 Sir, As curator of the collection in which Sir Peter Lely’s Venus and Child has held pride of place for more than 50 years perhaps I might be permitted a few words on the identification of the work’s principal sitter (“Nell Gwyn? No, it’s the King’s other mistress”, May 2).
A reliance on likeness as a determining factor in this matter will not convince many critics. Lely’s faces are notoriously generic, and however much the Chiddingstone beauty might resemble Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, facial similarities alone offer no real proof that the subject is her.
Indeed, two factors militate strongly against the identification. First, despite the notorious licence of Charles II’s court, it is questionable that the aristocratic Villiers, a married woman, would ever have allowed herself to be painted in such a revealing pose. Secondly, even allowing for a likely idealising of the image, it is difficult to see the lithe young body of Chiddingstone’s Venus realistically being promoted as that of a woman who by 1665 – the earliest accepted date for the Lely – had given birth to five children.
If not Barbara Villiers then who might the painting represent? The commoner Nell Gwyn, born in 1650 and the Duchess of Cleveland’s junior by ten years, remains the obvious candidate, with clear documentary proof that a highly provocative depiction of “pretty, witty Nell” was once extant. George Vertue’s description of that work, evidently painted sometime after 1670 and by 1723 on view at Buckingham House, strikes an obvious chord with the Chiddingstone image: “Nell Guin naked leaning on a bed, with her Child by Sr. Peter Lilly. This picture was painted at the express command of K. Charles 2d. nay he came to Sr Peter Lillys house to see it painted when she was naked on purpose”. What is clearly an earlier reference to this same work may be found in James II’s inventory of 1688: “Sir Peter Lely . . . Madame Gwynn’s picture naked, with a cupid”.
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In the absence of any alternative candidate for the painting described by Vertue, or of evidence that Lely produced paintings of other deshabillé royal courtesans to explain why the Chiddingstone canvas need not be the Vertue picture, then only one conclusion can realistically be drawn: that the Nell Gwyn of the records and Chiddingstone’s Venus and Child are one and the same work.
NICHOLAS REEVES, Director of Collections, The Denys Eyre Bower Bequest, Chiddingstone Castle, Kent
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