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Lot Essay
The courts of Henry VIII and Charles I, so the court of Charles II has become inextricably linked with the portraits of his Principal Painter, Sir Peter Lely. This portrait, dating to the late 1660s or early 1670s, represents the culmination in development of Lely’s style of the portrait types through which the Restoration court could fashion its identity. The rapidly applied, broad brushwork of the sitter’s brown silk dress, her smoothly painted face, and ‘heavy-lidded’ gaze are all hallmarks of the female portrait-types which gained Lely a position of supremacy in British portraiture throughout the second half of the seventeenth century.
This portrait has traditionally been identified as Mary ‘Moll’ Davis, as famed actress of the Restoration and one of the favored mistresses of King Charles II. Details of her birth and upbringing are unknown; Pepys believed her to be the illegitimate daughter of ‘Collonell Howard, my Lord Barkeshire [Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire (1619-1706)]’; though she may instead have been the daughter of a blacksmith on his Wiltshire estate. In 1660, she joined the Duke’s Theatre Company with whom, as a famous beauty, she rapidly became a celebrated actress and singer. Pepys saw her perform on 14th January 1668, writing that she ‘dances beyond any thing in the world’. By this time, she had met Charles II who attended her performances, ‘gazing on her, and my Lady Castlemayne [Barbara Villiers, 1st Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Castlemain (1640-1709), the King’s then favourite] being melancholy and out of humour, all the play…The King, it seems, hath given her [Davis] a ring of L700, which she shews to every body…and he hath furnished a house for her in Suffolke Street most richly’. As the King’s mistress, Moll retired from the stage in May 1668, though continued to perform at Court masques such as Calisto in 1675 and John Blow’s Venus and Adonis in 1681-82. Her position as the King’s favorite lasted only briefly, however, as Charles quickly tired of her extravagant habits. Her rivalry with Nell Gwyn, who had likewise begun an affair with the King in 1668, caused much gossip at Court. Famously Gwyn was alleged to have laced Davis’ food with a purgative drug just before she spent an evening with the King. The ascendance of ‘Pretty, witty Nell’ at Court saw Moll Davis’ position decline, though she did give birth to Charles’ last child, Lady Mary Tudor, in 1673. In December 1686, she married James Paisible, a musician from the Court. The couple went into exile in 1688 at the beginning of the Glorious Revolution (1688-89), returning to England in January 1698.
Portraits of Moll Davis are not common and few can be identified with absolute conviction. A portrait of the actress playing the guitar, an instrument which became highly fashionable at court from the early 1660s onwards, is now at Weston Park and remains the most securely identified portrait of the sitter, as it was copied in mezzotint and published by Richard Thompson (d. 1693) titled as ‘Madame Davis’. The present portrait shares a number of similarities with the work, particularly in the modelling and features of the sitter’s face. The sitter’s pose is an early example of Lely’s use of a full-length composition showing the sitter, sitting languidly on the ground with a landscape beyond, which he would use frequently in the mid- and late 1670s. The pose and dress of the sitter are reminiscent of other portraits of women at the court painted at the turn of the 1670s, like those of Louise de Kéroualle, later Duchess of Portsmouth, as a shepherdess and Mary of Modena, Duchess of York (both Althorp House, Northamptonshire).
This portrait has traditionally been identified as Mary ‘Moll’ Davis, as famed actress of the Restoration and one of the favored mistresses of King Charles II. Details of her birth and upbringing are unknown; Pepys believed her to be the illegitimate daughter of ‘Collonell Howard, my Lord Barkeshire [Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire (1619-1706)]’; though she may instead have been the daughter of a blacksmith on his Wiltshire estate. In 1660, she joined the Duke’s Theatre Company with whom, as a famous beauty, she rapidly became a celebrated actress and singer. Pepys saw her perform on 14th January 1668, writing that she ‘dances beyond any thing in the world’. By this time, she had met Charles II who attended her performances, ‘gazing on her, and my Lady Castlemayne [Barbara Villiers, 1st Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Castlemain (1640-1709), the King’s then favourite] being melancholy and out of humour, all the play…The King, it seems, hath given her [Davis] a ring of L700, which she shews to every body…and he hath furnished a house for her in Suffolke Street most richly’. As the King’s mistress, Moll retired from the stage in May 1668, though continued to perform at Court masques such as Calisto in 1675 and John Blow’s Venus and Adonis in 1681-82. Her position as the King’s favorite lasted only briefly, however, as Charles quickly tired of her extravagant habits. Her rivalry with Nell Gwyn, who had likewise begun an affair with the King in 1668, caused much gossip at Court. Famously Gwyn was alleged to have laced Davis’ food with a purgative drug just before she spent an evening with the King. The ascendance of ‘Pretty, witty Nell’ at Court saw Moll Davis’ position decline, though she did give birth to Charles’ last child, Lady Mary Tudor, in 1673. In December 1686, she married James Paisible, a musician from the Court. The couple went into exile in 1688 at the beginning of the Glorious Revolution (1688-89), returning to England in January 1698.
Portraits of Moll Davis are not common and few can be identified with absolute conviction. A portrait of the actress playing the guitar, an instrument which became highly fashionable at court from the early 1660s onwards, is now at Weston Park and remains the most securely identified portrait of the sitter, as it was copied in mezzotint and published by Richard Thompson (d. 1693) titled as ‘Madame Davis’. The present portrait shares a number of similarities with the work, particularly in the modelling and features of the sitter’s face. The sitter’s pose is an early example of Lely’s use of a full-length composition showing the sitter, sitting languidly on the ground with a landscape beyond, which he would use frequently in the mid- and late 1670s. The pose and dress of the sitter are reminiscent of other portraits of women at the court painted at the turn of the 1670s, like those of Louise de Kéroualle, later Duchess of Portsmouth, as a shepherdess and Mary of Modena, Duchess of York (both Althorp House, Northamptonshire).