Frances Terresa Stuart 1670 - Duchess of Richmond and Lennox after elopement
Art Bite 22 March 2024
by Stephanie BethWords. 3221
* https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/bulletin/215/abandoned-ancestors. Exhibition curted by Ken Hall. Introduction.I quote:
Lely achieved his greatest success after the Restoration of 1660, as principal painter to Charles II. Over the following decades, the artist’s large studio, with its many assistants, would fulfil hundreds of portrait commissions. In his portraits, elegantly gesturing hands are an important compositional element. These were often based on carefully observed studies of hands like the ones shown here. About eighty such process drawings survive in public collections, indicating the importance they held for Lely’s workshop practice, where assistants would translate details from drawing into paint. The drawing is an early example of a technique known as aux trois crayons, which combines red, black, and white chalk. In all but one of the studies, the artist first sketched the contours of the hands and nails in red chalk, then used black chalk for accents and shadows, and, finally, added highlights in white chalk. (1)
There’s a few directions I would like to go with this. I am not getting into the ground of canvas or the mixing of paint materials. I am offering more the social tapestry of the 1600’s that is unremittingly triggered as a thought simply by the existence of a painting with a date attached. Getting near any paintings from this period is new to me. I have seen the painting in full of Louis XIV, after 1701, after Hyacinthe Rigaud at the GETTY in Los Angeles in 2001. His original Portrait of Louis XIV of 1701, now in the Louvre, was so popular that Rigaud had many copies made, both in full and half-length format. That viewing was my one sighting of a French 1700’s copied portrait.I have spent a half day inside and outside the Palace of Versailles, which has given me a handle on what aristocratic pomp and illusion was at that time. Lely is a good place to start. In one text I had access to six days ago, Herbert Read ( editor for a book from Westminster press ) is quoted describing Lely arriving in England ambitiously, as a competent painter, with little idea of political swings. He was determined to walk in the footsteps of Anthony Van Dyke. The book Read edited, covers some of his circumstances and the full catalogue of Lely’s Royal commissions oeuvre. Most usefully, what the author Beckett does in his writing, is to give a worthy account of Lely’s dramatic arc of mastery to its decline. It was written in 1951. (2) On the back cover it states, ‘English art has never been surveyed in the systematic manner in which the Italian, Flemish, Dutch and other schools have been treated’. England, therefore, was explained as still behind in scholarly record making about portraiture. The text is important. Beckett sought to restore credit from the early portraits of high quality that Lely was doing before he ‘ succumbed to the demands made on him as the most fashionable portraitist of the day’ . Lely had a rise to prominence for over a quarter of a century and his influence continued down to Joshua Reynolds. He may have peaked in 1666. In this painting, the impression is that it is studio practice work. Not an hour of practice was wasted, and hopefully someone enjoyed working on it. An Irish aristocratic descendant liked the painting. It was owned and sold by her in 1931 in London. It was picked up here from an Invercargill buyer who sourced London.
Peter Lely died 1680. His eyesight had been fading.
He achieved his standing, that Caroline Campbell of The National Gallery has noted, by being 'a pictorial magpie: picking up ideas and motifs from any number of sources, but uniting them in a fashion which combined the Italian Renaissance and the Dutch Classicist movement, but in a more Baroque and showy manner.' (3)
From Lydia Figes, 2020:
“Today, art historians credit Lely for his efficient studio practice, which stood as a precursor to the artist's studio practice today. However, in his own time, Lely's "reputation was seriously damaged by portraits that came from his studio under his name but without much of his participation.' Upon his death, Lely left behind thousands of paintings and drawings, including priceless works by Old Masters from his sizable art collection. The sale of his collection after his death became one of the most important public auctions of artworks of the seventeenth century”.4These facts bear some relation to the idea of this work as really being from an attentive studio. The name Lely, either way is a powerful echo and creates some interest. This is in the nature of a recognizable face image, of hairstyle, and brush strokes of swaths of fabric that are now, at least, of historical note.Looking at a work from the studio of Lely, is to look at fashion and fabric, to study Sir Peter Lely’s time. Fashion was a court motif factor. On a recent trip to Auckland I went to the mezzanine floor at the Art gallery there to look at an early painting by Henry Gascar. He portrayed Louise de Keroualle in an expensive silk and golden thread dress. The fabric glows off the wall. She is holding a Charles Terrier in 1635. 5 Gascar was of the stable of painters of the pre- to Restoration time along with Lely and was later to ostensibly replace him in England. They both painted for Charles I before they painted for Charles II.
