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This miniature depicts a young lady wearing a low-cut dress edged with lace and embroidered with pink, gold, green and blue flowers. Suspended from her neck is a black silk cord, an accessory worn by fashionable ladies in the early seventeenth century to emphasise the fairness of their skin.[1] Her curly light brown hair is loose, suggesting that she was unmarried at the time this image was painted.[2] The lady’s pose and gesture – right hand simultaneously caressing her long locks and clasping them to her heart and left breast – surely were intended to be erotic.
The sitter traditionally has been identified as Lady Eleanor Touchet (1590–1652), the fifth daughter of George Touchet (c. 1551–1617), 11th Baron Audley (later 1st Earl of Castlehaven).[3] Assuming that to be the case, this miniature must depict her in her late teens, in the run-up to her disastrously unhappy marriage, in March 1609, to the poet-courtier and lawyer Sir John Davies (c.1560–1625). He was...
This miniature depicts a young lady wearing a low-cut dress edged with lace and embroidered with pink, gold, green and blue flowers. Suspended from her neck is a black silk cord, an accessory worn by fashionable ladies in the early seventeenth century to emphasise the fairness of their skin.[1] Her curly light brown hair is loose, suggesting that she was unmarried at the time this image was painted.[2] The lady’s pose and gesture – right hand simultaneously caressing her long locks and clasping them to her heart and left breast – surely were intended to be erotic.
The sitter traditionally has been identified as Lady Eleanor Touchet (1590–1652), the fifth daughter of George Touchet (c. 1551–1617), 11th Baron Audley (later 1st Earl of Castlehaven).[3] Assuming that to be the case, this miniature must depict her in her late teens, in the run-up to her disastrously unhappy marriage, in March 1609, to the poet-courtier and lawyer Sir John Davies (c.1560–1625). He was more than twice her age and, according to contemporaries, ugly, illtempered, exceedingly fat and given to violent rages.[4] Given that Davies and the Touchets were based in Ireland at this date, presumably Oliver – who is not known to have visited Ireland – took Lady Eleanor’s likeness on an occasion prior to her marriage when she happened to be in England. Nothing is known, with certainty, of Lady Eleanor’s physical appearance. However, the poet and politician Christopher Brooke’s description of her, in a letter of 1622, as possessing a ‘contracted purse[d] mouth’ is not inconsistent with the pursed lips depicted in this miniature by Oliver.[5]
Sir John and Lady Eleanor had three children. Their only daughter, Lucy Davies (1613–1679), who was born in Dublin, went on to marry Ferdinando Hastings (1609–1656), 6th Earl of Huntingdon, whose mother, Lady Elizabeth, née Stanley, is the presumed sitter in a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard also in the Bearsted Collection. Lady Eleanor, who was literate in both Latin and English and learned, too, in theology and the law, would go on to become a prolific pamphleteer. Her first printed pamphlet, A Warning to the Dragon and All his Angels, was published in London in 1625; nearly seventy more, many containing prophecies, were to follow. At the time that Oliver painted this miniature, however, such literary endeavours were still to come.
A virtually identical miniature – depicting the same young lady wearing the same low-cut dress and adopting the same erotic pose – is at Castle Howard (fig.6).[6] The example in the Bearsted Collection, however, must be presumed to be the ‘prime’ version. Why Oliver should have produced more than one copy of this miniature remains unclear, though it is tempting to speculate that Lady Eleanor might have ordered one for her ogre of a fiancé, another for a secret lover or admirer
