As the likenesses of Anthony van Dyck did for the generation before, the portraits that Peter Lely created for the elite of the reigns of Charles II and James II fix in our modern minds the faces and personalities of Restoration England in a way that it is impossible to escape. Lely’s style, languid and lush, matches the temperament of the t.mes perfectly, and this is nowhere more evident than in his portraits of beautiful, aristocratic women. Lely painted this Portrait of Lucy Loftus in about 1673, when he was at the height of his popularity and artistic powers. The painting has an unbroken provenance since its creation, having descended in the sitter’s family until it was purchased by Sir Robert Walpole for his magnificent collects ion at Houghton Hall, where it remained until sold in 1886. It was acquired later that year for his mansion in New York (and later The Breakers, Newport) by Cornelius Vanderbilt II, in whose family it remains today.
Although she appears to have been a celebrated beauty, with engravings made after the present painting as well as other versions of it produced by Lely’s studio,1 biographical details about Lucy Loftus are somewhat scarce and confused. She was the daughter of George Brydges, 6th Baron Chandos (1620-1655), by his second wife, Lady Jane Savage, although her exact date of birth is uncertain. However, her marriage to Adam Loftus (1647-1691) on 7 March 1673 is recorded. Loftus, a member of the Anglo-Irish landowning elite, was the second son of Sir Arthur Loftus of Rathfarnham, County Dublin and his wife, Lady Dorothy Boyle, daughter of the 1st Earl of Cork. The couple had two children: James, who died in infancy, and a daughter also called Lucy, who later married the Marquess of Wharton, to whose family this portrait descended. As a Roman Catholic Loftus found favor upon the succession in 1685 of James II and was created Viscount Lisburne the following year. Sadly, Lucy had died in April 1681, before her husband’s elevation. A year later, in May 1682, Loftus remarried in lavish style, this t.mes to Dorothy, daughter of Patrick Allen.2 She also predeceased her husband, whose own demise followed soon after in September 1691, slain by a cannonball at the siege of Limerick. With no heirs, his title became extinct.
The present painting exemplifies the type of elegant portrait of women that had made Lely so popular with the elite of his day. The sitter, about twenty years of age, is shown with her legs stretched to the right, a stormy, “proto-Romantic” landscape opening behind her. She wears a blue shift, trimmed with gold fringe over one shoulder with a sumptuous red silk cloak covering the stone on which she sits. In tone, the painting is less formal than Lely’s famous “Windsor Beauties,” a series of ten canvases painted for the Duke of York in the mid 1660’s. Given the age of the sitter in the present portrait, and the more relaxed presentation of the sitter, it seems likely that it dates later than these famous canvases, likely to the early 1670’s, possibly commissioned on the occasion of Lucy’s marriage in 1673.
From very early in its history, the Portrait of Lucy Loftus was paired with another painting by Lely of Anne Wharton (née Lee), now in the collects ion of The Breakers, Newport, RI. Anne, a poet and playwright, was the first wife of Thomas, 1st Marquess of Wharton, who secondly married Lucy, the daughter and heir of Adam Loftus and the daughter and namesake of the sitter in the present portrait. Both canvases were thus brought together in the Wharton collects ion, which was already famous for the quality and range of portraits. The collects ion was largely formed by Philip, 4th Baron Wharton, and comprised of royal and family portraits as well as depictions of a few eminent personages.
Soon after his namesake grandson, Philip, 1st Duke of Wharton inherited the estate in 1715, the collects ion of portraits was sold en bloc to the great statesman, Sir Robert Walpole. His son, Horace Walpole, recounted the transaction:
My father bought of the last duke the whole collects ion of the Wharton family. There were twelve whole lengths, the two girls, six half lengths and two more by Sir Peter Lely; he paid an hundred pounds each for the whole lengths and the double picture, and fifty pounds each for the half lengths. [3]
By early 1723, George Vertue had seen some of the Wharton paintings brought to London after their purchase. Most of these paintings went to Robert Walpole’s magnificent house in Norfolk, Houghton Hall, except for a few that Horace Walpole noted were “not suiting” and were later sold. The “two more by Sir Peter Lely” are most likely the present portrait and its mate. It was while the painting was at Houghton that some confusion as to the identity of the sitter in the present painting arose. By the publication of the Aedes Walpolianae in 1747, the present portrait was thought to represent Jenny Deering, the mistress of the Marquess of Wharton, and Charles Townley published a print after the painting in 1787 with that identification, despite the previous engraving with the correct identification of the sitter made by Browne shortly after it was painted. When the famous sale of the Houghton collects ion was made to Catherine the Great in 1779, the two Lelys, which were hanging over doors, were presumably left out as the Russian empress would have had little familiarity with the artist, while the best of the other ex-Wharton portraits, mostly by van Dyck, would have had great appeal. The paintings remained at Houghton until they were sold at public auction by the 4th Marquess of Cholmondeley in 1866. Soon after they were both purchased by Cornelius Vanderbilt II for his new mansion at 57th and Fifth Avenue in New York, the largest private residence ever built in Manhattan. They remained there until they were sent to The Breakers, Vanderbilt’s famous “cottage” in Newport, where the present painting has remained until it was recently removed (fig. 1).
The present painting and the Portrait of Anne Wharton are in matching frames, both with Sir Robert Walpole’s crest of a capped man in profile. We are grateful to Lynn Roberts who has suggested that these were likely reframed in an auricular revival style in the early 18th Century when they came to Houghton.
1. For the engravings see examples at the National Portrait Gallery, London: inv. nos. NPG D31029 and NPG D11439 (both Alexander Browne) and inv. no. NPG D37406 (Charles Townley). A Studio replica of the present painting was sold at Replica Shoes ’s, London, 6 December, 2018, lot 155. There are further replicas by the studio at Rathfarnham Castle, outside Dublin, one formerly at Easton Neston and one at Aston Hall, Birmingham.
2. On 31 May, 1682, Arthur Chichester, Earl of Donegall wrote to the Dowager Countess that he had heard that “Addy Loftis’s [sic] wedding was very public… I hear the furniture of the wedding room cost £1,000” cf. Calendar of the Orrery Papers, Dublin 1941, p. 260.
3. H. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, London, 1762, vol. II, p. 92.