Sir Anthony Van Dyck

To date, Van Dyck's several portraits of Lady Mary Villiers have been studied and catalogued by Erik Larsen, by Samuel J. Hardman, and most reliably and thoroughly by Sir Oliver Millar (see Works Cited). These several images provide something of a pictorial history of important moments in the life of the sitter. A dazzling beauty of the Stuart court ("Your Face was always Beauty's Standard thought, / Where all Pretenders to be try'd were brought", Female Poems…by Ephelia, A2v), Mary Villiers was a favorite subject of the Flemish master, and her direct access to him was easily established by her father, George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, who negotiated Van Dyck's royal pension from James I in 1620. Selections from the extensive Van Dyck corpus were included in Buckingham's fabled art collection, formed largely by Balthazar Gerbier, Buckingham's personal art adviser and buying-agent. Gerbier, incidentally, produced a juvenile sketch of Mary Villiers, preserved in the British Museum and mentioned in the Villiers family correspondence (Lockyer, 153).

Graham Parry has observed that Van Dyck cultivated a special relationship with Stuart court poets, and that no other painter working in England received as much praise from poets ("Van Dyck and the Caroline Poets," Van Dyck 350 [Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1994], 247-60). Might Van Dyck have known of Mary Villiers's secret literary life? It certainly is possible, especially in view of the clever iconography of his double-portrait of Lady Mary with her dwarf, Anne Gibson (the dwarf-and-gloves portrait; institutional locations, Blenheim Palace and Wilton House; see Image 11a and also Section IV of this document, on manuscript transmission). In any case, the painter's close ties with English writers, especially poets, may well have contributed to Mary Villiers's abiding preference (so it would seem) for the eye of Van Dyck.

All students of Van Dyck's portraits of Lady Mary Villiers are indebted to the work of Sir Oliver Millar, G.C.V.O., F.B.A., Surveyor Emeritus of The Queen's Pictures, most especially his contribution to the new Van Dyck catalogue raisonné (Paul Mellon Centre Publications, 2003). See Millar in Works Cited, at the close of this archive. I am grateful to Sir Oliver Millar for his informative correspondence with me (spring-summer, 2003).