Each time you see a painting from the 1600’s you wonder a little more. Several patrons of his commissioned more than one painting of themselves. Women ranged from Queens to aristocrats to mistresses. Later on there were statesmen, admirals, judges, with these more likely just one-offs. The mistresses wanted artifice with which to adorn corridors and rooms of their apartments, sometimes to counteract accusers that they were draining the royal coffers, or to ward off female rivals. These commissions gave Lely some casual and generous scope. He came up with women in states of loose undress, breasts bared. Apparently Keroualle smashed up a few of her pearls and dabbed them onto her chest to add a little more gleam. Swaths of fabric sometimes dropped to painted daybeds. The excitement of the restoration period offered renewed status from the return of art itself, after the puritan times, whether that be a love of Titian’s sky, or glimpses of tapestry fragments, all of this coming into the court after seven years of suppression. In all of this, the thrill of titivations of excess. Mistresses needed ammunition, for as well as enemies, satirists within parliament attacked them with rhyming poems whilst the officials still had to watch a number of ships of the fleet of Charles being named after favourites. Lely, playing along, was not out of danger himself.
As I started preparing this talk I needed to think what it must have been like to have been within the vagaries of English history at this time and in the following times:
When in doubt, go by the fashion of the time. This painting is dated as 1670. The hairstyle of the time was introduced by Louise de Keroualle. (6) We see the style on the finished painting of Louise de Keroualle by Lely. The studio apprentice practices it here. It’s the parting in the middle of the head and the thick side locks.
Three facts pertinent to health and politics when thinking about this painting.I was looking up the degree of devastation the population succumbed to from small pox.(7) Lely had no need to flatter Frances with his brush. In 1663, Pepys observed the ladies of the Stuart court at Whitehall, including Frances, who wore a hat with a red plume and concluded that ‘she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen’.(8) Frances Terresa was a noted beauty. But, she was struck by smallpox in 1668. She chose to have an effigy made of herself when she was called upon to attend Queen Anne’s funeral in 1671. The effigy was dressed with the Coronation clothes she had worn in 1685 at the coronation. This led to my looking at data on London cemeteries. In the London Bills of Mortality.Only burials within Anglican grounds were included; Roman Catholics, Jews, Quakers, and other nonconformists were excluded.(9)Samuel PepysHow did Pepys feel about the restoration of Charles II to the throne? Pepys, by the way, was at school with Cromwell.Pepys's diary entries convey his feelings of ‘ sympathy, awe, and respect for the king. He is “ready to weep” listening to the king's stories of escaping England. At the coronation, Pepys seems starstruck as he strains to get a look at the king.’(10)
The Puritan interregnum.Playhouses and gambling were banned during the Republic times, though Opera encouraged. There was a reopening of playhouses after. The civil war had lasted 1642- 1651, with the execution of Charles I in 1649 and then the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Shakespeare's, Macbeth, Henry VIII, and Othello remained unchanged. Restoration material attempted to persist with comedy. The design of the theatre changed. Women actors were introduced to the stage in 1661. The heroic drama had come to an end. Farces were on the rise -Nell Gwyn, a hugely popular actress. There was a restoration of “ society comedy.” Of new playwrights with contemporary allusions, Edward Howard was the playwright of The Change of Crowns(1667). John Lacey was the lead. He acted the part of the country gentleman who had the effrontery to attack “the court with all the imaginable wit and plainness about selling places, and doing everything for money”. “ bitter indeed, but very true and witty” wrote Pepys. The King, who attended its first performance, was, we are told, so incensed at being abused to his face that he ordered the theatre closed and Lacey imprisoned.(11)
