125.5 x...

Studio of Sir Peter Lely,

British 1618-1680-

Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Lewis, standing three-quarter length, wearing a green cloak fixed by a jewelled clasp in a landscape setting;

oil on canvas, bears old labels attached to the reverse, 125.5 x 101 cm.

Provenance: Francis Henry Manners, 4th Baron Manners (1897-1972).; His sale, Sotheby’s, London, 17 March 1971, lot 97 (purchased by ‘O’Malley’); Private Collection, UK (since c.1976).

Note: The present portrait of Miss Elizabeth Lewis is almost identical in composition to Lely's portrait of the Countess of Montagu, noted as in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch, 125.5 x 101 cm., illustrated no.123 in R.B. Beckett, ‘Lely’, (1951).

The National Portrait Gallery exhibition catalogue (Oliver Miller, 1978) notes that ‘...from the later 1660s his [Lely's] colours become less bright and his paint thinner and drier… At the same time the drawing of the draperies became more formalized, as if to make them easier for a pupil to copy. Some of the latest portraits are almost monochrome, the dragged paint, often over darkish underpaint, and sombre colour imparting a richly atmospheric effect, enlivened by touches of liquid impasto which display the mastery of touch unimpaired by thirty years of unremitting work’ (p.20-1). These features evidently relate to the present work. Our work, too, has the ‘slightly greyish tone which characterises much of Lely’s later work’ (Ibid, p.63), and it compares well with his portrait of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, c.1671.

Elizabeth Lewis (c.1657-1696) was the daughter of a London vintner, Sir Thomas Lewis, who traded to Aleppo. Her mother was Thomas’s second wife, Elizabeth Dashwood, daughter of London merchant Francis Dashwood. Lewis obtained a grant in arms in 1661 and purchased West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire in 1670. His son, Elizabeth’s brother, was frequently M.P. for Chipping Wycombe between 1679 and his death in 1696. Elizabeth married Thomas Whitley of Peele, Chester in 1680. After his children’s two deaths in 1696, old Lewis sold the house and estate, which likely included the present work, to the Dashwood family. Later, the Dashwood family was connected to the Manners family through the marriage of Vice Admiral William Dashwood’s daughter to the 2nd Baron Manners in 1828, and the portrait was sold at Sotheby’s in 1971 with other pictures belonging to the 4th Baron. It came into the possession of the current owner in around 1976.

The present work was likely painted in around 1677, when Elizabeth was aged twenty, as a product of the increasing gentrification of her father. Lely is known to have painted many female portraits around this time.