Unknown Woman

Physical description

[Miniature] Portrait, head and shoulders, to front; the sitter is wearing a high collar. Features in minute fine stipple and hatch of dark grey-brown, red in the lips and with some blue shading; blue and black in the eyes and touches of white; all on a very pale carnation ground; hair lined in black over a brown wash with some ochre lights; collar in impasted white and pale brown over a pale brown wash; necklace in black, ear-ring marked with a touch of gold; background a red curtain, floated wet-in-wet; a gold marginal strip, interrupted by the collar lower right, and shaded on the inside with black; on vellum put down on pasteboard, apparently a playing card, partially painted on the back in mauve gouache.
[Lid] Early 17th century oval locket of silver-gilt, the convex back enamelled all over in champleve translucent dark blue on an engraved diaper; the half-round edge in dark blue champleve enamel, with fine strapwork ornament in gold. The hanger of openwork gold, with small loops on each side, the sides filled with black enamel with a white enamel tear-drop at base; two hinge barrels at the front; beneath, the catch for the cover and a transverse ring for a now lost pendant (probably a drop-shaped pearl). The gold cover is similarly enamelled, and chipped below the single hinge barrel; below, double lugs for the catch. The locket has been repaired and the miniature may not originally have belonged to it.

Place of Origin

England, Great Britain (painted)

Date

early 1620s (painted)
early 17th century (made)

Artist/maker

Oliver, Peter, born 1589 - died 1647 (artist)

Materials and Techniques

[Miniature] Watercolour on vellum put down on pasteboard

Marks and inscriptions

[Miniature] 'Lady Shirley / (temp. Elizabeth) by N. Hilliard' and on the back 'or perhaps an / early Oliver.'

Dimensions

[Miniature] Height: 32 mm, Width: 26 mm

Object history note

Provenance: Acquired by George Saltiny ' from an unrecorded source, and by him bequeathed to the Museum, 1910.

Descriptive line

Portrait miniature of an unknown woman in an oval locket, watercolour on vellum, painted by Peter Oliver, early 1620s.
[Lid] Lid from an original 17th century silver-gilt locket, in which is framed miniature, anonymous.

Bibliographic References (Citation, Note/Abstract, NAL no)

Murdoch, John. Seventeenth-century English Miniatures in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: The Stationery Office, 1997.
Cat. 16, pp.38-39. Full Citation:
"16 Unknown Woman
early 1620s
P137-1910
Oval 32 X 26 mm
Features in minute fine stipple and hatch of dark grey-brown, red in the lips and with some blue shading; blue and black in the eyes and touches of white; all on a very pale carnation ground; hair lined in black over a brown wash with some ochre lights; collar in impasted white and pale brown over a pale brown wash; necklace in black, ear-ring marked with a touch of gold; background a red curtain, floated wet-in-wet; a gold marginal strip, interrupted by the collar lower right, and shaded on the inside with black; on vellum put down on pasteboard, apparently a playing card, partially painted on the back in mauve gouache.