The Restoration.Women commissioned Lely to paint themselves, sometimes more than once. Lely went along with the requests. There are many studies of women thinking that they are wielding power. They prompted Lely to have license to toy with symbols. Louise de Keroualle , for example, was a long -term mistress of Charles II. She was an aristocrat, determined to bed Charles II as soon as she hit English shores when she was twenty one. Charles II got her appointed as maid of chambers to his sister. In her quite long reign, she was able to secure lands in England and France for both of her children and had a pension. Mistresses such as Keroualle commissioned Lely with urgency so that they might propagandize their wares. A hand holds a small lock of hair schematically in this idea in the apprentice work. Keroualle, her dark hair falling below her waist, in around 1671, completed by Lely, holds up a whole shank of her hair. (12)
Here is a quote about him when he was young, Ut pictura poesis is a Latin phrase literally meaning "as is painting so is poetry". Lely crossed to England first in 1643. He saw a collection from Charles I. ‘ in the autumn of 1647 he painted a portrait of Charles I and his fourteen-year-old second son, James, Duke of. York’ Between 1671 - 1674, Lely had raised his prices for heads to fifteen pounds. In 1669 he was granted a 200 pound annual pension. After his death, in 1680, the trustees of Lely’s estate took account of 9000 pounds of debt, and Lely’s large personal art collection. Lely was a connoisseur. The collection included many Van Dycks and his own work. His drawings were well sought after in Europe at auction. Debts were cleared. Lely’s son set up well as a gentleman and there was enough money to maintain Ley’s daughter until her marriage. (13)
I have been drawn by the enthusiasm that the curator Ken Hall shows as being appreciative of a past curators purchasing initiative that went on in the 1970’s in the Christchurch Art Gallery. Hall writes about several finds made that decade. ( Appendix ii) This writing is in the Bulletin issue. We are offered much material for discussion, in the context of this floor, whereas, insights and referencing of this painting alone tend otherwise towards a study of a practice with image stereotypes. What the purchasing initiative did for the gallery, importantly, has been that the buying inspiration has provided some access to examples from the ‘ bloodstream’ of English Art. We may imagine that the OUT OF TIME exhibition takes hold of a beginning of a narrative out of England to what we are invited to see here as a New Zealand scholarship opportunity with portraiture before photography. Every ruff of lace, and woven cloth, not silk, demarcates the push for locally manufactured materials.Young Frances Terresa before 1662, is Lely's first painting of her; the beautiful image, a face holding a different hairstyle and a body carrying yellow silk. (14)
It is the painting from Remuera, New Zealand purchased in the 1970’s that first caught my eye and gave me another theme for today as the extender to the studio painting. It is the portrait of the cavalier from Cromwell’s time. We ( in New Zealand) are all the inheritors of a dominant Protestant history, with respect to Civics and parliamentary laws. Britain became a nation secured into European Protestant influences. James II was Charles II’s younger brother and his successor. William of Orange would uphold this influence during his reign after James II. Then William from Holland who followed James.
From World History.A Constitutional MonarchyWe know that James followed Charles and William followed James.I quote: ‘The official line was that James had abdicated, and Parliament recorded the removal of the monarch as occurring on 23 December 1688, the day James had left English shores. William became William III of England via a decree by Parliament on 13 February 1689. This change of regime became known as the Glorious Revolution because it had occurred entirely peacefully (or almost, there were some episodes of Catholic houses and chapels being attacked during William's march to London). There had certainly been no battles or country-wide uprisings in support of either side. Whig historians (pro-Protestants) also believed the revolution 'glorious' because it had preserved the existing institutions of power, which was true, but the relationship between these institutions was altered, a change which only grew more.’ (15)
After 1670, the English industry for lace for fine clothing grew in impetus. We see men of England, landowners, along the wall to the left here from the 1700 period in their finery. This is a white rose thesis in 2006. Material Culture in Early Modern England: The Role of Goods in the Creation of Social Identities in Three Yorkshire Communities., -1660-178o , submitted in part for Doctoral degree in 2006.
by Eleanor Love.
