Portrait of Nell Gwynn attributed to Mary Beale
A fine Charles II portrait of Nell Gwynn attributed to Mary Beale, delicately painted showing Eleanor or “Nell” wearing pearl earrings and necklace, her low-cut, lace-trimmed, dress with jewelled clasps and within a feigned stone oval cartouche. Inscribed with Ms. ELEANOR GWYNN in the top left corner
A strikingly similar portrait of another mistress of Charles II, Barbara Villiers, is in the collection of The Geffrye Museum of The Home, London (illustrated). The Villiers portrait shows the sitter within a feigned stone oval cartouche of exactly the same baroque scrollwork, is of identical size and is also inscribed with the sitter’s name in the top left corner.
Nell Gwyn (born Feb. 2, 1650, London, — died Nov. 14, 1687, London) was an English actress and mistress of Charles II, whose frank recklessness, generosity, invariable good temper, ready wit, infectious high spirits, and amazing indiscretions appealed irresistibly to a generation that welcomed in her the living antithesis of Puritanism.
Her father, according to tradition, died in a debtors’ prison at Oxford during Nell’s infancy. Her mother kept a bawdyhouse in the Covent Garden district, where Nell was brought up “to fill strong waters [brandy] to the guests” (Samuel Pepys, Diary, Oct. 26, 1667). In 1664, through the influence of her older sister, Rose, Nell became an orange-girl at the Drury Lane Theatre. Quickly attracting the attention of the theatre’s leading actor, Charles Hart, whose mistress she became, Nell mounted the stage and probably made her first appearance in December 1665.
Mary Beale (1633 –1699) was an English portrait painter. She was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London. Beale became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work – a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s. Beale was also a writer, whose prose Discourse on Friendship of 1666 presents a scholarly, uniquely female take on the subject. Her 1663 manuscript Observations, on the materials and techniques employed “in her painting of Apricots”, though not printed, is the earliest known instructional text in English written by a female painter. Praised first as a “virtuous” practitioner in “Oyl Colours” by Sir William Sanderson in his 1658 book Graphice: Or The use of the Pen and Pensil; In the Excellent Art of PAINTING, Beale’s work was later commended by court painter Sir Peter Lely and, soon after her death, by the author of “An Essay towards an English-School”, his account of the most noteworthy artists of her generation.
