Portrait miniature of Louise Renée de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, a copy after Mignard, watercolour on vellum, painted by Susannah-Penelope Rosse.

Portrait of a woman, head and shoulders, turned slightly to left and looking to front, and wearing a pearl earring in her left ear. Features in fine brown strokes with some blue for the shadows, black for the eyes and red for the lips, on a pale yellowish carnation ground; hair in pale brown wash, hatched and lined in dark brown and with the lights in pale gouache; dress in very pale brown wash, modelled with darker browns, a touch of red and black, and a white highlight at the breast; mantle in blue washes with the lights in white; background sky in yellow and blue washes, and to the left a solid grey wash; on vellum put down on pasteboard.

Frame: Seventeenth-century oval silver-gilt locket; convex back, straight sides with a single narrow thread moulding incised at the arris, and holding the convex glass in a bezel by its bevelled edges; hanger of D-section formed as a simple ring. Compare the locket with that on Cat. No. 147. [Evans 45]

Portrait of a woman, head and shoulders, wearing a pearl earring.

Purchased with funds from the Stephenson Bequest

Provenance: From the collection of Miss M Davies of Black heath (no. 54), from whom bought by private treaty with funds from the R H Stephenson Bequest, 1955.

This tiny portrait in miniature is a copy of the head and shoulders of a much larger portrait in oil. Painted by Pierre Mignard, the oil is in the National Portrait Gallery in London (number 497). The oil portrait shows the seated three-quarter-length figure of the Duchess of Portsmouth, accompanied by a black page. It is signed and dated Paris 1682. Rosse’s copy, in this small format, must date from very soon after.

This miniature is catalogue number 140 in John Murdoch’s Seventeenth-century English Miniatures in the Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (1997).

P.21-1955