Imagine being in York or Halifax. Imagine reading the Borthwick institute of archives.
The thesis starts:This thesis explores the spread, use, and social significance of material culture in Restoration and Georgian England, by focusing on three places in Yorkshire. ' These provide examples of how regional and urban/rural differences affected material culture in areas outside London, and allow an examination of how their inhabitants reacted to the sustained growth in the production and distribution of material goods in this period. quote more from the thesis: ‘Material culture in Contemporary Thought'The truth is that citizen’s and tradesmen's tables are now the emblems, not of plenty, but of luxury; nor of good housekeeping, but profusion. A tradesman dressed up fine, with his long wig and sword, may go to the ball when he pleases. For he is already dressed up in the habit; like a piece of counterfeit money, he is brass washed over with silver, but no tradesman will take him for current’‘Magazines such as the London Magazine, and previously The Spectator and The Tatler, devoted many column inches to the discussion of these issues. In 1711, the author of The Spectator ridiculed the emulation of city fashions by country people. Not only were many of these fashions above their wearers' social station, but being mere plain country folk and living far from the metropolis, the fashions followed were often hopelessly out of date, and incorrectly worn at that.
The Female Tatler magazine, earlier in the century, had been equally blunt. It scathingly described 'inferior' women who acted 'above' their station, as wearing 'tawdry painted calicoes, washed gloves, and steel crosses'. It was not just in written works that this type of discussion appeared, but also in paintings. The work Taste A-La-Mode (1745) by Louis Phillipe Boitard, for example, is populated by a group of fashionable women who at first glance all look alike. But as the historian Mark Hallett has pointed out, on the left hand side of the picture there is a prostitute, identifiable only by the way she is lifting her skirts in order to give an inviting glimpse of her ankle. "(16)
In the late sixteenth century, the nonconformist divine Arthur Dent in A Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven had lamented that 'poor men and women, poor hired servants, milk-maids, and such like, go quite beyond their abilities. " ' In 1583, Philip Stubbes advocated that every person should be forced to dress according to their rank, but complained that at the present time, even poor labourers wore silks and satins 'notwithstanding that they be bothe base by birth, mean by estate and servile by calling'. (17) Aileen Ribeiro's work Dress and Morality is a veritable historical compendium of such moral lamentations, about the perceived misuse of clothing from the early middle ages to the modem period. "' The doctoral essay continues ‘ Given the biases of contemporary commentators, it is not always easy to establish whether the 'misuse' of goods condemned by these men was a social practice or a trope. Nonetheless, authors between 1660 and 1780 all agreed that a variety of material goods such as clothes, wigs, china, silver trinkets and so forth, were becoming more common and more easily available. The problem in their eyes, was that this increasing availability was not restricted to the elite. Indeed, as Dent had stated, this produced a situation in which 'every Jack will be a gentleman, and Joan is as good as my lady'. Men like Defoe saw their well ordered world in threat of meltdown, and becoming a society in which: The poor will be like the rich, and the rich like the great, and the great like the greatest, and thus the world runs on to a kind of a distraction at this time. '(18)
by Stephanie BethWords. 3221
* https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/bulletin/215/abandoned-ancestors. Exhibition curted by Ken Hall. Introduction.I quote:
Lely achieved his greatest success after the Restoration of 1660, as principal painter to Charles II. Over the following decades, the artist’s large studio, with its many assistants, would fulfil hundreds of portrait commissions. In his portraits, elegantly gesturing hands are an important compositional element. These were often based on carefully observed studies of hands like the ones shown here. About eighty such process drawings survive in public collections, indicating the importance they held for Lely’s workshop practice, where assistants would translate details from drawing into paint. The drawing is an early example of a technique known as aux trois crayons, which combines red, black, and white chalk. In all but one of the studies, the artist first sketched the contours of the hands and nails in red chalk, then used black chalk for accents and shadows, and, finally, added highlights in white chalk. (1)
