John Parker

Portrait of a Husband and Wife, Possibly Members of the Selby Family, circa 1635

oil on canvas

43¼ x 53½ inches (109.8 x 135.8 cm.)

PROVENANCE: The Selby-Lowndes family, Whaddon Hall, Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, by descent to Lieut.-Colonel W. Selby-Lowndes; Property of Lieut.-Colonel W. Selby-Lowndes removed from Whaddon Hall, Bletchley, Buckinghamshire; Christie’s, London, November 2, 1945, lot 128 (as Jonson); Anonymous sale, Christie’s, London, July 30, 1982, lot 3 (as G. Jackson); Private Collection, United States

This beautiful portrait of a man and wife is a superb example of native English painting in the years leading up to the Civil War and strikes deep chords in English painting which resonate far beyond its period. The simple, direct style in which it is painted, and the artist’s concern with the sitters’ characters, the private narrative of their relationship and their connection with the landscape - and by extension the society - in which the painter places them look forward to the best of eighteenth century British painting. The subtle synthesis of the couple’s apparent cheerfulness and the sunshine on unblemished landscape beyond says much to us not only of the relationship that Parker is depicting, and no doubt of his knowledge of these sitters, but of the fervent hopes of the English country gentry at this date.

The ease and unpretentiousness in Parker’s execution must come from those qualities in himself, and from his complete familiarity with the world he is portraying. A couple just entering middle age are shown holding hands, an informal gesture of affection rare in painting at the time, against a backdrop which subtly places them in the social hierarchy as surely as it sets them in the geography of their own countryside. They are shown in their own clothes – the husband in the sober black of a gentleman, adorned only by the elaborate and fashionable lace collar he is wearing and the sword which establishes him as a figure of knightly authority – and in their own landscape, without any mythical or allegorical trapping. The tall spired church on a hill is their parish church as surely as the alert spaniel by the wife’s side is her favourite lapdog.

Whether the firm grip that the husband has on his sword expresses the mood of the 1630s, the unwilling recognition that maybe not this year, nor next but soon that war was round the corner, or whether it merely emphasises the squire’s authority in his lands is a matter of taste. But the gesture perfectly echoes the anxiety of the country gentry at this date: the class who heard the reports of war with Scotland, Puritan iconoclasm in London and the growing breach of Parliament with the Crown but still tried to believe they lived in ‘so flourishing a kingdom of which the whole world grew jealous daily’ ¹ whilst privately praying ‘God send good issue; my despair begins to go above my faith.’ ²

It is significant that although Parker was aware of Van Dyck’s painting – his portrait of Eleanor Evelyn painted in 1634 derives from Pieter de Jode’s engraving of Van Dyck’s Henrietta Maria of 1632 (National Gallery, London) – the clasped hands of these sitters have no echo in the Flemish master’s work, none of whose marriage portraits can equal this one in simple harmony and affection. Parker creates a world the viewer might be happy to inhabit. The artist and his contemporaries might appropriate Van Dyckian poses in their work, but Van Dyck’s fantasy was a courtier’s art, most suitable for ‘patrons who spent so much of their lives in an atmosphere of masque.’³ The sitters in this portrait, a country gentleman and his wife, have their feet planted more firmly on the ground, and Parker, whose talent was to show his sitters as they saw themselves, was their painter in a way that Van Dyck could never be.

He was also possibly their friend. Parker was not a commercial jobbing portraitist, but a gentleman amateur, who painted for his own and his friends’ pleasure. Until the 1950s he was known only as a name in one of the earliest works of English art history, Sir William Sanderson’s Graphice, The Use of the Pen and Pensil, in Designing, Drawing, and Painting published in 1658. Graphice remains one of the more important contemporary sources for the early careers of well-known professional portraitists such as Gerard Soest – to whom Sanderson sat – Mary Beale, John Hayls or Sir Peter Lely. But after listing the principal commercial painters of his time Sanderson continues:

And to give honour to the Art of Painting man wealthy Gentlemen, ingenious in their private delight, are become Judicious practitioners herein; Namely Sir John Holland, Mr Guies, Mr Parker, Mr Springnall and others. ⁴

In 1953 a portrait signed and dated Jo: Parker pinxit Anno Dom 1637 appeared on the London art market (Robinson and Foster, November 26, 1953, lot 124). This portrait established the distinctive characteristics of Parker’s artistic style and enabled an existing body of work to be attributed to him. It shows a young woman, three-quarter-length with a watch beside her on a table, whose haunting, alert characterisation, is coloured by melancholy or anticipation through the use of the watch as a temporal allusion, or as a memento mori. The painter clearly delights in the meticulous depiction of costume – the intricate lace and ribbons of the sitter’s dress – and the exact depiction of still-life elements in painting, the watch and chain upon the table, as well as the communication of emotion through a repertoire of expressive hand gestures.

