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- Daniel Mytens
circa 1590 – 1647
Lady Mary Feilding, as Countess of Aran, later Marchioness and Duchess of Hamilton (1613 - 1638)
Painted 1620
Oil on panel: 46 x 31 3/16 inches, 115 x 78 cm
Provenance
Presumably commissioned by her father, William Feilding, 1st Earl of Denbigh (1606 - 1649);
thence to Lady Mary Feilding’s daughter, Anne, who married William Douglas (1634 - 1694) in 1656, created Duke of Hamilton (2nd creation) in 1660;
thence to their daughter, Katherine (1662 - 1707), who married the 1st Duke of Atholl in 1683;
thence by descent to Ralph Neville of Butleigh Court (1817 - 1886), thence to his grandson Commander Edward Neville of Charlton Adam, Somerset, who sold the painting along with the house around 1955 to an English family, by whom sold;
Sotheby’s, London, 23 November 2006, lot 5.
This exquisite child portrait, one of the finest to be painted during the Jacobean reign, is a major rediscovered work by Daniel Mytens, the dominant court painter in England prior to the arrival of Van Dyck. The sitter is Lady Mary Feilding, who was the third child and first daughter of William Feilding, Earl of Denbigh and his wife Susan Villiers, sister of George, Duke of Buckingham. In June 1622, at the very early age of nine, she was married to the fourteen-year-old James Hamilton, 3rd Marquess of Hamilton, later created 1st Duke of Hamilton in 1643.[1] This arranged marriage was one of the most significant dynastic matches to be made during the Jacobean reign, for it paired up the scion of Scotland’s leading noble family, the Hamiltons – distant cousins to James I – with that of Margaret’s uncle, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham, as ‘favourite’ to both James I and Charles I, was to become the most powerful man in the kingdom before his assassination in 1628.[2]
Marriages of aristocratic children of this sort were becoming rare by this time, and the fact they could not be consummated gave them a public dimension that, in Mary Feilding’s case, bordered on farce. In 1626, when she had reached the age of thirteen, Hamilton removed himself to Scotland, perhaps in fright. The king was incensed and tried to bribe Hamilton to return by making him Master of the Horse. This failed initially, and the king then wrote a letter in his own hand demanding that Hamilton ‘be quickly here’. This forced Hamilton, now eighteen-year-old, back to London and, on the night of his return, into the bed of his teenage wife. He tried to plead exhaustion and lack of clean linen in the hope of causing a brief postponement, ‘Whereupon his Majestie commanded his owne Barber to attend him with a shirt, waistcoat & nightcap of his majesties, & would not be satisfied till he had seen them both in bed together.’amiltonH Thereafter not a great deal is known of Mary’s short life, which came to an end at the age of twenty-five.[3] She and Hamilton had six children, only two of whom survived: the younger, Susannah (subject of a beautiful portrait by John Michael Wright), who married the 7th Earl of Cassilis, and Anne who became Duchess of Hamilton in her own right.[4]
Daniel Mytens came to London in around 1618 and remained until 1634, when he returned to The Hague. His art tends to be categorised as transitional between the highly formalised portraits of the Jacobean period and the more painterly ‘modern’ images of Anthony van Dyck, but this hardly does justice to his best work, which has virtues of a descriptive accuracy, not unlike the early works of Velazquez painted in Seville around 1618 – 1620, part of a Europe-wide move towards a new kind of realism. It is really a different strand in European painting, which should not be relegated, in purely aesthetic terms, to a position below the late and better known works of the Spanish painter, and, of course, those of Van Dyck. In addition, in the same way that the early Velâazquez has a natural, and surprising in someone so young, grasp of the inner workings of the human soul, Mytens could also express these powerful workings of the mind with an almost equal sensitivity.
These qualities are ones which we also find in the portrait of Mary Feilding.[5] Being only a child, there is not the same well of experience for the artist to draw on, but Mytens becomes so close to the hesitant, shy personality of his subject that we can begin to read into the beautifully delineated face the trials and triumphs that came later in her short life. In this way, it is a work of art that is also redolent of a life history that still speaks across the centuries, something that has an endless validity.
We are grateful to Dr Duncan Thompson, former Keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, for confirming the attribution of this portrait and for his assistance in writing the catalogue entry.
[1] Her husband was a direct descendant of Archibald Douglas, who had married Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII. The daughter of Angus and Margaret Tudor, also Margaret, was in due course mother of Lord Darnley, King Consort of Scotland, and husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. The Hamiltons were thus next in line to the throne after the Stuarts, and owned vast tracts of Scotland. As such the bridegroom’s father would have been the most powerful of all the Scottish nobles who joined James I’s court in England.
[2] As a result of this marriage, Mary (also known as Margaret), was to become the highest ranking woman at Court, after the Queen. See Sarah Poynting, ‘”In the name of all the sisters”: Henrietta Maria’s Notorious Whores’, in Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens (2003), ed. Clare McManus, pp.163-85.
[3] She was described by Bishop Burnett as ‘a most affectionate and dutiful wife, and a very decent person’, the latter part of which sounds more than mere convention.
[4] Hamilton, a man of taste, was the subject of two great masterpieces of seventeenth-century portraiture, both by Daniel Mytens: a full-length portrait painted in 1624 (Tate Britain), and another one painted in 1629 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery).
[5] Mytens was to portray Mary again two years later, this time in a bust length portrait dated 1622, a painting which has descended to the current Duke of Hamilton.
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