There’s a few directions I would like to go with this. I am not getting into the ground of canvas or the mixing of paint materials. I am offering more the social tapestry of the 1600’s that is unremittingly triggered as a thought simply by the existence of a painting with a date attached. Getting near any paintings from this period is new to me. I have seen the painting in full of Louis XIV, after 1701, after Hyacinthe Rigaud at the GETTY in Los Angeles in 2001. His original Portrait of Louis XIV of 1701, now in the Louvre, was so popular that Rigaud had many copies made, both in full and half-length format. That viewing was my one sighting of a French 1700’s copied portrait.I have spent a half day inside and outside the Palace of Versailles, which has given me a handle on what aristocratic pomp and illusion was at that time. Lely is a good place to start. In one text I had access to six days ago, Herbert Read ( editor for a book from Westminster press ) is quoted describing Lely arriving in England ambitiously, as a competent painter, with little idea of political swings. He was determined to walk in the footsteps of Anthony Van Dyke. The book Read edited, covers some of his circumstances and the full catalogue of Lely’s Royal commissions oeuvre. Most usefully, what the author Beckett does in his writing, is to give a worthy account of Lely’s dramatic arc of mastery to its decline. It was written in 1951. (2) On the back cover it states, ‘English art has never been surveyed in the systematic manner in which the Italian, Flemish, Dutch and other schools have been treated’. England, therefore, was explained as still behind in scholarly record making about portraiture. The text is important. Beckett sought to restore credit from the early portraits of high quality that Lely was doing before he ‘ succumbed to the demands made on him as the most fashionable portraitist of the day’ . Lely had a rise to prominence for over a quarter of a century and his influence continued down to Joshua Reynolds. He may have peaked in 1666. In this painting, the impression is that it is studio practice work. Not an hour of practice was wasted, and hopefully someone enjoyed working on it. An Irish aristocratic descendant liked the painting. It was owned and sold by her in 1931 in London. It was picked up here from an Invercargill buyer who sourced London.
Peter Lely died 1680. His eyesight had been fading.
He achieved his standing, that Caroline Campbell of The National Gallery has noted, by being 'a pictorial magpie: picking up ideas and motifs from any number of sources, but uniting them in a fashion which combined the Italian Renaissance and the Dutch Classicist movement, but in a more Baroque and showy manner.' (3)
From Lydia Figes, 2020:
“Today, art historians credit Lely for his efficient studio practice, which stood as a precursor to the artist's studio practice today. However, in his own time, Lely's "reputation was seriously damaged by portraits that came from his studio under his name but without much of his participation.' Upon his death, Lely left behind thousands of paintings and drawings, including priceless works by Old Masters from his sizable art collection. The sale of his collection after his death became one of the most important public auctions of artworks of the seventeenth century”.4These facts bear some relation to the idea of this work as really being from an attentive studio. The name Lely, either way is a powerful echo and creates some interest. This is in the nature of a recognizable face image, of hairstyle, and brush strokes of swaths of fabric that are now, at least, of historical note.Looking at a work from the studio of Lely, is to look at fashion and fabric, to study Sir Peter Lely’s time. Fashion was a court motif factor. On a recent trip to Auckland I went to the mezzanine floor at the Art gallery there to look at an early painting by Henry Gascar. He portrayed Louise de Keroualle in an expensive silk and golden thread dress. The fabric glows off the wall. She is holding a Charles Terrier in 1635. 5 Gascar was of the stable of painters of the pre- to Restoration time along with Lely and was later to ostensibly replace him in England. They both painted for Charles I before they painted for Charles II.