As Parker’s artistic personality became apparent, a sense of his circle of acquaintance and patronage also revealed itself. With sitters such as Eleanor Evelyn, who was the sister of the diarist John Evelyn, or Robert Lord Petre, - whose portrait dated to 1635 and that of his young son William dated to 1632 (both Petre family collection, Ingatestone Hall, Essex) were attributed to Parker by David Piper in 1956, ⁵Parker’s circle of friends and patrons emerge: they were cultured members of the gentry and minor nobility, politically conservative and royalist, but not central figures at the court or in politics. The majority of his portraits appear to date as with the present example from the 1630s, although a portrait of Susan Hervey (Hanmer Collection, Bettisfield Park) dates from after marriage in 1646 to the horticulturalist Sir Thomas Hanmer 2nd– a friend and correspondent of John Evelyn – and, necessarily, the reference in Graphice shows that Parker was still practising in 1658.

The names of the couple in this painting remains uncertain, although it is possible to speculate on their identity. The painting descended to 1945 in the collection of the Selby-Lowndes family at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, but the sitters are unlikely to be members of the Lowndes family. The Lowndes family, originally of nearby Winslow Hall, Buckinghamshire, achieved local prominence later in the seventeenth century, when William Lowndes was Secretary to the Treasury and one of Queen Anne’s ablest financiers – the originator of the saying ‘look after the pence for the pounds look after themselves.’ ⁶His father Robert’s main interests were in America – where he emigrated for the duration of the Civil War - and in any case it is improbable that such an important portrait of early ancestors would have lost its identity in the lifetime of their descendants. The landowning Barringtons – an old and distinguished family with whom the Lowndes intermarried in the eighteenth century and who brought family portraits into the Lowndes collection – were at this date notorious Puritans and political enemies of Charles I. As such religious radicals they would never have belonged to Parker’s circle.

The Selbys, however, fit the pattern of Parker’s patrons. Originally from Northumberland by the turn of the seventeenth century they were also established in the South at Ightham Motte in Kent, and family members held important provincial office under Queen Elizabeth and King James I. As Gentleman Porter of Berwick, for example, Sir William Selby of Ightham ⁷ handed the keys of the town – and symbolically of the kingdom – to James I on his progress south to claim his Kingdom in 1603, and was knighted by him on that journey. Whaddon Hall was acquired in 1698 by James Selby, Serjeant-at-law, a scion of the distinguished Selby family, who lived at nearby Wavendon House, Whaddon, and passed in the next century to his descendant Thomas James Selby High-Sherriff of Buckinghamshire. As Selby had no blood heirs he willed the house to his best friend and neighbour William Lowndes, a major in the militia, on condition that he added the name Selby to his own. In 1783 William Selby-Lowndes the new owner took possession not only of the hall itself but the contents, which included the paintings hanging there. While it may prove impossible to establish the identity of the husband and wife in this portrait, it is most probable that they are members of the numerous and widespread Selby family or their relatives.

¹ Oxenden family letters quoted in David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640 – 1642, Oxford University Press, 2006, p.26.
² Edward Dering quoted, ibid., p.40.
³ Sir Oliver Millar and Margart Whinney, The Oxford History of English Art 1624 – 1714, Oxford University Press, 1957, p.73.
⁴ Sir William Sanderson, Graphice or, The Use of the Pen and Pensil, in Designing, Drawing, and Painting, London, 1658, p.20.
⁵ David Piper, Petre Family Portraits, Essex County Records Office Publications, 1956, p.8.
⁶ A. A. Hanham, Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, vol. 34, p.601.
⁷ A portrait of Sir William’s wife Dame Dorothy Selby painted c.1638 - 1641 (National Trust, Ightham Motte, Kent) though presently unattributed has considerable stylistic affinities with Parker’s work.

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