Portrait miniature of Katherine Bruce, Mrs Dysart. Watercolour on vellum by Richard Gibson, ca.1655.

Portrait, oval, turned slightly to left and looking to front; the sitter is wearing a pearl necklace. Features heavily worked, hatched and stippled (but see Condition) in brown and sanguine, with blue in the shadows, red for the lips, and with blue, black and a white highlight in the eyes; all on a thick warm carnation ground; hair in pale brown wash, lined in darker colour, and with much modelling in pale brown and ochre gouache, the lights in pale yellow; pearls in pale brown wash, modelled in pale grey and white; chemise in pale grey, thickly modelled in white and grey; dress in dark grey wash, modelled in darker colour and with the lights in pale grey-brown; edge of wrap in blue wash, shaded in black; the jewels and gold ornament in yellow and brown paint, the stones in black with white heightening; background a flat, dark brown wash; on vellum put down on pasteboard.

Frame: Nineteenth-century gilt rim of V-section, holding a convex glass in a rebate; the back closed by a toothed copper strip, holding the miniature.

Miniature portrait of a woman wearing a pearl necklace.

Bequeathed by the Reverend Alexander Dyce

Provenance: Acquired by the Revd Alexander Dyce from an unrecorded source, and by him bequeathed to the Museum, 1869.

Previously said to be a portrait of Nell Gwynn, mistress of Charles II.

This miniature portrait is a reduced, small scale version of a large oil painting of Katherine Bruce, Mrs William Murray, Count Dysart (d.1649) by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, circa 1620-1641, at Petworth House and Park, West Sussex (inv. NT 486240).

DYCE.94