Lely – not just naughty court beauties

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Peter Lely: A Lyrical Vision

Edited by Caroline Campbell

Long obscured in the history of English art by the long Caroline shadow of his great predecessor, Sir Anthony van Dyck, Sir Peter Lely (1616–80) finally comes into his own.  His own reputation derived chiefly from his influential portraiture (especially of favoured female beauties) as Principal Painter at the court of Charles II.  Before that time, Lely famously portrayed Oliver Cromwell (1653–4) 'warts and all'.  Yet like van Dyck, Lely also produced sensuous fantasy subjects of pastoral shepherds, nymphs, and musicians, and this exquisite exhibition focused fully on these themes, many of them produced (astonishingly) during the English Civil War. 

Once more the Courtauld Institute produced an intimate exhibition of a dozen pictures, full of visual delight, with a catalogue which will also make an original and lasting contribution to art historical scholarship.  This project emerged from the nucleus of two of the Courtauld's own works: Reuben Presenting Mandrakes to Leah (after 1643) and The Concert (c.1650, with a self-portrait in the centre), supplemented by loans from the Tate, Dulwich (Nymphs by a Fountain; Boy as Shepherd), Chatsworth (Rape of Europa), French provincial museums, and private collections. 

While the pictures themselves require no gloss to be enjoyed, their subjects are often obscure or unfamiliar, and the catalogue deftly situates them within the heritage of pastorals and musicals, devised particularly for the Arcadian fantasies of English nobles in their country houses.   In fact, his major patrons were the 'Puritan Earls,' including the Duke of Northumberland and the Earls of Pembroke and Salisbury.  Their taste for these subjects lay in their recent origins in the courtly world of Netherlandish painting, inflected by Italian (especially Venetian) traditions transmitted through van Dyck's Flanders as well as Lely's own familial origins in The Hague and Utrecht.

The catalogue essays elucidate these relationships, beginning with Caroline Campbell's informative exposition, 'Becoming Peter Lely'.  Karen Hearn examines 'Lely and Holland' in closer detail, emphasizing his training with Frans de Grebber in Haarlem before the former Pieter van der Faes became Peter Lely in England; moreover, he joined many other Dutch painters who migrated to England during the 17th century.  This point is underscored in Diana Dethloff's study, 'Reception and Rejection' on 'Lely's Subject Pictures'.  She clarifies how Lely's membership in the Painter-Stainers Company allowed him to work without guild restrictions, in contrast to most Dutch immigrant painters.  In that company he also befriended a fellow member, the poet Richard Lovelace, whose verses (reprinted in an appendix) also praise several Lely paintings.

In an almost parallel career, De Grebber's son Pieter de Grebber also practised a form of Dutch classicism.  Court imagery in Italy-influenced Utrecht and the Dutch capital of The Hague, home-in-exile to the future Charles II, already included pastoral subjects, as David Taylor's essay, ‘Lely in Arcadia’ emphasizes.  He also reminds us of the Venetian origins of pastoral subjects in Titian and Veronese by way of van Dyck, in particular.

With this exhibition, an unknown early phase of Peter Lely has been restored, along with his links between England and his native Holland.  In the process a crucial roster of sophisticated, international, 17th-century cultural themes are re-introduced, restoring a truly attractive, if neglected, repertoire of Lely pictures.

The cataloguePeter Lely: A Lyrical Vision edited by Caroline Campbell with contributions by Diana Dethloff, Karen Hearn, David A.H.B. Taylor  is published by the Courtauld Gallery in association with Paul Holberton, 2012.  152 pp., 72 illus, most in colour, £25. ISBN 978-1-907372-40-7