STUDIO OF SIR PETER LELY
Portrait of Princess Isabella Stuart, daughter of James II and Mary of Modena
oil on canvas
42 ½ x 33 ½ inches (52.25 x 41.75 cm.)
PROVENANCE:
Private Collection, Germantown, Ohio
In 1673 at the behest of Pope Clement X, Mary of Modena acquiesced to marry the future King of England James II, although she had intended to enter a convent. “Bowed in submission, her surrender is as prompt as her resistance has been steadfast, and she was to carry to the married state those virtues of obedience, devotion, self-abnegation which would have adorned the quiet haven she had chosen for herself”.[1] At the time of their marriage Mary was 15 and James 40.
On August 28, 1676, their daughter Isabella was born at St. James’s Palace in London. Her paternal grandparents were Charles I of England and his wife Henrietta Maria of France, and her maternal grandparents Alfonso IV d’Este and Laura Martinozzi (the niece of King Louis XIV’s chief minister Cardinal Mazarin). She had two half-sisters from her father’s first marriage to Anne Hyde, Mary and Anne who both would become future queens of England.[2]
In 1678 the family fled to Brussels to escape the so-called Popish Plot. This was a fictitious scheme that alleged the Jesuits planned to assassinate King Charles II and crown his brother James. But in the summer of 1679 Charles became very ill and the family hastily returned to London.[3] Feeling the family had come back too soon upon recovering his health later that year, Charles ordered his brother to move to Edinburgh and take charge of the royal affairs in Scotland.[4] On Charles’s orders Anne and Isabella remained in London.[5] In a letter from Mary in November 1680 to her uncle Prince Rinaldo d’Este she wrote of the unimaginable pain and her “affliction at leaving the children behind”.[6]
Sorrowfully on March 2, 1681, Isabella died at the place of her birth St. James’s Palace without her parents. James observed “It was more afflicting to both because they had not the satisfaction of seeing and assisting her in sickness; but those hardships were the unavoidable sequels of their uneasy banishment and cruel persecution”.[7] Mary writing on the death of her only child to her friend Sister Mary Laura in the cloister of Modena wrote of Isabella “one of the dearest things I had in the world … God knows when we shall go home. It costs me less, now to be away, as my child is no longer there”.[8] Afterwards Mary’s health steadily declined, and she fell into a state of religious mania which would continue for years.[9]
Isabella is buried in Westminster Abbey, London. Described as a “very lovely and promising child”[10], she along with her mother were used as pawns in a game of dynastic chess. Although history records only a smattering of details on Isabella’s life, Sir Peter Lely and his workshop created a lasting tribute to all that might have been.
Believed to have been done around 1677, Lely painted Princess Isabella with a garland of flowers in her hair, seated on a red curtain with a lamb in a wooded landscape at twilight. Lely’s painting is in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court, but at some point reduced from its original size.[11] Our painting, done in Lely’s studio, depicts the entire original composition. Studio replicas were produced to hang in various residences of the Stuarts, for other family members, as well as courtiers. Around 1684 Alexander Browne executed a mezzotint of Lely’s painting of Isabella of which one print can be found in the National Portrait Gallery, London and another at the British Museum.
Isabella is most likely less than two years of age when painted by Lely. Her state of undress, the garland of flowers in her hair, along with the lamb are emblematic of her innocence and purity. The red curtain that hangs down from the tree and upon which Isabella sits refers to the dynastic tradition of the curtained structures under which royals sat on ceremonial occasions.[12] By painting the light to reflect sunset, the suggestion of tranquility and the antique were heightened. The evoking of antiquity stems from the popularity of pastoral literature during this period, which presented a vision of Arcadia as a paradise, free of the mundane tribulations of daily life, particularly those encountered in town and court.[13]
Oliver Millar in his exhibition on Lely held at the National Portrait Gallery, London noted the inspirational source for Isabella’s portrait was a drawing that the artist owned by Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, Il Parmigianino of the infant St. John the Baptist with a Lamb.[14]
This painting was previously unknown to Catharine MacLeod currently compiling a catalogue raisonné on the works of Sir Peter Lely with Diana Dethloff.[15]
[1] Martin Haile, Queen Mary of Modena, Her Life and Letters, J.M. Dent & Co., London, 1905, pp. 21-22.
[2] “Isabella Stuart” on DBpedia at dbpedia.org.
[3] “Popish Plot” on Britannica at Britannica.com.
[4] Mark Cartwright, “James II of England” in World History Encyclopedia, worldhistory.org, September 2,
2022.
[5] Carola Oman, Mary of Modena, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1962, p. 67.
[6] Martin Haile, op.cit., p. 100.
[7] Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, volume IV, Bell & Daldy, London, 1865, p. 600.
[8] Martin Haile, op.cit., p. 102.
[9] “Who was Mary of Modena” on History Things at historythings.com.
[10] Agnes Strickland, op.cit., p. 600.
[11] Oliver Millar, “Princess Isabella” in Pictures in the Royal Collection, Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian
Pictures, text volume, The Phaidon Press, London, 1963, p. 122, no. 246.3.
[12] Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990, p. 109.
[13] James Hall, “Arcadia” in Dictionary of Subject and Symbols in Art, Harper & Row Publishers, New
York,1979, pp. 30-31; Alison McNeil Kettering, The Dutch Arcadia, Pastoral Art and its Audience in
the Golden Age, Totowa, New Jersey, 1983, pp. 10-11, 70-71; and Scott A Sullivan, The Dutch
Gamepiece, Rowmant Allenheld Publishers, Totowa, New Jersey, 1983, pp. 62-63.
[14] Oliver Millar, Sir Peter Lely, 1618-80, National Portrait Gallery, 1978, p.29, fn. 43.
[15] Written communication dated May 24, 2023, from Catharine Macleod, National Portrait Gallery,
London.