Each time you see a painting from the 1600’s you wonder a little more. Several patrons of his commissioned more than one painting of themselves. Women ranged from Queens to aristocrats to mistresses. Later on there were statesmen, admirals, judges, with these more likely just one-offs. The mistresses wanted artifice with which to adorn corridors and rooms of their apartments, sometimes to counteract accusers that they were draining the royal coffers, or to ward off female rivals. These commissions gave Lely some casual and generous scope. He came up with women in states of loose undress, breasts bared. Apparently Keroualle smashed up a few of her pearls and dabbed them onto her chest to add a little more gleam. Swaths of fabric sometimes dropped to painted daybeds. The excitement of the restoration period offered renewed status from the return of art itself, after the puritan times, whether that be a love of Titian’s sky, or glimpses of tapestry fragments, all of this coming into the court after seven years of suppression. In all of this, the thrill of titivations of excess. Mistresses needed ammunition, for as well as enemies, satirists within parliament attacked them with rhyming poems whilst the officials still had to watch a number of ships of the fleet of Charles being named after favourites. Lely, playing along, was not out of danger himself.
As I started preparing this talk I needed to think what it must have been like to have been within the vagaries of English history at this time and in the following times:
When in doubt, go by the fashion of the time. This painting is dated as 1670. The hairstyle of the time was introduced by Louise de Keroualle. (6) We see the style on the finished painting of Louise de Keroualle by Lely. The studio apprentice practices it here. It’s the parting in the middle of the head and the thick side locks.
Three facts pertinent to health and politics when thinking about this painting.I was looking up the degree of devastation the population succumbed to from small pox.(7) Lely had no need to flatter Frances with his brush. In 1663, Pepys observed the ladies of the Stuart court at Whitehall, including Frances, who wore a hat with a red plume and concluded that ‘she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen’.(8) Frances Terresa was a noted beauty. But, she was struck by smallpox in 1668. She chose to have an effigy made of herself when she was called upon to attend Queen Anne’s funeral in 1671. The effigy was dressed with the Coronation clothes she had worn in 1685 at the coronation. This led to my looking at data on London cemeteries. In the London Bills of Mortality.Only burials within Anglican grounds were included; Roman Catholics, Jews, Quakers, and other nonconformists were excluded.(9)Samuel PepysHow did Pepys feel about the restoration of Charles II to the throne? Pepys, by the way, was at school with Cromwell.Pepys's diary entries convey his feelings of ‘ sympathy, awe, and respect for the king. He is “ready to weep” listening to the king's stories of escaping England. At the coronation, Pepys seems starstruck as he strains to get a look at the king.’(10)
The Puritan interregnum.Playhouses and gambling were banned during the Republic times, though Opera encouraged. There was a reopening of playhouses after. The civil war had lasted 1642- 1651, with the execution of Charles I in 1649 and then the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Shakespeare's, Macbeth, Henry VIII, and Othello remained unchanged. Restoration material attempted to persist with comedy. The design of the theatre changed. Women actors were introduced to the stage in 1661. The heroic drama had come to an end. Farces were on the rise -Nell Gwyn, a hugely popular actress. There was a restoration of “ society comedy.” Of new playwrights with contemporary allusions, Edward Howard was the playwright of The Change of Crowns(1667). John Lacey was the lead. He acted the part of the country gentleman who had the effrontery to attack “the court with all the imaginable wit and plainness about selling places, and doing everything for money”. “ bitter indeed, but very true and witty” wrote Pepys. The King, who attended its first performance, was, we are told, so incensed at being abused to his face that he ordered the theatre closed and Lacey imprisoned.(11)