Condition: Apparently excellent, unfaded.
Signed: Not signed. Inscribed: A small slip of paper formerly kept in the locket is inscribed by a late nineteenth-century hand: Lady Shirley / (temp. Elizabeth) by N. Hilliard and on the back or perhaps an / early Oliver.
Frame: Early seventeenth-century oval locket of silver-gilt, the convex back enamelled all over in champleve translucent dark blue on an engraved diaper; the half-round edge in dark blue charnpleve enamel, with fine strapwork ornament in gold. The hanger of openwork gold, with small loops on each side, the sides filled with black enamel with a white enamel teardrop at base; two hinge barrels at the front; beneath, the catch for the cover and a transverse ring for a pendant (probably a drop-shaped pearl). The gold cover is similarly enamelled, and chipped below the single hinge barrel; below, double lugs of the catch. Interior scored radially. The glass is set back in the locket, retained by a thin silver ring. The locket has been repaired and the miniature may not originally have belonged to it.
Provenance: Acquired by George Saltiny ' from an unrecorded source, and by him bequeathed to the Museum, 1910.
Exhibited: Possibly BFAC 1889, Case XI, no. 12 (as Lady Shirley. Wife of Sir W[sic] Shirley. I Oliver.) Lent by Jeffrey Whitehead.
Literature: Foster 1911 ; Long 1930, p. 53; Summary Catalogue, 1981, p. 42.
Dating, like almost everything to do with this interesting miniature, is doubtful. The rather slight evidence of costume and coiffure suggests c.1615, and, if one is right to detect an intentional browning on the white imp as to in the ruff, the date could be narrowed down to the short-lived fashion for saffron dye in the collar starch of about that year. That date, however, would be of some difficulty in relation to the traditional identification of the sitter.
She has been called Teresa, Lady Shirley (c.1595-1668), daughter of a Circassian Christian, Ismael Khan, and wife of 'Sir' Robert Shirley (1581?-1628), a promoter of Anglo- Persian trade and envoy of the Shah, whose diplomatic and courtly activities brought him and his wife to England for eighteen months from the summer of 1611 until January 1612/ 13.They were not in England again until the 1620s.
Lady Shirley's portraiture depends on three types: an uncertain image attributed to Gheeraerts, showing her in profile and with a head-dress, of c.1610; (2) a whole length in profile, also attributed to Gheeraerts, in which she again wears exotic dress and carries a pistol; (3) and the well-known Van Dyck of 1622, also in Persian costume.(4) She is represented in these portraits as a fair-skinned Circassian lady, not noticeably foreign except in her dress. Her appearance is reconcilable with, but not conclusively similar to, that of the sitter for this miniature who, unlike Lady Shirley in her other portraits, wears conventional English Court dress. Here, the sitter's vivid, apparently dark complexion should not necessarily suggest foreignness: the miniature seems to be in exceptional condition and this darker, more sculptural modelling is probably just a function of the Oliver influence over the limning tradition in the second decade of the seventeenth century.
The late nineteenth-century attribution to Hilliard-Oliver was taken over in the Museum acquisition registers, but scholars - including Foster, who rejected Hilliard and suggested 'one of' the Olivers (5) - were sceptical. Long (6) was alerted to the Peter Oliver connection in particular by the similarity of the locket to that on Cat. No. 7. By April 1912 the display labelling had been changed to 'Perhaps by Peter Oliver, but Long continued to ponder: 'If this is by PO. it must be an early work. I am more inclined to regard it as a work of Isaac Oliver.' Later, his entry in the Handlist (7) isolated this miniature from the main body of Peter Olivers, but his idea of Isaac Oliver attracted no further support, and was not even considered by Winter, Reynolds or Strong. (8) Long did not say so, but he must have been thinking of the Isaac Oliver miniatures of c.1610-15 - Donne, (9) and Unknown Man, 1614.(10) For the 1981 Summary Catalogue the Peter Oliver attribution was allowed to stand without qualification.
In the early 1980s, however, the re-installation of the reserve collection (to which it had been relegated for many years) placed this miniature by chance beside Hoskins Cat. No. 22 and helpful comparisons between the two have been made.
The Hoskins, of course, is an uncertain object because of its disastrous condition, but there are similarities in the fineness of the dark stipple and hatch of the face painting and in the 'granular' work at the hair-line. It is datable on costume, however, at least five years later than this miniature. As to date, Hoskins Cat. No. 19 is closer, but not obviously so similar in style: its faded condition, however, could account for the relatively flat modelling and lighting in the face. So, if of c.1615, the present miniature would be too early for either artist, for there is otherwise nothing in this fine dark stipple style in their known oeuvres until, between miniatures like Peter Oliver's Nethersole of 1619 (Cat. No. 8) and Hoskins' Henry Cary Viscount Falkland (c.1625), (11) the style becomes virtually standard for both of them.
Perhaps, therefore, the answer is that this miniature is a later copy made in the Oliver or Hoskins studio in the early 1620s from an original of c.1611-16. Perhaps even the dating of the costume is sufficiently questionable to allow that the portrait might be an original of the early 1620s, when Teresa Shirley was again within reach for a personal sitting.

1 Salting Collection, no. 4652.
2 Sold Christie's 27 March 1981. 3 At Berkeley Castle.
4 At Petworth,
5 Foster 1911.
6 In V&A departmental file. 7 Long 1930, p. 53.
8 Winter c.1947. when he was working on the separation of the Hilliard and the Oliver hands; Reynolds 1947 or 1973; Strong 1983.
9 V&A.
10 Dutch Royal Collection.
11 Royal Collection; Murdoch 1981, fig. 102."

Exhibition History

Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures (Burlington Fine Arts Club 1889-1889)

Materials

Watercolour; Vellum

Techniques

Painting

Subjects depicted

Woman

Categories

Portraits; Paintings; Jewellery; Frames

Collection code

PDP