Peter Lely

(b Soest, Westphalia, 14 Sept 1618; d London, 30 Nov 1680). Dutch painter, draughtsman and collector, active in England. By a combination of ability and good fortune, he rapidly established himself in mid-17th-century London as the natural successor in portrait painting to Anthony van Dyck. Between van Dyck's death in 1641 and the emergence of William Hogarth in the 1730s, Lely and his successor, Godfrey Kneller, were the leading portrait painters in England. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Lely dominated the artistic scene, and his evocation of the court of Charles II is as potent and enduring as was van Dyck's of the halcyon days before the English Civil War. Although Lely's reputation was seriously damaged by portraits that came from his studio under his name but without much of his participation, his development of an efficient studio practice is of great importance in the history of British portrait painting. The collection of pictures, drawings, prints and sculpture he assembled was among the finest in 17th-century England after the dispersal of the legendary royal collections.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), a German-born painter who worked in England, was the most famous baroque portrait painter at the court of Charles II.

Peter Lely was born on Oct. 14, 1618, at Soest in Westphalia; his family was Flemish. He was trained as an artist in Holland and was in England by 1647. This was not an auspicious time to launch a career as a portrait painter in England. The nation was involved in the civil wars, which ended in 1649 with the execution of Charles I and the accession to power of Oliver Cromwell, the army, and the Parliamentarians. But Lely secured the patronage of influential people, and between 1647 and 1660 he impartially painted royalist and Parliamentarian alike. Charles II became king in 1660, and the following year Lely was appointed Principal Painter to the King and granted a pension of £200 a year; from then on he was the most popular painter of society portraits in England.

Lely's name is associated with the "grand manner" portraits he painted of society beauties and court ladies. Wrapped in voluminous but disordered shimmering draperies, the subjects of these opulent portraits gaze languidly at the spectator from heavy-lidded eyes and convey a curious combination of sensuality and dignity. Most of the portraits are three-quarter length, and generally the sitter is posed somewhat to one side of the composition. The setting is often a turbulent landscape and is frequently enriched by swags of drapery, an architectural element, or a decorative urn. Lely was famous for his facility in handling fabrics, and the play of light on flowing satin clothing is one of the primary visual elements of his paintings.

In the 1630s Sir Anthony Van Dyck had established the general style and format of the sumptuous baroque portrait in England. Lely's work lacks the delicacy and refinement of Van Dyck's finest English portraits and is more robust and heavier in tone and volume. Lely's mature style in the female court portrait is best seen in the series of 10 portraits painted as a set (1662-1665) and known as the "Windsor Beauties." By the late 1660s his work was in such demand that he frequently utilized studio assistants even in the execution of the original version of a portrait.

Always conscious of his position, Lely conducted himself in a lordly manner; Samuel Pepys found him a "mighty proud man, and full of state." He lived well and accumulated an impressive art collection. He was knighted by King Charles II in 1680 and died the same year, on December 7, in London.

Further Reading

The only recent work devoted entirely to Lely is R. B. Beckett, Lely (1951). For an excellent analysis of Lely's position within the context of 17th-century English art see Margaret Whinney and Oliver Millar, English Art, 1625-1714 (1957). Older but still useful works are C. H. Collins Baker, Lely and the Stuart Portrait Painters (2 vols., 1912) and Lely and Kneller (1922). See also Ellis K. Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790 (1953; 2d ed. 1962).

Lely, Peter (1618-80). Portrait painter. Born Pieter van der Faes, ‘Lely’ was a nickname borrowed from his family home at The Hague. He seems to have come to England in the early 1640s as an aspiring landscape artist. His natural enterprise procured him patronage from the Commonwealth government, and by the time of Charles II's restoration Lely enjoyed high repute as a portraitist. Within two years he had become naturalized and in receipt of a royal pension.

Sir Peter Lely
Mezzotint engraving of Lely by Isaac Beckett and John Smith, ca. 1684
Birth name	Pieter van der Faes
Born	14 September 1618(1618-09-14) Soest, Germany
Died	30 November 1680 (aged 62) Covent Garden, England
Nationality	Dutch - English
Field	Painting
Influenced by	Anthony van Dyck

Sir Peter Lely (14 September, 1618 – 30 November, 1680) was a painter of Dutch origin, whose career was nearly all spent in England, where he became the dominant portrait painter to the court.

