T he latest iteration of the Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries sale once again presents a selection of exceptional drawings, watercolors, gouaches and pastels that together chart in fascinating ways the development of the art of drawing in Europe over the centuries, and the great variety of functions that this many-faceted art form served.
Ever since his own lifetime, Sir Peter Lely has been regarded as one of the most distinguished artists active in seventeenth-century England. Following his arrival in London in the early 1640s, his reputation grew with remarkable speed, and by the mid-1650s he was widely acknowledged by contemporaries as the preeminent artist working in England. Soon after the Restoration, he was appointed Principal Painter to Charles II, and his celebrated portraits came to define the visual culture of a court renowned for its elegance, extravagance, and pursuit of pleasure.
Yet beyond the grand oil paintings upon which his fame principally rests, Lely was also an accomplished and highly sensitive draughtsman. The three portraits offered as lots 120, 121 and 122 in this sale provide compelling insight into this, now less familiar, aspect of his artistic practice. They belong to a rare and much-prized group of finished portrait drawings executed as autonomous works of art, rather than preparatory studies. Roger North, Lely’s friend and executor, referred to these refined works as ‘craions’, noting that they were displayed in ebony frames, testimony to the esteem in which they were held.1
These finished drawings, of which the self-portrait must be considered the greatest example, illustrate that Lely was a draughtsman of such exceptional sophistication and technical virtuosity, that he not only surpassed his London-based contemporaries, but also deserves to be seen in an international context, as one of the great draughtsmen of his age.
Executed between circa 1655 and 1680, the three portraits were produced during a period of profound political and social upheaval in England. Their creation spanned decades marked by the end of the Commonwealth, the Restoration of the monarchy, successive Anglo-Dutch conflicts, the devastation of the Great Plague, and the destruction wrought by the Great Fire of London. Beyond their obvious aesthetic appeal, these drawings possess significant historical value, offering vivid glimpses into a world that has long since vanished yet continues to captivate the modern imagination.
Their provenance is equally remarkable, for the ownership histories of the great Self Portrait (lot 120 ) and Lely’s portrait of his son, John (lot 121) is entirely unbroken since the time of their creation; the works having remained with Lely’s direct descendants until 2016, whereupon they were acquired, at Sotheby’s, by the present owner. The earliest owners of Lely’s Portrait of a lady holding a jar (lot 122) are - by contrast – not known, but by the late 18th century the drawing was certainly in the possession of the Scottish aristocrat, John, 16th Lord Forbes (1725-1804), within whose family it remains until today.
1.R. B. Beckett, Lely, London 1951, p. 12
Pieter van der Faes, known as Peter Lely, was born of Dutch parents in 1618 in the garrison town of Soest, Westphalia. His father took on the name ‘Lely’, as the house in which they lived bore the device of a lily on its gable. By 1637 he was apprenticed in the studio of Frans Pieterz de Grebber (1573-1649) in Haarlem, an important artistic centre at the time, where he spent at least two years.
Lely moved to England sometime between 1641 and 1643. Initially, according to his early biographer Bainbrigg Buckeridge (1668-1733), he ‘followed the natural bent of his genius and painted “landskip” with small figures, as likewise historical compositions, but at length finding face painting more encouraged here he turned his study that way, within, in a short time, he succeeded so well that he surpassed all his contemporaries’.1
He lodged at first in London with the artist-dealer George Geldorp, who was able to initiate some powerful connections and by the mid 1640s he had undertaken commissions for families including the Percys, Cecils and Sidneys.
Throughout the Civil War patronage appears to have continued on both sides of the political divide and Lely continued to build his reputation. In 1647 he was made a freeman of the London Painter-Stainers Company, thereby freeing him from the restrictions imposed on previous Netherlandish artists and enabling him to take on apprentices. In the same year the Earl of Northumberland commissioned him, as Van Dyck’s natural successor, to paint a double portrait of the King and his brother the Duke of York.
After Charles I’s death in 1649 and from the beginning of eleven years of Parliamentarian rule under Cromwell, Lely continued to prosper. In 1654, he painted Oliver Cromwell, who famously insisted on a true representation, including ‘pimples, warts and everything as you see [in] me’, together with many other figures in the Protector’s close circle.2
Meanwhile, Lely kept in touch with the exiled Charles II’s court in Holland and visited that country in 1656 with his friend, the royalist architect Hugh May. Following the Restoration in 1660, as one of the most sought-after portraitists in London, he was made official court painter with a substantial annual pension. Throughout this decade he painted many leading figures of the period, including the celebrated twelve aristocratic ladies, known as ‘The Windsor Beauties’, commissioned by the Duchess of York, and the ‘Flagmen series’, commissioned by her husband the Duke, depicting the great admirals who had defeated the Dutch at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665.
In 1666 Samuel Pepys commented, when visiting Lely with his friend Sir William Penn, that he was ‘so full of work… that he could only give Sir William a sitting six days ahead, between seven and eight in the morning’.3 Such pressure of work resulted in the need to increase considerably the number of assistants in his studio. However, throughout the next decade, he himself continued to undertake and complete important commissions, including one of Charles’ mistress Nell Gwyn in the guise of Venus and another of Mary of Modena, future wife of James II of England.
Alongside his great success as the leading portrait artist of his generation - comfortably following in the footsteps of his predecessor Van Dyck - Lely was one of the great collectors of prints and drawings. His executor, Roger North catalogued 10,000 objects, many of which are now in the world’s foremost collections. His collection included many drawings by Italian artists, which enabled him, without visiting Italy, to understand better the characteristics of the art of that country. Overall, in the history of collecting, Lely ranks alongside and arguably outstrips, in terms of the sheer quality and consistency of his drawings, subsequent pre-eminent artist-collectors such as Jonathan Richardson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West and Sir Thomas Lawrence.
From 1650 Lely lived and worked in the Grand Piazza of Covent Garden, close to the centre of fashionable London. ‘His studio was carefully designed with light sources coming from a number of angles, while the rest of the house was carefully appointed, perhaps echoing Lely’s awareness of the lavish lodgings Van Dyck had maintained at Blackfriars, adorned with his marvellously rich collection of Old Master and contemporary paintings, drawings and prints before the Civil War.’4
He was evidently of affable nature and a good host; as Pepys noted in his diary, ‘he lives very gently and treated us nobly at a Dinner’.5 Charles II once remarked that he ‘would often times take great pleasure in his [Lely’s], conversation, which he found to be as agreeable as his pencil’.6
Peter Lely was knighted in 1680 and died later the same year with a confirmed reputation as ‘an artist of outstanding invention and skill, both a chronicler of his age and a painter who could transport those who viewed his works to paradisiacal realms of dream and imagination’.7
1.Bainbrigg Buckeridge, writing in Roger de Piles’s The Art of Painting and the Lives of the Painters, (1706) cited in: Peter Lely, A Lyrical Vision, exhibition catalogue, London, Courtauld Gallery, 2012, p. 34
2.Ibid, p. 21
3.R.B. Beckett, Lely, London 1951, p. 18
4.Peter Lely, A Lyrical Vision, op. cit., p. 22
5.O. Millar, Sir Peter Lely 1618-80, exhibition catalogue, London National Portrait Gallery, 1978, p. 15
6.Peter Lely, A Lyrical Vision, op. cit., p. 39
7.Ibid, p. 24
