SIR PETER LELY
Diana Kirke, later Countess of Oxford (1665-70)
Oil on canvas (135 x 108 cm)
Yale Center for British Art, Yale, Connecticut, USA
To enlarge the picture, right-click on it and “Open in a new tab”
The portrait of Diana Kirke is one of Lely’s most sensuous and beautiful. It exemplifies his lush painterly and colouristic style, reminiscent of that of Rubens, in which the richly painted surfaces echo and magnify the voluptuousness of the subject. The painting was most likely commissioned by Diana’s lover, Aubrey de Vere, 20th Earl of Oxford. Painted in the late 1660s when Diana was openly acknowledged at court as Oxford’s mistress, the work closely follows the standard pattern used for portraits of Restoration beauties, a formula that Lely had devised earlier in that decade with his “Windsor Beauties” a series commissioned by the Duke and the Duchess of York.
It would be easy to describe Diana Kirke’s portrait as one more in Lely’s catalogue of Restoration beauties; but the casual, elegant pose, the beguiling stare and the careful attention lavished on the portrait by the artist himself sets this picture apart from the majority of Lely’s female portraits of the period most of which were produced by his studio assistants in an almost assembly-line fashion. If ever was a painting by which Lely should be remembered, then Diana Kirke’s portrait is the one.
Kirke and Oxford married in 1673, later on, their youngest daughter Diana would be renowned at court for her beauty. The family’s fate would be forever linked to the royal family by the marriage of the young Diana to the 1st Duke of St. Albans, Charles Beauclerk, an illegitimate son of Charles II by his mistress the actress Nell Gwyn. Unfortunately, Diana’s husband was not lucky as his wife in the choice of an artist, since he was the victim of Sir Godfrey Kneller, a mediocre painter vastly overrated by his contemporaries. Kneller’s awful portrait of the Duke can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Old Masters 