Contents 1 Life 2 Gallery 3 Notes 4 References 5 External links

Life

Lely was born Pieter van der Faes to Dutch parents in Soest in Westphalia,^[1] where his father was an officer serving in the armed forces of the Elector of Brandenburg. Lely studied painting in Haarlem, where he may have been apprenticed to Pieter de Grebber. He become a master of the Guild of Saint Luke in Haarlem in 1637. He is reputed to have adopted the surname "Lely" (also occasionally spelled Lilly) from a heraldic lily on the gable of the house where his father was born in The Hague.

He arrived in London in around 1641, which was marked by the death of Anthony van Dyck in December. His early English paintings, mainly mythological or religious scenes, or portraits set in a pastoral landscape, show influences from Anthony van Dyck and the Dutch baroque. Lely's portraits were well received, and he succeeded Anthony van Dyck as the most fashionable portrait artist in England. He became a freeman of the Painter-Stainers' Company in 1647 and was portrait artist to Charles I. His talent ensured that his career was not interrupted by Charles's execution, and he served Oliver Cromwell, whom he painted "warts and all", and Richard Cromwell. In the years around 1650 the poet Sir Richard Lovelace wrote two poems about Lely – Peinture and "See what a clouded majesty ..."

After the English Restoration in 1660, Lely was appointed as Charles II's Principal Painter in Ordinary in 1661, with a stipend of £200 per year, as Van Dyck had enjoyed in the previous Stuart reign. Lely became a naturalised English subject in 1662.

Demand was high, and Lely and his large workshop were prolific. After Lely painted a sitter's head, Lely's pupils would often complete the portrait in one of a series of numbered poses. As a result Lely is the first English painter who has left "an enormous mass of work", although the quality of studio pieces is variable. Among his most famous paintings are a series of 10 portraits of ladies from the Royal court, known as the "Windsor Beauties", formerly at Windsor Castle but now at Hampton Court Palace; a similar series for Althorp; a series of 12 of the admirals and captains who fought in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, known as the "Flagmen of Lowestoft", now mostly owned by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich; and his Susannah and the Elders at Burghley House. His most famous non-portrait work is probably Nymphs by a fountain in Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Lely played a significant role in introducing the mezzotint to Britain, as he realized its possibilities for publicising his portraits. He encouraged Dutch mezzotinters to come to Britain to copy his work, laying the foundations for the English mezzotint tradition.

Lely was knighted in 1680. He died soon afterwards at his easel in Covent Garden, while painting a portrait of the Duchess of Somerset, and was buried at St Paul's Church, Covent Garden. His collection of Old Masters, including Veronese, Titian, Claude Lorrain and Rubens, and a fabulous collection of drawings, was broken up and sold after his death, raising the immense sum of £26,000. Some items in it which had been acquired by Lely from the Commonwealth dispersal of Charles I's art collections, such as the Lely Venus, were re-acquired by the Royal Collection.

He was replaced as court portraitist by Sir Godfrey Kneller, also a German-born Dutchman, whose style drew from Lely's but reflecting later Continental trends. Between them they established the basic English portrait style followed by less fashionable painters for decades.

Gallery

Portrait of Sir Henry Stone, c. 1648	Barbara Palmer (née Villiers), Duchess of Cleveland, c. 1666	Abraham Cowley, c. 1665-66	James Harrington c. 1658
Two ladies from the Lake family, 1650.	A Pursuivant from the Garter Procession, 1660-1670

Notes

1. ^ Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790, 1953, Penguin Books (now Yale History of Art series)

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sir Peter Lely

• Millar, Oliver 'Lely, Sir Peter' (inc. bibliography) Grove Dictionary of Art, [London: 1996 rpr. 2002] vol. 19, pp. 119-125
• Millar, Oliver 'Sir Peter Lely 1618-80' [London]: National Portrait Gallery, 1978.
• Waterhouse, Ellis. Painting in Britain 1530 to 1790. Fourth Edition, New York, Viking Penguin, 1978.
• Whinney, Margaret and Millar, Oliver English Art 1625 - 1714 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

Court offices
Preceded by Anthony van Dyck	Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King 1661-1680	Succeeded by Godfrey Kneller

External links

• Self-portrait from the National Portrait Gallery
• Biography from the J. Paul Getty Museum
• Biography from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
• Biography from the Web Gallery of Art
• Sir Peter Lely at the WikiGallery.org

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