The Restoration.Women commissioned Lely to paint themselves, sometimes more than once. Lely went along with the requests. There are many studies of women thinking that they are wielding power. They prompted Lely to have license to toy with symbols. Louise de Keroualle , for example, was a long -term mistress of Charles II. She was an aristocrat, determined to bed Charles II as soon as she hit English shores when she was twenty one. Charles II got her appointed as maid of chambers to his sister. In her quite long reign, she was able to secure lands in England and France for both of her children and had a pension. Mistresses such as Keroualle commissioned Lely with urgency so that they might propagandize their wares. A hand holds a small lock of hair schematically in this idea in the apprentice work. Keroualle, her dark hair falling below her waist, in around 1671, completed by Lely, holds up a whole shank of her hair. (12)
Here is a quote about him when he was young, Ut pictura poesis is a Latin phrase literally meaning "as is painting so is poetry". Lely crossed to England first in 1643. He saw a collection from Charles I. ‘ in the autumn of 1647 he painted a portrait of Charles I and his fourteen-year-old second son, James, Duke of. York’ Between 1671 - 1674, Lely had raised his prices for heads to fifteen pounds. In 1669 he was granted a 200 pound annual pension. After his death, in 1680, the trustees of Lely’s estate took account of 9000 pounds of debt, and Lely’s large personal art collection. Lely was a connoisseur. The collection included many Van Dycks and his own work. His drawings were well sought after in Europe at auction. Debts were cleared. Lely’s son set up well as a gentleman and there was enough money to maintain Ley’s daughter until her marriage. (13)
I have been drawn by the enthusiasm that the curator Ken Hall shows as being appreciative of a past curators purchasing initiative that went on in the 1970’s in the Christchurch Art Gallery. Hall writes about several finds made that decade. ( Appendix ii) This writing is in the Bulletin issue. We are offered much material for discussion, in the context of this floor, whereas, insights and referencing of this painting alone tend otherwise towards a study of a practice with image stereotypes. What the purchasing initiative did for the gallery, importantly, has been that the buying inspiration has provided some access to examples from the ‘ bloodstream’ of English Art. We may imagine that the OUT OF TIME exhibition takes hold of a beginning of a narrative out of England to what we are invited to see here as a New Zealand scholarship opportunity with portraiture before photography. Every ruff of lace, and woven cloth, not silk, demarcates the push for locally manufactured materials.Young Frances Terresa before 1662, is Lely's first painting of her; the beautiful image, a face holding a different hairstyle and a body carrying yellow silk. (14)
It is the painting from Remuera, New Zealand purchased in the 1970’s that first caught my eye and gave me another theme for today as the extender to the studio painting. It is the portrait of the cavalier from Cromwell’s time. We ( in New Zealand) are all the inheritors of a dominant Protestant history, with respect to Civics and parliamentary laws. Britain became a nation secured into European Protestant influences. James II was Charles II’s younger brother and his successor. William of Orange would uphold this influence during his reign after James II. Then William from Holland who followed James.
From World History.A Constitutional MonarchyWe know that James followed Charles and William followed James.I quote: ‘The official line was that James had abdicated, and Parliament recorded the removal of the monarch as occurring on 23 December 1688, the day James had left English shores. William became William III of England via a decree by Parliament on 13 February 1689. This change of regime became known as the Glorious Revolution because it had occurred entirely peacefully (or almost, there were some episodes of Catholic houses and chapels being attacked during William's march to London). There had certainly been no battles or country-wide uprisings in support of either side. Whig historians (pro-Protestants) also believed the revolution 'glorious' because it had preserved the existing institutions of power, which was true, but the relationship between these institutions was altered, a change which only grew more.’ (15)
After 1670, the English industry for lace for fine clothing grew in impetus. We see men of England, landowners, along the wall to the left here from the 1700 period in their finery. This is a white rose thesis in 2006. Material Culture in Early Modern England: The Role of Goods in the Creation of Social Identities in Three Yorkshire Communities., -1660-178o , submitted in part for Doctoral degree in 2006.
by Eleanor Love.
Imagine being in York or Halifax. Imagine reading the Borthwick institute of archives.
The thesis starts:This thesis explores the spread, use, and social significance of material culture in Restoration and Georgian England, by focusing on three places in Yorkshire. ' These provide examples of how regional and urban/rural differences affected material culture in areas outside London, and allow an examination of how their inhabitants reacted to the sustained growth in the production and distribution of material goods in this period. quote more from the thesis: ‘Material culture in Contemporary Thought'The truth is that citizen’s and tradesmen's tables are now the emblems, not of plenty, but of luxury; nor of good housekeeping, but profusion. A tradesman dressed up fine, with his long wig and sword, may go to the ball when he pleases. For he is already dressed up in the habit; like a piece of counterfeit money, he is brass washed over with silver, but no tradesman will take him for current’‘Magazines such as the London Magazine, and previously The Spectator and The Tatler, devoted many column inches to the discussion of these issues. In 1711, the author of The Spectator ridiculed the emulation of city fashions by country people. Not only were many of these fashions above their wearers' social station, but being mere plain country folk and living far from the metropolis, the fashions followed were often hopelessly out of date, and incorrectly worn at that.
The Female Tatler magazine, earlier in the century, had been equally blunt. It scathingly described 'inferior' women who acted 'above' their station, as wearing 'tawdry painted calicoes, washed gloves, and steel crosses'. It was not just in written works that this type of discussion appeared, but also in paintings. The work Taste A-La-Mode (1745) by Louis Phillipe Boitard, for example, is populated by a group of fashionable women who at first glance all look alike. But as the historian Mark Hallett has pointed out, on the left hand side of the picture there is a prostitute, identifiable only by the way she is lifting her skirts in order to give an inviting glimpse of her ankle. "(16)
In the late sixteenth century, the nonconformist divine Arthur Dent in A Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven had lamented that 'poor men and women, poor hired servants, milk-maids, and such like, go quite beyond their abilities. " ' In 1583, Philip Stubbes advocated that every person should be forced to dress according to their rank, but complained that at the present time, even poor labourers wore silks and satins 'notwithstanding that they be bothe base by birth, mean by estate and servile by calling'. (17) Aileen Ribeiro's work Dress and Morality is a veritable historical compendium of such moral lamentations, about the perceived misuse of clothing from the early middle ages to the modem period. "' The doctoral essay continues ‘ Given the biases of contemporary commentators, it is not always easy to establish whether the 'misuse' of goods condemned by these men was a social practice or a trope. Nonetheless, authors between 1660 and 1780 all agreed that a variety of material goods such as clothes, wigs, china, silver trinkets and so forth, were becoming more common and more easily available. The problem in their eyes, was that this increasing availability was not restricted to the elite. Indeed, as Dent had stated, this produced a situation in which 'every Jack will be a gentleman, and Joan is as good as my lady'. Men like Defoe saw their well ordered world in threat of meltdown, and becoming a society in which: The poor will be like the rich, and the rich like the great, and the great like the greatest, and thus the world runs on to a kind of a distraction at this time. '(18)
References
1.https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/355537 2. Beckett. R.B. Lely. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 19513. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/from-flattering-royalty-to-warts-and-all-selected-highlights-of-sir-peter-lelys-works4. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/from-flattering-royalty-to-warts-and-all-selected-highlights-of-sir-peter-lelys-works5.https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/courtier#:~:text=%CB%88k%C8%AFrt%2D-,1,a%20person%20who%20practices%20flattery https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751884/ 6 .https://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/5036/ 7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751884/ 8. https://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/5036/ 9. https://www.norwellschools.org/cms/lib02/MA01001453/Centricity/Domain/192/THE%20RESTORATION%20OF%20CHARLES%20II.pdf10. https://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/5036/11.https://dokumen.pub/staging-the-revolution-drama-reinvention-and-history-164772-978178499 6765.html, 12.https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RE013.https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/48619214.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frances_Teresa_Stuart_by_Lely.jpg15. https://www.worldhistory.org/William_III_of_England/, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Philip-Stubbs, https://www.worldhistory.org/Glorious_Revolution/16. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Mark_Hallett_(historian)17.https://www.worldhistory.org/William_III_of_England/, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Philip-Stubbs18. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/11012/1/441024.pdf<<